Home alone

A DECADE ago Guatemala’s hotels were full of light-skinned foreigners with dark-skinned babies. The country was sending nearly as many children to America for adoption as was China, despite a hundredfold difference in population. Between 1996 and 2008 more than 30,000 Guatemalan children were adopted abroad—in 2007 nearly one out of every 100 babies. Hotels in Guatemala City, the capital, had entire floors for child care and notaries’ offices. “Some countries export bananas,” says Fernando Linares Beltranena, who worked as an adoption lawyer. “We exported babies.”