Until I Find You : Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala

During Guatemala’s decades-long civil war, tens of thousands of children, many of them Indigenous Maya, were coerced or kidnapped from their homes. They became commodities in a booming private adoption business, and most wound up in the United States. Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of a global industry that thrives on exploitation.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in NonfictionShortlisted for the 2025 Juan E. Méndez Book Award“Detailed and heartrending . . . uses years of research to show the way that a country destabilized by war can invite merciless profiteers to break apart families” —John Washington, Harper’sThe poignant saga of Guatemala’s adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession. In 2009 Dolores Preat traveled to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption—but in 1984, a girl across the street was abducted. At that house, Preat didn’t meet her mother, but she did meet Colop Chim, who turned out to be a jaladora—a baby broker. Preat and some 40,000 other Guatemalan children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by poverty and civil war. Amid the US-backed army’s genocide against Indigenous Maya, children were wrested from their villages and put up for adoption illegally, mostly in the United States. Eventually adoption became a private enterprise, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of files from war crimes investigations, Until I Find You reckons with the human toll of an industry that builds loving families in the Global North out of exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South.