On January 9, 1997, Osmín Tobar Ramírez, 7 years old, and his brother Jeffrey Arias Ramírez, 1 year and a half old, were separated from their family by the Attorney General’s Office (PGN) and placed in a group home run by the Association for Children of Guatemala, following an anonymous complaint alerted the authorities that the children were abandoned. It was a case of illegal adoptions, for which, 27 years later, the State accepted responsibility.
By then, Guatemala had become the third country in the world to give children up for international adoption, followed by Russia and China, according to what was revealed on Friday, July 12, by representatives of organizations that provided support to the Tobar Ramírez family, who added that the minors were even sold for sums ranging from US$12,000 to US$80,000.
The alleged complaint warned that the children had been abandoned by their mother, Flor de María Ramírez Escobar, who appeared before the respective court the day following the separation, but was not allowed to see her children nor was she informed of their whereregardings and the process of declaring abandonment began.
This is how the odyssey of the Ramírez family began. In 1998, they learned that their two children had been adopted by families in the United States. However, their struggle to find justice led them to knock on the doors of organizations that finally took the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), which ordered the State of Guatemala to acknowledge its responsibilities and offer a public apology to those affected, an event that was held this Friday, July 12, at the National Palace of Culture.
Leonel Asdrúbal Dubón, director of the Children’s Shelter, said that this case is regarding 30 years of fighting for justice and that it is a transcendental step in “an unwavering battle once morest the monster of impunity,” referring to the illegal adoptions that have been taking place for decades in Guatemala.
He added that the State’s acknowledgement of responsibility comes following almost 20 years of “systematic refusal by the same State, which for many years refused to acknowledge what happened to the victims and did not guarantee the mechanisms for the restoration of their rights.”
“This is a real-life story (…) a story in which the Judicial Branch through the then-called juvenile courts and the Attorney General’s Office itself denied her basic rights, such as the right to defense, the right to a family, access to justice and the exercise of judicial guarantees, criminalizing her poverty and hindering any attempt on her part to present herself as a family resource for her children,” he explained.
She added that “this heartbreaking story should teach us a lesson as a society, and a profound lesson regarding what cannot happen once more in Guatemala,” because, in her opinion, “no parent should be afraid of losing their children and no child should be separated from their parents and their biological family, especially when there are no unjustifiable reasons.”
“No one else should live through these horrors that the State itself inflicted on this family, where state institutions took away their children, separated them and disrupted their entire family structure, damaging their psyche and their very core,” she reiterated.
Dubón added that before and following the news of the “illegal” departure of the children from Guatemala to the United States at the end of 1998, “we already knew that the case of Osmín and his brother were not isolated cases, that many children in the country were stolen and separated from their own families in the perverse business of illegal adoptions.”
He added that, for some 30 years, between 1977 and 2008, it is estimated that there were more than 30 thousand irregular international adoptions in Guatemala, many of which have not been resolved.
“This is how Guatemala became a haven for illegal adoptions, involving public officials at all levels, notaries and medical professionals, and all of this coincided with the most critical years of the internal armed conflict that devastated the country between 1960 and 1996,” said Dubón.
He added that in 1990, Guatemala was the third country in the world that gave children up for illegal adoption, only surpassed by Russia and China, countries with a much larger population than Guatemala.
Marcela Martino, from the Center for Justice and International Law, said that these cases should not be forgotten so that they are not repeated, because the case of the Escobar brothers reflects the reality of thousands of Guatemalans who have been “abnormally robbed, sold and given up for adoption” because the State did not protect them.
He added that the IACHR in the ruling on this case proved that illegal adoptions in 1990 and 2000 “became a lucrative business run by criminal networks and facilitated by permissive regulations with little or no controls and rampant corruption.”
“Guatemalan children were sold for figures ranging from US$12,000 to US$80,000 per child. In 1998, Guatemala was considered the leading exporter of children to the United States,” Martino said.
Meanwhile, Flor de María Ramírez Escobar, mother of the children who were given up for adoption almost 30 years ago, recalled the path she had to endure as a result of the separation.
“I suffered more thinking regarding the pain my children were experiencing by going to another family. They took away my desire to see them grow, to enjoy their childhood, to be with them in school,” Ramírez said.
She added: “I have fought and I have not rested until I see justice done. Today I ask that there be no more illegal adoptions.”
Gustavo Tobar Fajardo, the father of the young men, said that “I fought for more than 20 years seeking justice. In this great race for impunity we planted a seed. Despite having denounced this publicly, I received threats and they tried to kill me (…) and they sued me for libel, slander and defamation and I simply claimed the rights of a father that they denied me.”
Osmin Tobar Ramírez, who has difficulty speaking because he does not master Spanish perfectly, said that it is “a new national day once morest illegal elections” and that it was thanks to the struggle of his parents that this day was reached.
He highlighted his parents’ courage in fighting once morest a corrupt system and recalled that his journey began in the “shadows” because he fell into addiction to alcohol and drugs, which he saw as his only refuge to overcome the reality he had to face.
He added that he lost his identity and his mother tongue in a land that was not his own.
Oswaldo Samayoa, director of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights (COPADEH), stated that the State of Guatemala recognizes that it violated the rights established in the American Convention on Human Rights regarding the prohibition of arbitrary interference in family life, judicial guarantees and the right to family protection to the detriment of the Tobar Ramírez family.
The Court also recognises that the State of Guatemala violated judicial protection and judicial guarantees within a reasonable time. It also recognises that it violated the right to the prohibition of discrimination.
The State of Guatemala also violated the lack of investigation into the process of separation of the Ramírez family and international adoptions. The State also violated the right to personal liberty, the right to identity, the right to a name and the right to personal integrity.
The Copadeh agreement establishes that the State must offer public apologies to those affected.
President Arévalo, for his part, said that the path to truth begins with the recognition of the error and that “it hurts us Guatemalans that our history, the unjustified, involuntary and forced separation of children and adolescents from their families has been consented to and even facilitated by the State.”
He added that breaking the cycle of conditions that made it possible for events like this to occur “is a daily task that requires recognizing, repairing and redirecting the actions of institutions to ensure that these acts can never be repeated, but it is also necessary to reconcile society in the face of a future free of human rights violations.”
In 2018, the IACHR declared the State of Guatemala responsible for facilitating the illegal adoption of Tobar, who had to live under another identity until he was 21 years old in the United States, a country to which he was never able to adapt due to cultural differences, he says.
Among the commitments that the IACHR is asking Guatemala to make to compensate Tobar’s family, this public apology is included, as well as seeking justice once morest all those involved in the crime.
During Guatemala’s internal armed conflict between 1960 and 1996, some 35,000 children, mostly from indigenous populations, were stolen and given up for illegal adoption in countries such as Belgium and Canada, according to social organizations.
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