This is an email that was sent from our agency today:
"No cases came out today. I just called Guatemala and in my phone call I learned that yes the President is trying to stop adoptions. There was another meeting today with attorneys. They are trying to stop this. The Guatemala office is stating it should not effect the cases already in PGN. The law the President put forward is to take affect on Sunday. (October 1st) However the office believes this should not stop the cases from coming out of PGN or new cases being submitted now."
I have been reading daily on the website www.guatadopt.com. It has been very helpful. The last post on their page talks about this issue in more detail. It brings UNICEF into the equation. They are not helping the situation at all from what I read. They are donating money to the country but asking Guatemala to stop adoption in return. I think it would be helpful for others to read it as well. It can be hard to under stand. Many things I do not understand but by reading the posts and adoptive parent comments it may bring some light into the subject and someone can explain it better to me/us. They say there isn't much we can do right now. Boy is it hard to sit back and watch them take our babies away. Our case is uncertain right now until we hear more. I will definitely post more news as is comes to us.
2 comments:
Heather,
for what it's worth, Angi and I took some time and prayed the rosary for you this afternoon. We will keep you in your thoughts and prayers, and we'll keep checking the blog.
Love, Tony and Angi
Hey, I was just searching the web and found this article:
September 29, 2006
THE EXECUTIVE ORDERS ARE NO LONGER A THREAT
{Posted on behalf of Susana Luarca, Asociacion Defensores de la Adopcion}
President Oscar Berger withdraw the executive orders that he planned to approve this weekend "to celebrate the Children’s Day" , October 1st. The abuse of power that he intended to do by-passing the Congress to pass the Protocol of Good Practices , which is the same UNICEF law of adoptions, and reinstate the Hague Convention, was halted by the same Congress, who warned him of the consequences of usurping the legislative power.
That Berger denied to the DOS that his intentions were to suspend adoptions and take them over by his wife who directs the Secretary of Social Welfare, was expected. He also lied when he said to the press, that Kofi Annan, General Secretary of the United Nations “told him that if Venezuela gets a seat in the Security Council, there will be trouble”. Annan denies having said that to Berger.
The positive part of this experience is to see that the legal system works and that we are working under the protection of the law. The rights granted by the Constitution to the mothers to relinquish their children, to the children to be adopted and to the lawyers to work on adoptions cannot be taken away, by any law or international treaty, not even by the President of Guatemala.
The next step will be to set the record straight with the people at the PGN. We have waited too long to hold them accountable for all their delays, their rejections without legal grounds and their abuses of power. The thorough review of the adoption files is their duty, to verify the legality of the process. But when the files are rejected for no reason or when the review takes not the three days that they should take, but more than a month if they are rejected and much more if they are approved , it is time to make use of the legal actions that the law supplies for cases like these and file criminal charges against them. The worst enemy of an abandoned child is time. The time that a child spends without the love of a family, hurts the child in more ways that we can think of. If the PGN does not care for the children, we have to make them to care. If we don’t do it, we will be as guilty as them.
Best regards,
Susana Luarca
Asociacion Defensores de la Adopcion
Article at
http://www.guatadopt.com/archives/000501.html#000501
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