On the football field in Futeca Cayalá, an exclusive neighborhood in Guatemala Citya sign displays motivational slogans: “To the last drop. To sweat is glory. Leave it all on the field.” Osmín Ricardo Tobar Ramírez, the 35-year-old defensive captain and linebacker for Los Toros and Guatemala’s American football team, seems to take every one of those words to heart. Wearing a helmet, shoulder pads and knee pads, he works hard at practice, while his mother, Flor de María Ramírez Escobar, 52, watches him from the sidelines, a smile lighting up her face. She has spent 14 years of her life without seeing her son. Today, she takes advantage of every moment.

Tobar has been involved in sports since he was young. During his teenage years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he won a wrestling scholarship to the university. Physical activity is his escape valve, a way to “find balance” in an existence filled with ups and downs.

Today he works at a telemarketing company in Guatemala, thanks to his perfect English. He lives with his wife Lilian and his son Cristian. “With the life I’ve lived, I never thought I’d be able to have a stable home. It’s been a great plot twist,” Tobar admits to EL PAÍS. While he speaks Spanish, English words slip in sometimes.

More than 3,000 miles from this field, in Montreal, Canada, Ignacio “Nacho” Alvarado dreams of a new bike for his next project: pedaling from Mexico City to Guatemala City, to bring attention to his cause. “We want to raise awareness so that what happened to us doesn’t happen again,” he explains resolutely.

Alvarado and Tobar have a lot in common. They are two of the 30,000 Guatemalan children given up for international adoption between 1977 and 2007. Many of these processes were marred by irregularities and corruption, according to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR). In 2018, the judicial body condemned the Central American state for the case of Tobar and his brother.

Tobar was adopted in the United States in 1998, while Alvarado was adopted in Canada in the 1980s. As adults, they have returned to Guatemala to learn the truth about their adoptions and to reunite with their biological families. Both are also human rights activists and speak out to ensure that the “legalized” theft of children in Guatemala is not forgotten.

That cursed day

“I will never forget January 9, 1997,” sighs Tobar. He was seven years old and officials from the prosecutor’s office entered his house and took him and his brother, after a complaint was filed by a neighbor saying the children had been abandoned. “They told me they would return us in the afternoon… but that was the last time I saw my house,” he recalls.

At the time, Ramírez — who alone raised Tobar and JR (the initials used by the court to protect the brother’s identity, as he prefers not to be involved in the process regarding his origins) — was at work. In fact, she was employed by a government agency linked to the Tax Administration. “I was happy because I earned 2,000 quetzales ($250 a month) and could give my children a good life. When I found out what had happened, I lost control and tore up half of the money, out of desperation for not knowing where they were,” she recalls.

Ramírez went to juvenile court, where it was confirmed that her child had been abducted. From there, a quick trial began. A judge finally declared her unfit to care for them. The children – admitted to the Los Niños de Guatemala association – were declared “abandoned”.

“I never saw them again. I felt like a ship without a rudder. I was dead in life,” Ramírez recalls, tears streaming down her face 27 years later.

In April 1998, an expedited adoption process began for the two brothers, who were separated. Each was adopted by a different family. Tobar flew to Pittsburgh on June 2 of that year, already under a different name. Appeals were filed to review the sentence of Ramírez and later of Gustavo Tobar Fajardo – the biological father of the children – who had migrated to Mexico for economic reasons. The legal attempts were to no avail.

“I was beaten and abused in (the orphanages). I also thought I had lost my brother. When I was adopted, I was happy to leave… but I never had contact with my adoptive parents and my life in the US was miserable,” admits Tobar. He spent his life feeling rooted. “I tried to escape from life. I drank, smoked, joined a gangand even spent a few months in prison.”

Unlike Tobar, Ignacio Alvarado – abandoned at birth – was found by residents of a community in the eastern part of the country, who cared for him with love and took him to the hospital for medical checks. Shortly thereafter, he disappeared. It was later discovered that he had been taken to the Elisa Martínez orphanage, exposed years later for its involvement in child trafficking. “The residents were so sad that they started calling the river in the community ‘The Return of the Child,’ hoping that one day I would come back,” says Alvarado.

At the age of three, he was adopted by a Canadian family. By the age of 17, he had already changed families three times. His life was as hard as Tobar’s. “As an adult, a friend showed me an article about child trafficking at the orphanage where I came from. I asked myself, ‘Did this happen to me?'”

The market for children

Tobar and Alvarado were adopted in connection with internal armed conflictwhich left at least 200,000 dead and missing in Guatemala between 1960 and 1996. Amid the institutional chaos, in 1977, Guatemala passed a law allowing notaries and lawyers to handle adoptions without judicial authorization. This favored the creation of child trafficking networks. Hospitals, the army, judicial bodies and orphanages were involved.

Many notaries enriched themselves by facilitating international adoptions, without first investigating whether a child was in fact orphaned or abandoned, or whether the family to receive them was suitable. They often took advantage of people’s poverty: adoptive families could end up paying between $30,000 and $80,000, according to estimates made by experts consulted by the IACHR. “A sum (of money) that could have been used to support families in Guatemala, without removing the children from their homes,” note Tobar and Alvarado.

These legal facilities made Guatemala one of the four countries that gave up the largest number of children for adoption in the world, according to a report by the UN Special Rapporteur. And in 2008, the majority of children arriving in the United States for adoption were of Guatemalan origin, despite the Guatemalan Adoption Law of 2007 establishing international adoption as a last resort. In 2010, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) concluded that trafficking networks used various strategies to obtain children, from threatening mothers to engaging in so-called “child laundering”, which consisted of presenting stolen or allegedly abandoned children before a judge to declare them suitable for adoption.

Tobar and his family became victims of this child-laundering. Alvarado was not, but the two were sold to families eager to have a child, Alvarado explains.

Returning to Guatemala

With legal support from organizations such as Casa Alianza (now La Alianza, or “The Alliance”) and later El Refugio de la Niñez (“The Children’s Refuge”), Gustavo Tobar fought his whole life to regain his parental rights, track down his son, and speak out against the theft of children. In 2002, a journalist came from Newsweek found Tobar and showed him pictures of his biological parents. “I cried and wanted to go back,” he says. But he was just a 12-year-old boy at the time.

“When they told me my son was alive, I had hope again,” Gustavo Tobar recalls, his voice breaking with emotion. The story took a turn in 2009, when the father contacted his son on Facebook. In 2011, they finally met again. And in 2015, Osmín Tobar decided to return to Guatemala permanently.

Thanks to Gustavo Tobar, the case of his children reached the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In 2018, the judicial body condemned the state of Guatemala for the illegal adoption of the brothers. According to the judgment, these adoptions “took place within a framework of corruption, in which a group of public and private actors and institutions operated under the guise of protecting the best interests of the child, but with the real aim of achieving their own enrichment.” In July 2024, Bernardo Arevalo became the first president to formally apologize on behalf of the Guatemalan state.

“For the first time, I felt that my life had meaning. I stopped drinking, because I was a public figure and had the responsibility to represent illegally adopted people, emphasizes Tobar.

Alvarado, for his part, began researching his origins during a trip to Guatemala in 2019. “Walking down Sixth Avenue, I saw the pictures of those who disappeared during the conflict. I had the idea to put up posters on myself to see if anyone was looking for me,” Alvarado told EL PAÍS. With the support of the non-profit organization HIJOS Guatemala, he managed to place his image in several places to raise awareness about child trafficking.

A DNA sample allowed him to contact a second cousin. Eventually he learned that his origins lay in a community in the eastern part of the country. And in 2022 he was able to see his mother with the support of the Mental Health League in Guatemala. “It was a very powerful feeling… but you don’t have to romanticize it. You can’t go back 35 years: it’s like being adopted for the second time. It takes time to build a relationship,” Alvarado admits.

In 2021 he founded the collective Estamos Aquí. Tobar is also a member. Any adopted person who has doubts about their past or is looking for their biological family can contact them. To do this, the organization uses DNA samples, birth certificates or puts up photographs on the streets. In three years, they have achieved eight reunions. “It’s important that biological parents don’t blame themselves, even though it can be difficult,” stresses Alvarado.

He is about to end the video call with EL PAÍS, when he suddenly remembers that he forgot to mention something important: “You know what? In the community where they found me, they have already renamed the river. Now it’s called ‘The Boy Returned’, because I’ve come back,” he laughs and smiles in his French-accented Spanish.

Translated by Avik Jain Chatlani.

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