Adopting Guatemalan

Since Guatemala’s civil war, a thirty-six year struggle that started in 1960 during which a quarter of a million people were killed or “disappeared,” Guatemalan children have been adopted abroad in steadily rising numbers. The few hundred brought to the U.S. annually in the mid-nineties, when that war ended, rose to nearly five thousand in 2006, or one baby out of every one hundred and ten births that year in Guatemala. The more than twenty-six thousand Guatemalan children adopted into the United States over the past decade are not orphans without families.