Adoption industry to be reviewed.

Prosecutors here said they will conduct a legal review of all of the country's pending adoptions, after an initial probe turned up irregularities, reports AP (May 4, 2008). The Attorney General's Office said that 2,286 case files will be re-examined:

The vast majority of prospective adoptive parents are US couples. "We are going to study the case files deeply," said spokesman Jorge Meng. "We have found some deficiencies in some of them." He could not estimate how long the review process would take. "We hope that it will be soon, but we don't want to say two weeks, because that would create a deadline";

Prosecutors describe the probe of Casa Quivira, considered one of Guatemala's best adoption agencies, as their first serious attempt to investigate a US$100 million industry that has made Guatemala the largest source of adopted U.S. babies after China. Some 29,400 children have been delivered to US homes since 1990--so many that one of every 100 Guatemalan babies born each year has been growing up in an American home. Meanwhile, four birth mothers who claim their children were stolen from them in 2006 and 2007 began a hunger strike in front of the offices of President Alvaro Colom to demand that their children be located;

The new adoption law, which took effect Jan. 1 to comply with an international treaty to prevent human trafficking, adoptions will be taken out of the hands of agencies and lawyers and handed over to Guatemala's notoriously sluggish courts and the National Adoptions Council.