Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala by Rachel Nolan (review)

Reviewed by: Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala by Rachel Nolan Ilan Palacios Avineri Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala. By Rachel Nolan. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2024, p. 320, 35. 00. In the 1970s, Guatemala became a place of palpable fear for families like mine. My grandfather, vigilant and protective, often ushered my father indoors at the sight of certain cars. "Carlos" he cautioned, "if you see that American robachico (child stealer) …run inside and hide immediately. " This fear was not paranoia. Countless Guatemalan children, disproportionately Indigenous, became ensnared in the shadowy realm of adoption and abduction during this period. In Until I Find You, Rachel Nolan elucidates the haunting history of these "disappeared" children with deep sensitivity and empathy. Weaving together a tapestry of sources — spanning adoption files, oral histories, and police records — she illuminates the grim realities that gripped Guatemala during this period. Nolan begins by outlining the early roots of adoption in Guatemala. Long before the late-20th century adoption boom, impoverished families often "gifted" their children to affluent families as a temporary respite from financial hardship. This phenomenon intensified during the 1960s and 1970s. As the Guatemalan government divested from social services towards fighting a counterinsurgent war, Indigenous children increasingly ended up in overcrowded orphanages. Nolan poignantly shows how these kids were "shook loose" from their families. She unveils the prejudice of ladina case workers, who routinely labeled Indigenous mothers as "cold, " "indifferent, " and "irresponsible" while overlooking the source of their economic deprivation (67). In the process, Nolan portrays adoption as a crude response to social problems, as a spatial fix that diverted attention from state neglect. Transnational adoption was increasingly employed to address Guatemala's so-called "orphan crisis" after a devastating earthquake struck in 1976. Overnight, the seismic event multiplied the number of orphaned children. Evoking Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine, " Nolan evinces how affluent Guatemalan lawyers and lawmakers exploited the quake to usher in a new, privatized, and disastrous adoption system. Through congressional records, she exposes how attorneys advocated for legislation that shifted adoption from the judiciary's purview to their own. These individuals promoted private adoptions as "humane, " claiming they expedited foster care placements and alleviated burdens on Guatemala's anemic legal system. They also understated or obscured their potential profits. By detailing this history, Nolan reveals how these lawyers co-opted nascent human rights discourse to frame self-serving legislation as a humanitarian endeavor. Nolan then delves into the repercussions of these legal machinations. The legislative overhaul engendered a network of lawyers, caretakers, End Page 316 and jaladoras (baby brokers), seeking to profit from the adoption boom. The role of jaladoras is particularly striking — these mostly younger women pressured, coerced, or outright forced mothers into relinquishing their children. Simultaneously, these baby brokers were themselves impoverished and often shouldered blame for unlawful adoptions rather than the lawyers heading the operation, particularly amid the genocidal campaign carried out by General Efrain Rios Montt in the early 1980s. Nolan's insightful analysis here interprets these women as both perpetrators and prey, echoing alternative studies of Guatemala's armed conflict. Where scholars like Vasken Markarian illustrate how the Guatemalan military coerced neighbors into killing one another, Nolan demonstrates how Congress spurred them to steal each other's children. Subsequent chapters examine the consequences of this generation of "disappeared" children on Guatemalan society. Coercive adoptions continued for decades, splitting families and suffusing communities with fear. Nolan charts the proliferation of chilling rumors amid this climate. In the ensuing decades, claims emerged that North Americans not only arranged adoptions, but abducted children to harvest their organs. Prominent newspapers amplified these terrifying tales, leading to a "baby panic" and tragedies like the lynching of Japanese tourists in Todos Santos in 2000 who were accused of kidnapping children (208). Nolan incisively avoids interrogating the veracity of these rumors. Instead, she underscores that they remained potent due to ongoing abuses within the adoption system. Simultaneously, the greed of lawyers and lawmakers prevented legislative changes to the system for decades, until 2007. The disorienting journey of Alberto Hertsens Zune, a single adoptee, marks the culmination of Nolan's. . .