PRECIO DE MERCADO DE LAS ACCIONES

Newspapers sporadically report on trafficking of children abroad. But little accurate information can be found due to secrecy. Parents involved in this trade try to protect their adopted children's former identity. However, international organizations which defend children's rights have gathered information from different newspapers. An investigation on this subject was successfully performed in Argentina by an inter-disciplinary and international commission. Most of its detailed and thorough

analysis is the base of the present analysis. There are also include reports from Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

In analyzing the selling of children a moral problem is involved. This Is borne out of social and economic factors. Children (mostly babies) become objects of trade and transaction. This act is hidden under the cover of humanitarian, loving and protective attitudes, but the starting point is poverty of people. In the local market families in a stronger economic condition buy children from poor families. In the international market families from wealthy countries buy children from families of the poor countries. Between both ends a team of unscrupulous people take advantage of both poor and infertile parents. But in the Argentinian a n a l y s i s ,36 they found that the economical factor is

subordinated by the pressure of the demand. A Brazilian report makes the same a n a l y s i s .37 The fact is that when demand exceeds

the supply, pressure also increases: threats, manipulation, inducement to hand over children, lack of support for mother- child attachments, etc.

It is important to differentiate between abandonment, adoption and trafficking. To adopt a child, he or she must be legally declared as abandoned by parents or relatives. When their family’s protection fails, the State has the responsibility over them. Children then are given in adoption. Most of the countries report38 that States are not providing adequate protection for children through welfare services. It is scarce and there is a lack of appropriate physical and psychological attention. Welfare

36 itwestigacioTU Venta y Trâfico de Ninos en Argentina. Defensa de los Ninos Intemaclonal- Secretarîa de Salud y Acciôn Social de la Naclôn (Argentina), Geneva, 1989.

37 Protecting Children's Rights in International Adoptions. Selected documents on the problem on trafficking and sale of children. Defence for Children International, Geneva, 1989.

institutions are also lacking funding. They tend to ease legal adoptions or the privatisation of child welfare services.

The process of child abandonment can be divided into acts of commission (willful abandonment of children) and acts of omission (impossibility to take care of them). The researchers find that the great majority are cases of omission. Family and rearing of children are culturally reinforced in Latin America. In the real extreme poverty where many families live, it is remarkable how they handle living costs to keep their children. Hence, giving children is not a national attitude but a personal struggle.

Legal adoption is a practice common in all Latin American countries. Law permits international adoptions in most of the countries, except Cuba and Nicaragua. Though law favours local adoptions.

Adoption requires legal, social-work and psychological procedures to protect the child’s welfare and adaptability to his/her new family. But, sometimes laws are ample and its application depends on the criterion of the judge.

The adoption procedure usually takes a long time, months or more than a year, due to bureaucracy and lack of personnel in the institutions involved. On the other hand, adoptive parents prefer to receive babies within the first year, or with a determined sex. For that reason they have to wait sometimes for years. Hence they take the easy way and get in contact with trafficking.

The reason to analyze child trafficking is not to raise the flag of morality and condemn the abuse and illegality of a profitable business with human beings. These are all surely condemnable. But for the purpose of this study, another kind of violence is before us: the loss of the right of all human beings to keep their identity, that is to say, original family, culture, country and perhaps language. This will be more evident in countries where ethnic characteristics differ from the child’s

own. The fact that the adoptive family accept and love a child as its own does not necessarily mean that he or she will be adopted by society. Sectors of the population of "white" societies reject immigrants.

Again, this kind of violence emerges from a main root which is poverty. There could be other reasons involved, but the economical factor seems to be determinant. Latin Americans have the cultural tradition to be warm and caring to their children. These usually stay at home until they form a new family. Maybe this is not the right way to bring children up, but culturally it means love and caring. Latin Americans like to have and nurture children. But poverty has pushed families to give up and deliver their children, in some cases, as a way for survival. But there is also a lack of solidarity that has been arising in some sectors of the population, where people struggle for their own existence and ignore or behave indifferently to what is happening in the next house's door. It is an eroding of cultural and national identity.

The most pathetic cases of this kind of violence were adoptions of children of missing parents by families In military forces, the very ones who killed their parents. This happened in Argentina, during the Military Dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. These children were separated from their parents or kidnapped from a mother who gave birth in captivity. They were sold, given as a presents to military's friends lacking children, or abandoned in institutions, always as "N.N." (without name).

In the international market children are recycled from the misery of Third World countries to a lovely middle-class home in the First World. This is the liberal economical formula: the law of supply and demand, correcting a tragic imbalance; in the north there is a deficit and in the south there is a surplus.39 This

conclusion, as sarcastic as it may sound, is a reality. It will be seen now how it operates. There is a demanding sector, an offering sector and a mediating sector.

a) The demanding sector

Locally adoptive parents belong to middle class. They are professional, business people, traders or executives. Their motivation to adopt a child varies but it normally involves their inability to give birth to their own children. They see themselves as charitable persons, who bring children from a deprived to a privileged situation. Because of the standards of society, they cannot accept their own sterility. They may also have the human need for generativity or trascendency that may compel us all at certain ages. But to fulfil these true needs they surrender to the clandestine selling of children. They do not consider the pain other parents might suffer in this business, or ethics nor human values. The apparent charity collapses when they select ethnic groups, sex, and age. Many chose their children by a photograph.

The foreign adoptive parents share in most of the same motivations and social characteristics. They come mostly from United States and Central Europe. Some countries prefer "exotic" children, but most of them tend to want children with the same ethnic characteristics as their own. These preferences have made the market more profitable in countries with lesser Indigenous features. There is a book "How to adopt from Latin America" which recommends that those who want to adopt a 'white' child, look for him/her in Chile, Costa Rica, and Argentina.^o

b) The offering sector

This could be better described as the "at risk" sector. They are especially poor single mothers, or pregnant women with many children. Beside their poverty, lack of family support also

contributes to their difficulty of keeping their children. It must also be considered that they have a total lack of or low educational level. Children can be a result of an extra-marital relationship or from an incestuous one. A very common case is that of young maids, living far away from their families and home. On the other hand, this sector neither have the economic capacity to avoid pregnancy due to high costs of contraceptives.

Despite the facts mentioned before, for cultural and human reasons, poor mothers do not give up their children as an easy solution to their economic troubles. On the contrary, as the different countries report, they feel robbed and deprived of their children, obliged by major forces, or victim of abuse. The following testimony is a sample of two children who were victims of this trafficking, the adolescent mother and her sold baby:

When I was 14, I came from my village to work in the