Finding Fernanda by Erin Siegal

Author:Erin Siegal [ Siegal, Erin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0143-1
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fundación Sobrevivientes was in the middle of its first adoption-related campaign, No Más Cunas Vacías (No More Empty Cribs), when Mildred came to the foundation. They had propped empty strollers and empty cribs in front of the PGN and the Ministerio Público’s headquarters to raise awareness about corruption in adoption. Demonstrations were also being held in front of various courthouses. Sobrevivientes had grown used to helping women file missing child complaints with authorities who didn’t seem to take them seriously. Both the PGN and the MP continued to react sluggishly to charges of kidnapping for adoption.

In at least three of the cases Sobrevivientes was helping with, stolen children were suspected to have already left Guatemala with new adoptive parents, despite having been reported missing before their American visas were issued. After a hunger strike, months of advocacy, and pro bono help from Sobrevivientes lawyers, Olga López, Loyda Rodríguez, and Raquel Par were granted access to boxes of immigration records kept by the Guatemalan government. The files contained photographs of children who had left the country on orphan visas. Each of the three women identified a little girl they believed to be her own.

Raquel Par and Marco Batz said that their 11-month-old daughter, Heidy Saraí, had been kidnapped on April 4, 2006, from Villa Hermosa, San Miguel Petapa. The couple had been married for 22 years and had eight children. They lived in the rural region of Chimaltenango. Par and Batz reported the abduction to both the Ministerio Público and the PGN the following day. According to Par, a stranger had given her a spiked drink and then taken Heidy during her bus commute into the capital.

Later, Par identified a child called Kimberli Azucena Jiménez in Guatemalan immigration photos. She suspected that “Kimberli” might be Heidy. Adoption documents provided to Par’s lawyers at Sobrevivientes by the Guatemalan Attorney General’s office showed that “Kimberli” was in the process of being adopted by an American woman, a single mother from Davenport, Iowa. It was unclear whether the child had left Guatemala, and whether the adoption had been completed.

Olga López, a soft-spoken woman who worked at a piñata shop, reported that her daughter, Arlene Escarleth, had been abducted on September 27, 2006. The baby was 56 days old. López knew the kidnappers, who were relatives of her brother’s wife, and believed they belonged to a gang that extorted “fees” from bus drivers. She suspected that they had sold her daughter to an adoption network. Guatemalan authorities initially accused López and her mother of being accomplices to the crime because they were able to identify the alleged kidnappers.

It was hard for López to identify Arlene Escarleth from among the hundreds of photographs in migration records because of her age. She found a few possible matches, including a baby whose name was listed as Cindy García. “Cindy” had been adopted by an American family in Illinois. According to PGN records, the process was facilitated by U.S. adoption agency Palmetto Hope and Guatemalan lawyer Luis Emilio Orozco Piloña.

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