GUATEMALA CITY - After six months Esperanza Tema had almost given up hope.
Her only daughter had disappeared from the Guatemalan clinic where she was born and the distraught mother had never seen her.
But Baby Esperanza turned up this week when police, investigating a clandestine operation which sells newborns to adoptive parents in France and Spain, raided four houses in Guatemala City and discovered a kidnapped infant in each one.
Tema said that during labour she was made to sip a bitter liquid that knocked her out for hours. When the new mother awoke her baby was nowhere to be found.
Tema agreed to show police the residences she had visited with Lucinda Bautiza, an educated woman who allegedly tricked her into signing away her power of attorney, and they recovered her daughter.
Prosecutors in Guatemala City are suddenly cracking down on the lucrative international baby trade, which accounts for 95 per cent of adoptions in this poverty-ridden Central American country.
International pressure to take action followed the release of a United Nations report last week that described in detail how baby farms in Guatemala provide infants for rich Western couples, who are willing to pay up to $US25,000 ($50,000) for a healthy child.
Meanwhile, thousands of genuine orphans languish in underfunded Government homes until they are too old for any chance of life outside these institutions.
Ofelia Calcetas-Santos, a UN expert who visited Guatemala City last July, said poor women were often contracted to produce babies and then give them away.
Outraged that the collusion of lawyers and criminals reduces children to commercial objects to be offered to the highest bidders, Calcetas-Santos is urging Guatemala to pass long-delayed bills regulating adoption, and to ensure that private adoptions are eliminated.
Cash crop in global baby farming
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