A bicycle caravan that arrived from Mexico traveled through Guatemala’s capital this Sunday to demand justice for thousands of illegal adoptions of children during the civil war that drained the Central American country between 1960 and 1996. The “Memoria sin fronteras” caravan covered about 2,000 kilometers and was organized by members of the collective Estamos Aquí, made up of Guatemalans who were separated from their biological families and given up for adoption to foreigners.
According to the group, about 30,000 children were adopted between 1977 and 2007, many of them irregularly. An extinct UN anti-mafia mission in Guatemala noted that military and police participated in transferring children for illegal adoption networks during the armed conflict. “We want to reconnect with our cultures, with our roots, and we also want to demand justice,” said Ignacio Alvarado, who was adopted in Canada when he was three years old, in the mid-1980s.
Alvarado and about a dozen activists set out from the Mexican capital at the end of February and, along the way, raised funds to finance family reunification processes. “We already know that it is not the Guatemalan state that is going to support us” in this search, he lamented. “So we are an autonomous, self-managed collective.”
The route of the bicycle caravan in Guatemala’s capital passed by a hospital and an orphanage—places considered “symbolic” because “many boys and girls passed through them before being sold by the state,” according to Alvarado. Guatemala was once considered one of the countries with the highest number of illegal adoptions, but in 2007 it changed its legislation to tighten controls.
Human rights and child protection organizations estimate that foreign couples, mainly American, paid about 50,000 dollars for an adoption. Diego Sánchez, a 23-year-old Mexican, said he joined the bicycle caravan for the “visibility and awareness about the state crimes” related to “the network of child trafficking that existed in Guatemala in the context of the war.”
In July of last year, President Bernardo Arévalo publicly apologized on behalf of the Guatemalan state to a family whose children were taken in 1997 and irregularly given up for adoption to American couples.
