GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala -- When she was six months pregnant, Gabriela de Leon's husband told her he couldn't afford -- and didn't want -- another child.

After he beat her and threatened to kill her and her other two children, de Leon agreed to give the newborn to a lawyer specializing in international adoptions.

Her husband received the equivalent of $650 for what was considered by the Guatemalan government a private, legal transaction. Within weeks, de Leon, a 23-year-old school teacher, had left her husband. She is now trying to get her baby back. "This is so painful," she says. "I had no idea how bad this would feel."

De Leon's child was sold on a market where big dollars have made young, healthy infants a commodity. Lawyers brokering babies earn up to $15,000 a year in fees from adopting parents. And, critics and government officials say, the lawyers are filling out more than just legal forms -- they're filling orders to meet booming demand from parents in the United States and Europe.

Much of the activity is legal. It is not against Guatemalan law, for instance, for a mother to receive money for a baby she puts up for adoption. But authorities say that the high demand and big dollars encourage tactics of intimidation and manipulation that often cross the line between facilitating an adoption and coercing one.

"What we're fighting against is children being turned into toys or becoming merchandise," says Carmela Carrup, who heads a section on minors in the Guatemalan attorney general's office.

De Leon's case is atypical in at least one respect: The baby brokers generally target single mothers, usually poor and often ill-informed about their rights.

Maria Cobosh, who is 28, single and unable to sign her name, was pregnant when she was befriended by a woman who would stop by her house to talk. For weeks the subject of adoption never came up. But the woman, it turned out, was employed by a lawyer representing an American couple trying to adopt a Guatemalan child. Cobosh agreed to give up her baby, she says, in part because the attorney promised to pay her hospital bills.

Within a few weeks of the birth, she changed her mind. When she told the lawyer that she wanted her baby back, he demanded that she repay the hospital bill -- the equivalent of more than a year's income for Cobosh. "He told me I'd go to jail. He said I had to go to the [U.S.] embassy and say I was giving

up my baby," she recalls. "I was scared, so I did it.'

Dozens of complaints filed with the Guatemalan attorney general's office, and the testimony of investigators and mothers, detail the brokers' tactics.

The targets are often young women who have moved to bigger cities to find work far from families and systems of support. Agents scour poor neighborhoods seeking prospective donors. Brothel owners sell the babies of prostitutes. Middle- and upper-class housewives hire expectant mothers as servants, than arrange an adoption and pocket a fee.

Four months pregnant, Veronica Godinez Vicente, a 19-year-old who can neither read nor write, was hired to work in a middle-class home as a maid.

Her employer took her for medical checkups, and a week before she was due, drove Godinez to the hospital. When drugs failed to induce labor, her baby was delivered by Caesarean section. "I asked to see my baby, but the doctor told me it wasn't permitted," Godinez says. "He looked at me and said, 'Don't you know what's going on here?' I have never seen my baby."

Scared and threatened with the loss of her job, Godinez put her thumbprint on 12 blank pages that were later filled in with legal documents declaring the baby abandoned. Police later raided the unlicensed nursery operated by the lawyer who filed those papers, but hers wasn't among nine infants found.

The women have the right to stop the adoption at any time, says Bruce Harris, director of the Latin American branch of Covenant House, an advocacy group for children, but often they are illiterate, poor and easily intimidated. "The lawyers say, 'If you start making a problem, I'll put you in jail.' Because they're lawyers, [the women] believe them."

Oddly enough, the bustle in Guatemala's adoption market is partly a result of stronger international efforts to curb abuses.

After the signing of the 1993 Hague convention on international adoptions, dozens of countries passed strict regulatory provisions. Some countries once popular with U.S. and European international adoption agencies have virtually shut down. After Peru, for example, rewrote its adoption code, the flow of babies to the United States dropped from 800 a year to 17.

International adoptions in Guatemala encounter minimal state interference. Private attorneys act as representatives of absentee clients while paperwork is processed. Prospective parents need be in the country no more than three days. Accordingly, Guatemala has become, along with Russia, China and South Korea, one of the stars of the international adoption circuit. In three years, visas for Guatemalan babies being adopted by U.S. parents have more than doubled, to 879 last year. "It's simply supply and demand," says Harris.

The demand comes from prospective parents frustrated by strict requirements in their own countries. Gary and Elizabeth Nelson, of Southgate, Mich., feared that adopting in the United States would be risky. "All of a sudden a birth father shows up that wasn't in the picture when the baby was given up, and then the baby is taken away after two years or six years or whatever,' says Gary Nelson. Last year he paid a Guatemalan lawyer $7,000, with another $7,000 due when the adoption was final.

But in a country whose streets are filled with homeless and abandoned children, the dollars that families like the Nelsons are willing to pay have created a shortage of healthy infants.

Reports of baby-stealing prompted the British Embassy to institute mandatory DNA tests for adoptions from Guatemala. The U.S. Embassy requires such tests sporadically. Of 29 performed last year, three showed that the woman offering a child for adoption was not the mother.

The Nelsons' adoption fell through after eight months of anxious waiting and a visit to Guatemala to see the baby. They say they, too, are victims. They place partial blame on the Michigan-based agency that managed the process and put them in contact with a Guatemalan lawyer.

"It turns out that the birth mother wanted the baby back two week after it was born, which would have been six weeks before we even got the referral," Gary Nelson says.

It is up to U.S. or European-based agencies, advocates say, to enforce tougher ethical standards. But as adopting abroad becomes more popular and more lucrative, it is easy for both agencies and parents to simply ignore where those babies come from -- and how the dreams of adopting parents are made to come true.

Prospective parents "are very naive to believe what their lawyers tell them," says Covenant House's Harris. "This business, which they think is a lovely social project done by their lawyers, is really nothing more than a baby supermarket."

Pub Date: 7/02/98