The AFU and Urban Legend Archive Medical Organ Theft Baby Parts guatemalan baby snatchers Select a topic - - - - - - - - Home Searches AFU FAQ - - - - - - - - AFU Animals Books Celebrities Classic Collegiate Death Disney Drugs Food GIF Language Legal Medical Misc Movies Politics Products Religion Science Sex Songs TV - - - - - - - - Other sites

From: andrewst@u.washington.EDU (Andrew Steinberg)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Guatemalan Baby Snatchers UL
Date: 22 May 1994 01:54:27 -0000

The Washington Post

May 17, 1994, Tuesday, Final Edition

SECTION: STYLE; PAGE C1

HEADLINE: WITCH HUNT;
Babies Are Disappearing. Ugly Rumors Abound, And a Tourist's Life Is at Stake.

BYLINE: William Booth, Washington Post Staff Writer

DATELINE: SAN CRISTOBAL VERAPAZ, Guatemala

BODY:
Before she was dragged from her bus and beset by the mob that demanded her blood, the blood of the American accused of stealing children to harvest their organs, before she was called a witch and almost beaten to death with sticks -- before all this, June Weinstock probably fell in love with Guatemala.

In her last conscious hours before the attack, the 51-year-old environmental activist from Alaska discovered the Guatemala of a traveler's dreams, the highland villages where the descendants of the Mayas grow moon lilies on the sides of dead volcanoes and time in the dusty town squares seems expanded and almost still.

But this was not that Guatemala. This was the other Guatemala, the one travel guides do not speak of, the violent, unknowable Guatemala, where rumors have been circulating for months that there are gringos -- evil longhaired hippies, their dusty backpacks filled with surgical gear -- who roam the countryside, hunting.

Olivia de Ruiz, the prim matron of an inn here that bears her name, drank good Guatemalan coffee with Weinstock on the morning the national baby-snatchinghysteria consumed the American woman.

It was Holy Week in San Cristobal, March 29, and the town was dressed in flowers. So pretty, remembers Olivia de Ruiz, so tranquil. The streets were filled with Indians from the outlying villages and farms, following the processions of the saints.

De Ruiz remembers there were only a few foreigners in San Cristobal -- a four-hour drive from Guatemala City -- a highland town of 7,000 people on a lakesurrounded by coffee plantations and pine forests. Later, De Ruiz heard that Weinstock -- a rugged outdoors woman -- strolled the plaza, the market, taking photographs of the brown-eyed children. Then a boy wandered off to follow the religious processions, and a mother panicked. Though the child was found within the hour, it was too late.

More than four hours later -- as police watched and desperate officials at the U.S. Embassy in the capital monitored reports -- the mob finally smashed into the bathroom in the judge's offices where Weinstock was hiding, abandoned, alone. It did not stop beating her until it was convinced she was dead.

Today, more than a month after the attack, the judge's offices are being rebuilt. A workman points to a red smear on the bathroom door. The crowd had finally gotten what it wanted. "Sangre," he says. Blood.

June Weinstock, airlifted out of Guatemala, is still in a Fairbanks, Alaska, hospital, unable to speak or walk or respond to much of what happens around her. Friends say it may be years before she recovers, if she ever does.

And the baby-stealing hysteria continues. On Sunday, Janice Wogel of Philadelphia was attacked on a Guatemala City bus by an enraged crowd that accused her of stealing the 6-month-old Guatemalan baby she had recently adopted. The U.S. Embassy was forced to send security guards to protect her.

In Malacatan, near the Mexican border, a medical examiner will soon unearth the body of a woman killed, police say, by men who thought she was abducting children. Her identity is not yet known.

Rumors of baby stealing have circulated in the region for years, but they exploded in Guatemala this spring. It is impossible to know what -- or who -- is behind them, but human rights observers and Western diplomats suspect that right-wing elements in the military are behind the baby-parts stories -- that these forces want to destabilize the country and further weaken President Ramirode Leon Carpio, whose government has been negotiating a peace agreement to end the country's 33-year guerrilla war.

"Even when you think you know who is pulling the strings, you don't know," says a Western diplomat. "If you eventually find out who benefited from some act, you don't know if they pulled the strings to get what they wanted or whether someone else pulled the strings to make it look like they did it."

"Magic realism on acid," says Reuter correspondent Fiona Neill.

Whatever is pushing the buttons in the tabloid press, it has succeeded in creating widespread distrust of foreigners.

In the little village of Quixaya, in the shadow of the volcano Atitlan, a young American teacher from New Orleans named Michael DePass says, "Little kids have asked me, 'Do you steal babies?' It's easy for the rumors to start. We stick out like sore thumbs, and a lot of people don't like you."

In late March, following the attack against Weinstock and the false arrest of another American woman accused of stealing children, the State Department warned all Americans to curtail nonessential travel to the country.

The latest rumors have taken on a distinctly macabre twist. The babies are not simply stolen for illegal adoptions, it is said, but as unwilling donors for body parts used in clandestine organ transplants.

Transplant surgeons emphatically deny that illegal organ trafficking could occur in the United States. Transplants are simply too well monitored, and the organs themselves too delicate. The human heart, for example, remains viable outside of the body for only about five hours.

Todd Leventhal, a specialist in countering disinformation campaigns at the U.S. Information Agency in Washington, believes the rumors began as a kind of "urban legend," much like the "poodle in a microwave" story.

Leventhal says the baby-parts story first appeared in the international press in January 1987, when Leonard Villeda Bermudez, the former secretary general of the Honduran Committee for Social Welfare, said the rumors should be investigated. News services repeated his comments, and the story began appearing in Guatemala the next month.

By April 5, 1987, Leventhal says, the Soviet disinformation apparatus had seized on it, with Pravda printing the three-month-old Honduran story without the emerging disclaimers. The Tass news agency disseminated it worldwide.

In Guatemala, the baby-parts legend has wide currency, among poor and rich alike. In many towns a story circulates that disemboweled babies were found, their organs removed, a $100 bill on their bodies and a note: "Thanks for your contribution."

Needless to say, no such thing has ever been found. But even travelers in a tourist town such as Panajachel on Lake Atitlan repeat the story, though hippie wanderer Jim Mathiasen, who retells the tale at a cafe, says it was a $ 20 bill.

The Guatemalan press is partly responsible for the hysteria. On March 13, a week after an American traveler named Melissa Larson was wrongly arrested in Santa Lucia Cotzumalguapa under suspicion of baby-napping, an article ran in Guatemala's largest-circulation daily, Prensa Libre, under a headline that translates literally as: "The purchase of children for mutilation has become frequent."

Next to the article was the caption "Prices of organs on the international market" and an illustration showing lungs, kidneys, hearts and corneas packaged like so much luncheon meat.

Tonya Lewis, whose missionary husband, Michael Lewis, tried to save June Weinstock from the mob and who himself was beaten, remembers this: "They had taped the article to the wall of one of the stores in town."

Weinstock, of course, never stole a child. But this does not mean the theft and disappearance of children in Guatemala is untrue. The Guatemalan Public Ministry reports that on average six children go missing each day.

Carlos Aldana of the Archbishop's Human Rights Committee in Guatemala says he does not know if that figure is accurate, but agrees children do disappear. Aldana, however, does not believe the children are used as organ donors, or that they end up in Brazilian snuff films or as sex slaves in the Middle East, as other rumors hold. Many of the children, he suspects, are probably missing for the same reason children in the United States end up pictured on milk cartons. They run away, or are "stolen" by estranged parents or relatives. Many reappear. But not all.

A Disappearance

In the hot, dusty agricultural town of Mazatenango, some three hours from the capital, on the truck routes from Mexico, lives Victoria Orbolina Luna and her children, including her youngest son, Marvin Jr. The mother likes English names.

Two years ago, a woman and her daughter came to live in a cramped single roomnext to Orbolina Luna's, in a little boarding house just off the noisy main roadnext to the fire station.

After a few days, while Orbolina Luna was running errands, the woman and her daughter volunteered to make a special dinner of spaghetti and hot dogs. The daughter went to the store with Marvin, followed by her mother. They did not return. Marvin, then age 1 1/2, was gone.

Orbolina Luna became frantic. She too had heard the rumors. But she was lucky. The police in Mazatenango found that the woman who stole Marvin visited her husband in prison. On the way to the prison, Orbolina Luna hailed a taxi. Who was inside? She could not believe it. It was the woman who snatched Marvin. The woman denied all, but one of the police, tired of what he believed was a charade, told the woman he had run out of patience. He told her he was going to strip an electric wire of its covering and make her sit on it. She confessed.

According to Orbolina Luna's tale, told in a rainy courtyard in Mazatenango, the baby-snatcher said she got 2,500 quetzales for Marvin. That's about $100.

Legal adoptions in Guatemala cost between $ 15,000 and $ 30,000, with most ofthe money going to lawyers and the rest to judges, bureaucrats, doctors and nannies. The U.S. Embassy reports that about 1,000 Guatemalan children are adopted every year, some 500 by American parents.

After the police had their baby-snatcher, they took her and Orbolina Luna to Guatemala City, to the offices of a prominent attorney, who denied any knowledgeof shady dealings. Instead, the attorney said a woman claiming to be Marvin's
mother put the child up for adoption.

The attorney's sister showed Orbolina Luna the child's papers. Marvin's name had been changed to Liceo Cruz, said to be born to another woman on a farm out in the country.

To foil illegal adoptions, the U.S. Consulate in Guatemala recently began to insist that the birth mother undergo a rather intimidating one-on-one interview with someone on its staff. If things do not seem right, the adoptive parents must pay $ 800 for DNA tests. Of the 20 tests done last year, according to an embassy spokesman, three women claiming to be the true mothers were not.

Orbolina Luna got Marvin back. The child had been hidden in what Guatemalans call a casa cuna, or crib house, a nursery where babies awaiting adoption are cared for. In the last year, the National Police in Guatemala have made several well-publicized raids on illegal crib houses.

Francisco Goldman, the Guatemalan American author of "The Long Night of White Chickens," a 1992 novel prescient in its tale of a woman accused of baby trafficking, says, "Everything about the baby-parts story is true, except for gringos and baby parts. ... Children get stolen all the time in Guatemala. But not for their organs and not by foreigners. The Guatemalans steal them for adoptions."

While he was researching his novel, Goldman and a friend pretended to be desperate American parents searching for a child. They visited another prominent attorney, who sent them to a crib house.

"The guy said go take a look and see if there's anything you like," Goldman remembers. "We went to this house filled with cribs and Fisher-Price toys. There were only a few babies there. But I really remember the toys, and how dark it was, and I remember one of the nannies there telling us, 'Come back in 13 days.' Like, in 13 days they'd be getting another batch."

The woman who stole Marvin died in prison of cancer, says Orbolina Luna. The attorney is still practicing in Guatemala City. And Marvin Jr. is learning his letters, writing his E's and F's on a brown tablet in a rainy courtyard, watching his mother tell her tale to an American reporter.

The Mob

While the tabloid press in Guatemala has run away with the baby-parts story, it is the mom-and-pop cable companies that have gotten the real scoop. Incredible as it may seem, two different video cameramen taped the melee at San Cristobol -- for hours.

After June Weinstock was accused of stealing a child and pulled from a departing bus, a small crowd surrounded the bewildered woman with her limited Spanish, pushing and kicking her. A brave man named Jesus Valdez interceded, and told the people they must take her to the judge's offices. As they marched her off, they stopped at the house of Michael Lewis, an American missionary in San Cristobal.

"They needed a translator," said Tonya Lewis, Michael's wife. "I remember June looked pretty scared, and she said, 'What the hell do they think I've done?' "

Over the next four hours, the judge, Lewis and two policemen kept the growing mob at bay. On the videotapes one can see the judge's offices surrounded by a crowd of several hundred people, mostly men, many young, some drunk. As the tapes go on and on, the crowd first smashes windows. Then it tries to light the building on fire.

On one tape, several excited men tell the cameraman they are after a man. No, says another, it is a woman. Then another in the crowd says, "It is a man who turned into a woman."

"We want to protect our children," says one. "If we don't fight for our children, what are we? We are not baby chicks."

Two police in blue uniforms, with a radio and guns, stand in the crowd, watching. Informed sources say that two military officers were also in the crowd, perhaps only to investigate whether the army should step in, which it eventually did. There were other outsiders too -- a gang of road workers who some witnesses say were the most bloodthirsty, and drunk.

Tear gas canisters are thrown out of the building, and then back inside. A priest from nearby Coban arrives and is interviewed.

"I came to see if I could mediate," says Monsignor Geraldo Flores. "But the people are in such a strange state."

"This is a psychosis affecting San Cristobal and the entire republic," says the judge, who protected Weinstock from the mob for hours, but who finally fled the building.

People are screaming that they want to kill both Weinstock and Lewis. They want to burn them. Finally, they use a bench as a battering ram and break thoughthe locked doors, one by one. Lewis dashes from the back of the building, leaving Weinstock locked inside the bathroom.

He is struck on the head, pulled away under police custody and attacked again later. On one tape you can hear him shout, "Tonya, it's okay, baby," to his wife, who has been watching the riot with her two young children from her second-story window.

"When they started throwing stones at the monsignor, I just knew they were going to kill Mike," Tonya Lewis says. "I prayed for the Lord to give me the strength to carry on without a husband." She recalls that people shouted down the monsignor and yelled, "We don't want your blessings, we want blood."

Embassy officials say that June Weinstock entered the building around 11:30 in the morning. They heard reports of the melee and wanted to send a helicopter,but the skies were too overcast in the mountains.

The crowd finally reached Weinstock at 4 p.m., and stopped beating her only after police convinced them she was dead. They wanted to burn her.

The Men

At the men's prison in nearby Coban, where the inmates play polkas and volleyball and order their cold Cokes from a stand inside the walls, are the 57 men arrested after the attack on June Weinstock. They do not look like hysterics. They are soft-spoken. They are farmers, truck drivers, bricklayers,road workers and vendors. They politely answer a journalist's questions.

None of them has any opinions about the rumors of kidnapping and baby parts. None of them admits he attacked the building. None of them saw a thing, they say. They are all innocent, they say.

"Please help us regain our liberty," says a road worker. "We have families to feed."

Welcome to Guatemala.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, THE MEN ARRESTED AFTER THE BEATING OF JUNE WEINSTOCK, AN AMERICAN TOURIST THEY ACCUSED OF STEALING A CHILD. THE SERIOUSLY INJURED WEINSTOCK, SHOWN AFTER THE MARCH 29 ASSAULT, IS STILL UNABLE TO SPEAK OR WALK. PHILLIPPE DIEDERICH FOR TWP; MAP, TWP