Word: guatemala
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...News of the raid, a story that rivaled Guatemala's upcoming presidential election for headlines, was especially alarming for women like Ana Escobar, a Guatemalan, and Ann Roth, an American. Last spring, armed gunmen held up Escobar in the storage room of her Guatemala City shoe store while two female accomplices stole her 6-month-old daughter Esther. Escobar, 26, is convinced the baby was put up for illegal adoption, and she came to Antigua to see if Esther was one of the infants found at Casa Quivira. "We are not animals to be bought and sold," she says, clutching...
Earlier this month, dozens of Guatemalan police, soldiers and government officials raided Casa Quivira, a foster home in the colonial town of Antigua. They took custody of 46 babies and accused the home of failing to issue the proper paperwork for adoptions. Worse, says Carmen de Wennier, Guatemala's Secretary for Social Welfare, Casa Quivira is being investigated for illegally trafficking infants, an accusation that its owners vehemently deny: "If these children were bought in the womb," de Wennier says, "that is a crime...
...Rather than adopting the disastrous heavy-handed anti-gang polices of neighboring Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, which have actually led to an escalation of violence and repression, the Nicaraguan police several years ago launched an intervention program aimed at engaging young men to turn them away from gang life. Since the program began in 2003, police claim that gang membership has declined dramatically. According to official statistics, 42 gangs have been demobilized and almost 4,000 of their members have been reintegrated into society. Of the 62 gangs that existed here four years ago, only 20 remain, with...
...fashioned Nicaraguan nationalism may also have helped keep the gang culture at bay, since the major transnational gangs that terrorize Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras - the Mara Salvatrucha and the M-18 - are essentially foreign, originating in Los Angeles. Mauricio Bustamante, 19, spent three years living in Guatemala spying on M-18 for the Salvatrucha before returning to Nicaragua and getting involved in his old local gang, the Cumbas. He says that Nicaraguan gangs have rejected the culture of the Salvatrucha and M-18 in keeping with the Nicaraguan spirit of resistance to foreign intervention...
Yolanda, who--for now--has taken the last name of Sanctuary, does not cry easily; but today is unusual. An essentially merry 52-year-old from Guatemala, a deacon in her church who is more likely to break into her favorite song (Dios Es Aquí) than complain, she calmly recounts the long story of bad luck and worse lawyers plaguing her 18-year attempt to get U.S. papers. She is impassive while reporting a judge's ruling that her daughter Anabella, 17, would "not be affected by my deportation." But then she recalls the sudden sense of being hunted that...