On the heels of her most recent trip to Guatemala last month, Senator Landrieu will discuss her insights as to the status of the adoption cases and talk about her future plans in advocating for parents.

Interested families must pre-register to attend this call. Please email your name and the phone number you plan to call in from to info@guatemala900.org and we will email you back the call-in information.

Thank You Senator Landrieu, we look forward to hearing your insights!

President Otto Perez Molina said Wednesday he hopes to resolve those cases after meeting with Sen. Mary Landrieu. The Louisiana Democrat has been traveling to Guatemala to push for the adoptions to go through.

The government issued a decree last August approving adoptions that had been fully arranged before the ban, but it applied to only 44 cases.

Guatemala was once a top source of adopted children for U.S. couples, with more than 4,000 a year. The U.N.-created International Commission Against Impunity studied 3,000 adoptions and found irregularities such as falsified paperwork and fake birth certificates.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0412/75055.html#ixzz1rpVgkWGf

Senator will meet with Perez Molina to lobby for adoptions

Democratic US Senator Mary Landrieu, of Louisiana is in the country and is scheduled to meet Wednesday afternoon with President Otto Pérez Molina.

The Guatemala900 has found Ms. Ordoñez to be one of the very few government officials who has worked to proactively navigate children’s cases through the bureaucratic labyrinth of Guatemalan institutions. This is in stark contrast to many officials who seem reluctant to even acknowledge the children’s tragedies that continue to unfold. Ms. Ordoñez is a true advocate for the children of Guatemala who continue to be dehumanized by layers of bureaucracy and stripped of their basic human right to belong to a permanent, loving family.

The Guatemala900 is encouraged by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement of support concerning the rule of law and the constitutional principle that no one is guilty until proven otherwise. We are deeply concerned that these accusations against the honorable name of Lissette Ordoñez are a part of the disturbing political trend that involves attacking the reputation of those who advocate for adoption as an effective solution for children who are living outside the love of a permanent family. Regrettably, Ms. Ordoñez’s good name seems to be the latest victim of this climate that is currently clouding all aspects of the Guatemalan adoption system.

Now, a full year later, a majority of the children that loving adoptive families wrote love letters to have spent another tragic year “in process.”  It will be *at least* the 5th year adoptive families have had to send heartbreaking valentines to the children in Guatemala. The children all continue to be caught in the endless spinning wheel of dehumanizing bureaucracy with still NO end in sight.

The Guatemala900 believes that these children are suffering bureaucratic sins to the highest degree. Their stolen childhood is no longer measured in days or months, but years. Who is to blame?  One can point fingers to almost all of the organizations who are responsible for processing the adoptions in Guatemala one way or another, especially for what they haven’t done - to value, create and uphold a timely process that tries to ensure that all children in process will reach a permanent, loving home.

Today, we sadly watch the same video, miss the same faces, and again ask the country of Guatemala to help these innocent children join their forever families.

Click here to see original article in the Prensa Libre.

Lesly Mariela Vasquez Guarcas

It is apparent that even the best intentions can destroy the life of a child and its waiting parent, entangling them in the weeds of bureaucracy.

The desire to prevent child trafficking cannot be an excuse to ruin the life of an orphan, snatching it from the arms of a waiting parent who is willing to provide the shelter and care of a family with warm and individual love, giving the child instead a life sentence in a “children’s shelter,” by its very definition a temporary shelter, incomplete and even, in the long run, harmful. It is a sin.

It is a sin that the legal dictatorship, caught up in paroxysms of paranoia about the commercial trade of children—something that we all abhor and reject—has at last given birth to a monstrous law with so many flaws in its DNA.

From the start, this legal whining is responsible for having reduced the numbers of children being adopted to almost zero. So, we pulled up not only all the weeds but also the wheat. Ergo: we threw out the baby with the dirty bathwater.

The worst. The mistakes, delays and disorder in processing the “good” cases, which are not weeds, has created an inhumane dam of pending adoptions of such magnitude that support groups have even formed to protest the PGN (Attorney General) and the Misterio Publico (MP) in Washington D.C..

A case in point: Lesly Mariela Vasquez Guarcas. Her record of adoption has been approved by the PGN since April, 2009. But, oh! Bureaucratic nonsense! The final paperwork included a typo in the child’s surname and the case was resubmitted for correction.

Second mistake: Because Primavera, where the girl was living, was raided following the case of a child who was stolen and submitted for adoption with another identity, PGN decided to “send all cases of children living in this home to the MP for continued investigation.” In Lesly’s case, the MP did not find any abnormalities, and concluded their investigation, but—third mistake—CICIG said the work of the MP had not been effective and they decided to repeat the investigations yet again.

Fourth mistake: Last week they called for the biological mother, held her for four hours in a locked room and, under psychological pressure, illegally forced her to say that there were anomalies in the child’s notarial record; she was born in Guatemala City, but registered in Retalhuleu. So what? No matter that the mother had repeatedly stated her desire to give her daughter up for adoption and that there were three DNA tests confirming maternity.

A girl. A waiting adoptive mother. Multiple trips. Expenses. The desire to provide maternal love frustrated. Three years living in an orphanage.

The cruelty of the weeds in all their glory.

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Click here to see original article in the Prensa Libre.

Just before the new year the U.S. Department of State, Division of Children’s Issues announced the creation of a new agreement with the Guatemalan Central Authority on Adoptions (CNA).   The agreement brings hope for some families and children who have been waiting for over 4 years by creating a new Guatemalan CNA process for approximately 40 selected adoption cases that were started before 2008. The new procedure will require waiting families to submit additional documents and undergo an “in country empathy study” that then must be adjudicated by USCIS and the Guatemalan authorities.  A subset (6 or 7) of the CNA cases will be used as “pilot” cases and will be the first to navigate the new process.   As we understand, no additional cases will be started until the pilot cases are all complete.

The Guatemala900 believes that there are hopeful signs with this new agreement.  It is certainly good news for some of the children who have been wrongfully detained outside the care of a permanent family for the first 4+ years of their life, as there now exists a path for them to be adopted.  We are encouraged by the fact that     meaningful communication between the U.S. Department of State and the Guatemalan CNA helped enable the creation of this new policy. This is also potentially good news for the approximately 350 additional stalled cases waiting in the wings outside the CNA (at the PGN, MP, and Guatemalan Courts), as it could serve as a future path for them as well.

The Guatemala900 Executive Committee respectfully requests clarification on a timeline and transparency for the new plan and for all in-process cases that continue to stagnate within all Guatemalan authorities.

These children continue to suffer outside the security of a permanent family for their 5th year (at a minimum) and according to expert pediatricians, have already experienced significant developmental delays that are most likely permanent.  The science says that children continue to lose one IQ point every month of institutionalization, and many are developing significant behavioral and attachment disorders that may be irreversible.  Any plan that lacks an aggressive timeline does not acknowledge or respect these serious developmental consequences that the waiting children continue to endure.

Lack of transparency has plagued the adoption process since the system came to a grinding halt without an interim plan for the children whose cases had been initiated prior to January of 2008.  A definition of all new and current adoption processes as well as necessary milestones to complete the process must be identified.  They must be transparent and accessible to waiting families.  The possibility that children will continue to lose months or years of their family life because there is no tangible way to verify their case is reaching milestones in a timely manner is a very serious issue that must be addressed by all parties immediately.

As human beings, we are hard wired to be part of a family. Every one of the approximately 400 children who have been denied their intrinsic right to a loving, permanent family needs our attention now! They must be served with a transparent process and an expeditious deadline!

Freedom Now…Family Now!

*Views expressed by the Executive Committee are not necessarily shared by all waiting families affiliated with Guatemala900

Effects of Institutional Care on Child Development.

by Dr. Dana E. Johnson

I remember standing in the courtyard of an orphanage in mid-summer watching the children play. It was hot and one of the caregivers was handing out glasses of juice to the thirsty kids. My attention was drawn to two young boys from the community looking in from outside the fence. They wanted a glass of juice and they wanted to play with the toys on the orphanage playground. It occurred to me that looking in from the outside it’s easy to imagine that institutionalized children have it made. They have food, clothing and shelter in countries where the basics of life are often scarce and difficult to afford for many families. It’s no wonder that many parents feel that their child may have a better future within an institutional care setting.

Orphanages have been a major part of the fabric of child welfare for the past 700 years and often played a role in child survival when the kindness of strangers failed. However, surviving is vastly different from thriving. Professionals in the fields of medicine and social science have recognized the adverse effects of orphanage care for over 150 years. However we have only recently begun to quantify the impact of institutional rearing on normal child development.

Studies such as the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, the first randomized controlled study of foster vs. institutional care, have provided a wealth of data demonstrating that orphanages, with inadequate caregivers, a regimented lifestyle and little sensitive interaction or individual attention extracts a fearful toll on the developing child. Within an orphanage during the first years of life growth slows, the electrical activity of the brain diminishes, cognitive abilities decrease one IQ/month, language development lags, children fail to form a primary attachment relationship to caregivers and the likelihood of future mental illness increases dramatically.

I’ve been in pediatrics for over 35 years and of course I knew that a family was important but did I really know how important? Result obtained over the past two decades from a variety of scientific studies can be summarized simply by saying the without the individual nurture that a family provides, a child’s body and brain literally withers away. The opposing situation is an equally powerful lesson on the value of nurture. Children taken from institutions and placed within family care exhibit dramatic catch-up growth, brain electrical activity returns to normal, IQ improves and attachment bonds form. However, within these data there is a powerful message-time matters!! The earlier a child is removed from an orphanage and enters a family the better the outcome.

The children who remain in Guatemalan orphanages continued to experience this adverse environment and have been deprived of the chance to recover within their waiting families. The clock is ticking!!! Deficits and delays become worse with each passing day and we can only hope that policymakers will respond to this progressive loss of human potential as promptly as they would to comparable natural disasters.

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Dana E. Johnson is Professor of Pediatrics, member of Division of Neonatology and Founder of the International Adoption Clinic at the University of Minnesota which is one of the largest adoption-related medical programs in the world. Over the past twenty-three years, information gathered through this clinic on the medical status of children adopted from dozens of countries and a wide variety of living conditions has helped establish the field of adoption medicine. His research focuses on the short- and long-term effects of early deprivation on child health and early development. Dr. Johnson is an adoptive parent, serves on the Editorial Boards of Adoption Quarterly and Adoptive Families Magazine and is a Senior Research Fellow in the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute.