As Guatemala and El Salvador were being torn apart by violent US-backed regimes, tens of thousands of children—many of them war orphans, others forcibly taken from their birth parents—were being adopted overseas.
José Mario Dellow
José Mario Dellow: Baby, 2020. Dellow was adopted from Guatemala and raised in the UK; the painting is based on a photograph taken by Dellow’s adoptive parents in Guatemala.
by Elizabeth Barnert, with a foreword by Philippe Bourgois
University of California Press, 329 pp., $95.00; $29.95 (paper)
The inauguration in 2024 of Guatemalan president Bernardo Arévalo, a progressive politician who is the son of a former president, represented a glimmer of hope for the Central American country. For months powerful officials had worked to undermine the peaceful transition of power, and they almost succeeded in preventing Arévalo’s inauguration, but he had an unexpected ally supporting him from behind the scenes: the United States.
During his campaign Arévalo had vowed to root out corruption, a promise that unsurprisingly resonated with voters. (Outgoing president Alejandro Giammattei was plagued by allegations of graft, and his chief prosecutor was accused of hindering corruption inquiries. Both have been barred from entering the US by the State Department.) Arévalo placed second in the first round of voting in June 2023 and then triumphed over the conservative candidate, former first lady Sandra Torres, that August, pledging to strengthen civic institutions, tackle violence, reform the education system, and create jobs through public investment.
Almost from the moment of his landslide win, Arévalo was subjected to a litany of legal attacks from lawmakers and prosecutors, including attempts to strip him of his potential immunity from prosecution and essentially nullify the election results. He also faced death threats, surveillance, and smear campaigns, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, all aimed at preventing him from taking office.
Thousands of Guatemalans, particularly from the country’s Indigenous communities, took to the streets, flooding the capital to hold protests and sit-ins demanding that Arévalo’s inauguration go ahead. As documented by The Washington Post, American bureaucrats also spent months targeting “Guatemalan politicians and influential business people with a blizzard of sanctions, stern public statements and quiet arm-twisting” to persuade them to support the inauguration; US senators rushed to the Central American nation and pressed members of Giammattei’s cabinet to allow it to go forward; and the State Department announced in December that it was canceling visas for nearly three hundred Guatemalan citizens “for undermining democracy and the rule of law.”
Transnational /Transcultural Adoption Project 