Searching for birth families in Guatemala

Available for over a year

Guatemala shut down international adoptions in 2008. Before that, US families adopted some 30,000 Guatemalan children. Now those kids are growing up, and some want a connection with their birth families. Enter ‘searchers’, who will try to track down birth families for a fee. But as one adoptive mom found out, that process can be difficult — and it's as unregulated as international adoption itself once was in Guatemala. Picture: Diego Luke (far right) with his birth brother, Juan, and birth mother Isabel (second from left) in Santiago Atitlán. Credit: Laurie Stern.