Secretive Network : Salvadoran ‘Baby Scam’ Flourishing

The young Minnesota couple waited expectantly at the airport for their newly adopted daughter, flying to them at last from war-ravaged El Salvador.

After months of waiting, reams of paperwork and thousands of dollars in fees, they seemed at last to have reached the end of an ordeal.

But when the 3-year-old girl arrived, something was wrong. Like many abandoned children rescued from Third World countries, she had scabies and lice. More disturbing, she was also visibly malnourished, and a pediatrician who examined her said that despite her small size she was not 3 years old at all, but possibly as old as 5.

What distressed her new parents the most, however, was a startling tale that emerged as they struggled to communicate with the distraught child: When she left El Salvador, the little girl had been traveling with a younger brother. Somewhere along the way, an adoption agent had abruptly separated the two children--sending the brother to some other, unknown family.

Baby Brother Disappears

Now, far from home, the child desperately wanted her little brother back. When her new parents asked the woman who had handled the two adoptions to contact the little boy, they were horrified to learn that his whereabouts could not be determined.

“She didn’t know where he was,” said a Massachusetts official who later investigated the case. “She had delivered the boy to a couple in Massachusetts, but she had no idea where they lived. She had no records at all.”

From orphanages and squalid slums, through a secretive network of Central American adoption lawyers and American “baby-brokers,” a small tide of Salvadoran children is washing into the United States--about 1,300 over the past six years.

The Lucky Few

For those lucky enough to pass through the hands of careful agencies and scrupulous lawyers, the result can be new homes with loving families and an escape from poverty and the brutality of El Salvador’s civil war.

Yet for others, the road to a new life in the United States runs through an ugly netherworld of profiteering, exploitation and neglect. It is a world tainted with fraud and indifference to the needs of vulnerable children, where rules against abuse are too rarely enforced.

In some cases, Salvadoran babies have been bought from their natural mothers. U.S. diplomats fear others have even been stolen. Babies have been shipped into the United States with false birth certificates and adoption consent forms that their real mothers never signed.

Salvadoran authorities have convicted one baby-finder of kidnaping three children. The woman testified that she had turned the children over to the agent of a prominent adoption lawyer for $160 each--a lawyer who has arranged U.S. adoptions at fees reportedly as high as $6,500 per child.

The lure of profits has turned El Salvador’s tiny adoption-law community into a circle of fear and intrigue. Some lawyers have made small fortunes, while others have fled the country after receiving anonymous threats. Last year, a law clerk was killed by unknown assassins who proclaimed themselves the Salvadoran Protective Army, a new death squad sworn to guard the nation’s infants against kidnapers.

In the United States, too, unscrupulous baby brokers have been drawn to the trade in Salvadoran children. Authorities in Massachusetts, Minnesota, California and other states have been attempting to crack down on adoption “facilitators” who charge would-be parents large amounts of money and promise them healthy babies--but who then sometimes provide no children, children who are desperately ill or children whose availability for adoption is questionable because they carry fraudulent adoption documents.

A federal grand jury in Boston is currently investigating the largest Salvadoran ring, after more than three years of detective work by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

But so far, authorities in El Salvador and the United States have taken little effective action against those involved.

“Are people doing wrong things? Yes,” a source close to the federal investigation said Thursday. “Is there enough evidence to result in a conviction? That’s another question. A lot of stuff is in Central America and it’s hard to get.”

The roots of the problem spring from the way international adoptions work, and from the tragic consequences of El Salvador’s civil war between the U.S.-backed government and leftist guerrillas.

In the United States as well as El Salvador, adoption is largely a private business, virtually unregulated in some states, in others legally subject to regulation but actually little-scrutinized. No government agency in either country has sole responsibility or authority for supervising adoptions. Lawyers and private agencies do most of the work, matching couples with children and steering them through the legal maze.

Some agencies’ purposes are purely charitable, but others are in the business for profit. It can be difficult for would-be parents to know ahead of time what kind of agent they may be working with.

Further, El Salvador is a difficult country to deal with, even for adoption agents who have worked in dozens of other countries.

‘A Complicated Maze’

“El Salvador is a rat’s nest, a complicated maze of twists and turns,” said Annabelle Illien, the owner of an Atlanta adoption agency who has helped parents to adopt Salvadoran babies for three years. “Nobody has the truth. It’s Alice in Wonderland.”

Nonetheless, American couples have found themselves drawn into the thicket of Salvadoran adoptions for one compelling reason: There is a pressing shortage of adoptable babies in the United States and a terrible surplus of unwanted babies in El Salvador.

More than 2 million U.S. couples want to adopt children, but only about 50,000 healthy infants come up for adoption in this country each year, according to the National Committee for Adoption, a Washington office funded by private adoption agencies.

As a result, thousands of couples turn to Third World countries, especially South Korea, Colombia, the Philippines, India--and El Salvador. Americans adopted 310 children from El Salvador in fiscal year 1985, the last year for which figures are available.

One attraction is that El Salvador’s procedures for foreign adoption are looser than those of most other Latin American nations.

“It’s one of the few countries where single parents can adopt, where people over 40 can adopt, and where the government permits people to adopt without coming down and appearing in court,” a U.S. consular official said. Most countries require several personal court appearances by the adoptive parents, often over several weeks--a burden of both time and money.

El Salvador offers another grim advantage for the adoption business: It has plenty of children who need new parents.

The country’s six-year-old war between the U.S.-backed government and leftist guerrillas, the collapse of El Salvador’s economy and the disintegration of its social structure have produced thousands of orphans and abandoned children, and thousands more whose impoverished mothers are willing to give them up. And in a society so stratified that the upper classes have long viewed peasants’ lives as cheap, negligent treatment of poor children can pass almost unnoticed even by those handling them.

Thus, with U.S. adoption agencies constantly seeking adoptable children, the handful of Salvadoran lawyers who deal with foreign adoptions have discovered a steady demand for their services--”a seller’s market,” one U.S. diplomat said.

“In a country where there’s nothing, adoption is a big business,” said Martha Edwards Correa, executive director of the American Adoption Agency in Washington, D.C.

The little Salvadoran girl who lost her brother was one of several victims of the adoption ring now being investigated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Internal Revenue Service and the Massachusetts attorney general’s office.

“It is one of the largest, if not the largest, foreign adoption fraud that INS has ever seen,” said William Granger, a senior official in the INS office in Boston.

It is also the second major “orphan scam,” in police argot, uncovered in Latin America in the last two years. In 1985, federal investigators broke up an Arizona-based ring that falsely promised to provide more than 40 couples with children from Mexico. Some U.S. diplomats and investigators believe the INS may have found only the tip of an iceberg and that questionable adoption rings may be operating throughout Central and South America.

Not a ‘Victimless Crime’

“People sometimes say adoption fraud is a victimless crime,” said Dr. William Pierce, president of the National Committee for Adoption. “But I don’t think it’s any such thing. Corruption has an effect. It’s a very short step from selling kids to good homes to simply selling them to the highest bidder.”

U.S. officials say the INS has focused on what they describe as a “baby broker” in Massachusetts named Suzanne Champney and the man who supplied her with babies, a Salvadoran lawyer named Roberto del Cid Aguirre. Federal prosecutors are reviewing evidence gathered by the INS for the Boston grand jury’s investigation.

Although Del Cid issued a general denial, both he and Champney refused to comment on the specific allegations against them.

Investigators and adoption workers say Del Cid has worked on hundreds of adoptions for parents in California, Minnesota and Pennsylvania as well as Massachusetts, making him easily the biggest lawyer in the Salvadoran-U.S. baby trade. Many of the adoptions have been entirely normal, matching needy children with loving parents. But some, U.S. officials say, have been deeply flawed.

U.S. officials say Del Cid has employed teams of women who went into the slums of El Salvador to persuade mothers to give up their babies. The officials said the women sometimes offered cash for the babies, a practice illegal under Salvadoran law. Del Cid has said that if cash was exchanged, he did not know of it and would not have approved.

U.S. diplomats in El Salvador say some babies in adoptions handled by Del Cid have been discovered to have false birth certificates and faulty forms registering the consent of fictional mothers, a violation of U.S. immigration law. When the U.S. Embassy tightened its rules and required the babies’ mothers to appear in person, at least two “mothers” turned out to be women hired to play the role.

The INS, the IRS, the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador and the Salvadoran government have been looking into Del Cid’s activities since 1982. U.S. investigators say they have been aided by El Salvador’s Special Investigative Unit, the FBI-trained police force originally designed to stamp out death squads.

But as of now, U.S. officials and adoption agencies say, Del Cid is still operating through a network of other Salvadoran lawyers--still working on applications to the U.S. Embassy for the admission of adoptive babies to the United States and still collecting fees from hopeful American parents. Privately, some officials express doubt that he will ever be put out of business.

Del Cid has denied every charge against him and says he is no longer in the adoption business.

“I have had nothing to do with adoptions since 1983,” he said in an interview in San Salvador.

But adoption agencies and adoptive parents say otherwise.

Susan Kowalski and Patricia Brown of Bay Area Adoption Services Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., said Del Cid has worked on three adoption cases for their agency this year.

“He comes frequently to the Bay Area,” Brown said. “He came in and talked to us in February or March (of 1986) and told us . . . that he could provide us with a liaison between our clients and lawyers in El Salvador.

“He came through with one baby on Sept. 4, and another on Sept. 27,” said Kowalski. “Both cases were fine. We’re hoping to do more work with him.”

Del Cid says he has never been to the Sunnyvale agency.

“Maybe someone else is using my name,” he suggested. “I have not been in the United States.” However, The Times reached Del Cid in San Salvador at the telephone number left by the man who visited the Sunnyvale agency.

A young Minnesota couple, Janet and David Ostlund, say they also know that Del Cid has been in the adoption business more recently than 1983. When they applied to adopt a little girl in August of 1984, Suzanne Champney told them they would have their child in a matter of months.

“They sent us her picture, and we sent them the money,” she said. “It was $6,500.”

But after months of delay, the Ostlunds still had no baby. In May of 1985--more than a year after Del Cid says he left the adoption business--Janet Ostlund complained to Champney.

“She told me to talk to the lawyer,” Janet Ostlund said. “She said the main lawyer’s name was Roberto del Cid Aguirre. . . . I remember talking with him. He was the one who spoke some English.”

Eventually, the Ostlunds’ new daughter, 1-year-old Maria, arrived on a flight from San Salvador clearly ill. The Ostlunds rushed her to the emergency room of a nearby hospital, where physicians found half a dozen medical problems including malnutrition, an abnormal heart condition, a long-running ear infection and signs of mild retardation.

The Ostlunds nursed Maria back to health, but a year later she died as a result of injuries received in an accidental fall.

Del Cid says he has never heard of the Ostlunds or their daughter Maria.

Roberto del Cid Aguirre’s role in processing Salvadoran children for adoption came to light largely by mischance, in a bizarre 1983 case heard in San Salvador’s criminal courts.

Three women had come to police with the same strange complaint: A woman who had once employed them as maids had “borrowed” their children and then refused to give them back. Police arrested the woman, Aracely Urrutia, for kidnaping, and Urrutia led them to apartments holding dozens of children. The law student who seemed to be in charge, a young man named Ruben del Cid, told police the children were being collected for adoptions arranged by his older brother, the lawyer Roberto. The police contacted Roberto, who said he had no idea what Ruben was talking about.

Although Urrutia was convicted of kidnaping in the criminal case that followed, Ruben and Roberto del Cid were never charged. Ruben del Cid admitted, in testimony given under oath, that he had paid Urrutia $160 for each of three children, but said he believed they had been obtained legitimately. (Salvadoran law permits lawyers to pay baby-finders for their services, as long as no payments are made to the children’s parents.) Indeed, U.S. and Salvadoran investigators generally believe the Del Cid brothers did not know that Urrutia was kidnaping the children.

Women Employed as ‘Scouts’

The trial’s sworn testimony revealed a thriving adoption enterprise that employed as many as eight women as “scouts” to comb El Salvador for mothers who might be willing to give up their children. Some mothers apparently handed over their infants in the hope that the children would enjoy a better life in the United States. Others, Urrutia said, were lured with payments.

Even before the Urrutia case, the U.S. Embassy was interested in Roberto del Cid Aguirre, who was producing visa applications for four or five children a month while most Salvadoran adoption lawyers could manage only one or two.

“It is true that I was investigated by the U.S. Embassy,” Del Cid said in the interview. “The U.S. consul came to talk to me and treated me as an enemy. . . . But I have never been charged with any crime.”

After Urrutia’s arrest, embassy officials declared a moratorium on Del Cid-handled adoptions and began examining all adoption applications more closely. They also began requiring that the natural mother of a child put up for adoption appear in person at the embassy to confirm that she was giving up the child freely.

In one case, U.S. officials said, when the “mother” who appeared was questioned, she confessed that she was an impostor. The lawyer in the case then produced a second “mother” who knew even less about the child than the first one. The application was denied.

The U.S. officials said they believed the lawyer, a Del Cid associate in the past, was working for Del Cid on the case. But Del Cid denied that he has employed any other lawyers on adoptions since 1983.

Many Appeared Legitimate

On the other hand, officials said, many of the visa applications submitted by Del Cid did not appear fraudulent. And in some of the cases of suspected fraud, they said, phony mothers appear to have signed adoption forms because it was difficult to track down the real mothers.

Urrutia, whose account in an interview with The Times was confirmed by Salvadoran officials and U.S. investigators, said most of the babies were apparently wheedled or “bought” from poor women.

But there have also been darker stories--reports that the kidnaping of children for sale and adoption may actually have occurred on a wide scale, or that children may have been captured by army units and handed over to adoption brokers for a bounty. Such stories, especially those involving the military, could not be confirmed, but some U.S. officials say they take them seriously nonetheless.

‘Could be a Smoking Gun’

“Some of the cases we’re investigating are from (combat) areas,” one U.S. official involved with the issue said. “There could be a smoking gun there,” he said, though none has been found.

Public anxiety about the issue runs so high in El Salvador that rumors swept the capital last year that kidnapers were snatching infants from their mothers’ arms to sell them for adoption. Although no specific incidents were ever confirmed, the stories caused panic among many parents. The government reacted by abruptly freezing all foreign adoptions.

And a previously unknown organization calling itself the Salvadoran Protective Army claimed responsibility for the murder of a young law clerk whom it charged with arranging questionable adoptions abroad.

The new death squad also published a newspaper advertisement threatening to kill five more people in the adoption business, including one lawyer who had worked with Del Cid. That lawyer and at least one other adoption lawyer who was not named fled the country, other Salvadoran lawyers and U.S. and Salvadoran officials said.

Meanwhile, many U.S. adoption agencies have simply stopped working in the country.

“Usually when I go down there I’m worried about being taken for a military adviser,” said Ray Croteau, a Manassas, Va., lawyer. “This time I was afraid I’d be taken for what I am--an adoption attorney.”

Suzanne Champney acted as Del Cid’s chief American broker from 1979 until 1983 as he delivered at least 200 children, and possibly more, to the United States.

“I never really kept a count,” she said in a sworn deposition to Massachusetts authorities filed in Boston’s Suffolk County Superior Court in 1984. “I would say probably two or three hundred.” All but a few, she said, came through Roberto del Cid Aguirre.

The state of Massachusetts sued Champney in 1984, accusing her of “unfair and deceptive acts.” The state’s complaint, based on affidavits from angry adoptive parents, included the case of the little girl in Minnesota who was separated from her brother. It also charged that Champney:

--Solicited thousands of dollars from adoptive parents by telling them specific children from El Salvador and Guatemala were ready for adoption when the children either did not exist or were not available.

--Promised one Massachusetts couple a healthy baby but delivered a child so ill from neglect that she died shortly after arriving at Miami International Airport.

--Furnished a Minnesota couple with a baby girl suffering from malnutrition, pneumonia and scabies so severe that a St. Paul hospital asked permission to photograph her for a medical textbook.

The Suffolk County court agreed, and issued an injunction ordering Champney to stop operating an unlicensed adoption service in Massachusetts. Following that action, Minnesota’s social welfare department instructed adoption agencies to stop dealing with Champney.

Believed Still in Business

But despite the court order barring Champney from arranging adoptions in Massachusetts, officials there say they believe she is still in the business, operating from Florida. One said that when Champney was recently asked, in a deposition under oath, whether she still arranged adoptions, she invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Last fall, Champney sold her house and moved to Florida, but Massachusetts authorities seized the funds from the sale. The Massachusetts attorney general’s office is now administering a fund to reimburse families who paid fees for babies that never arrived.

Champney, who has turned down repeated requests to discuss her activities, told Massachusetts authorities in her 1984 deposition that she kept virtually no written records of the hundreds of adoptions she handled. She said couples handed thousands of dollars over to her and she sent most of it on to Del Cid, with no clear accounting of what the funds were used for.

“I would like to know where the money went (in El Salvador),” Champney said in the deposition. Sometimes, she said, she endorsed couples’ checks directly over to Del Cid. In other cases, she said, “couriers would take down bundles of dollars” to El Salvador.

Reached by The Times at her home, Champney refused to comment on any of the charges against her. “There’s nothing I want to say about it,” she said.

In Boston, the federal grand jury is still investigating the Del Cid-Champney organization. The California Department of Social Services is seeking information about Del Cid’s activities in the state, according to James Brown, chief of the department’s Adoption Branch. And authorities in Minnesota, Kansas and other states are taking a second look at reports of adoption abuses there, officials said.

The INS has also tightened its procedures on foreign adoptions, especially in Latin America, in hopes of catching any further fraud cases at the source.

But prosecutors admit to some bafflement over the moral ambiguities of the Champney case.

“If you get your baby, you love this woman; you send her a bottle of champagne,” said a Massachusetts official who worked on the case. “Either she’s a cynical, calculating, avaricious woman who takes advantage of anyone who contacts her--or she’s just a person who’s making contacts and services available.”

Doyle McManus is a Times staff writer. Craig Pyes is an associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news service, who was retained by The Times to work on this article. Times staff writer Marjorie Miller, in San Salvador, also contributed to this article.