A Sun Herald piece,
Bond set for New Albany couple.

A brief ‘week in review’ piece from the DJ, Enna’s death: Accident or otherwise?

And finally another puppy-centric local TV news piece- Veterinarian: New Albany puppy mill ‘worst condition’ she’s seen.
…
Update, a new AP piece came out this afternoon-

Bond Set for Parents Accused of Child Abuse

Here’s tonight’s comment;

By way of latest news updates, I haven’t gotten through my news searches today, but be sure to read this story-

Adoption process likely OK’d Union Pair (5/24)

Also I’ve pulled an older Fox/Faux *cough!* news *cough!* piece from May 21rst, Mid-South couple facing charges of child neglect, homicide, animal cruelty.

It has some snippets of video from inside the house, describing the conditions therein. To date, most of what I’ve seen has focused outside on the animal cages. So this was a little different.

I can also give you two more blog posts from adoptionland about Enna’s death;

Ungrateful Little Bastard’s Adoption process definitely FAILED Guatemalan kids – but who cares, right? in which she blogs about the DJ piece, but ads commentary and some great graphics.

and

Adopted Jane’s When adoption turns to murder

There are also a variety of other pages and blogs that have picked the story up (such as here for example.)

I suggest using tools such as Google’s blogsearch and Google news to stay on top of the latest and set email alerts for updates.

I’ll only be pulling a few particularly pertinent pieces from time to time to post here.

One of the most damning aspects of this is that at least 2 of the adoptions at least APPEAR to have gone through some form of normal channels, meaning there’s an agency, a lawyer, a someone out there who ok-ed them.

Now they may have looked very different when those two took place, for example, they currently make their livings off renting trailers they own and the animal sales. But those two adoptions (I’m guessing they were earlier, who knows?) may have looked very different on paper. For all we know, they may not have been in the animal business at all at the time, they may have had some version of more standardized jobs.

As is, it’s impossible to know unless more details come out- which means someone- i.e. WE need to be demanding the real questions be asked. Because no one else is going to. Adopters want stories like this to go away. The industry sure as hell doesn’t want Enna as their new poster child, and government and the courts are overrun with adopters, adoption lawyers, and others who have a vested stake in (protecting) the system as it currently exists.

Other than those involved in child welfare work, who’s left to hold those responsibles’ feet to the fire for Enna’s sake? Who keeps memory alive? Who demands changes in the business as usual atmosphere? Just us Bastards- provided even we get off out collective asses. Otherwise down the memory hole kids like Enna go.

If the timing works out over the next few days, I plan to be blogging more on this. Right now we’re still in the ‘too many questions’ phase and as I said, people are focusing on the animals angle because it’s somehow easier to comprehend. The real questions may or may not even be asked. Then you’ve got the tangle of agencies and the alphabet soup of departments investigating the mess on the back end, which leads to its own potential confusion. One branch of law enforcement may think it’s up to another’s to ask certain questions, and the other may assume the first is doing it, meanwhile the questions slide down the crack where no one does it. To even comprehend that those involved in the two ‘normal’ adoptions may be people who should at least be spoken to may not even occur to those investigating. There are just so many questions.

Take for example the matter of lack of ensuring the kids were alright AFTER the (at least two ‘regular’) adoptions. Were the kids just placed, but then not checked in on again? What, if any, kind of follow up was done after the placements?

Over and over again, once the kids are in the adopters’ possession, too many people feel the job is done, the kid is ‘home’ and no one need ever revisit that to see if the kid’s even still processing oxygen a year or two later. And that’s just the ‘real’ adoptions.

As for the paperfree, they’re just off the books. Anything’s possible.

And that is the climate Guatemala has become, a place where womyn have been nonconsentually drugged, where children have been kidnapped, and where the exchange of money for children is just business as usual, all because demand (i.e. desperate wanna be adopters) is so incredibly high. Anyone able to provide a kid in a way that can get them out of country, whether that be buying a (n original) family’s ‘consent’ or just trafficking them across borders completely off the books, knows there’s big money to be made.

Once you have a climate like that, we should not be the least bit surprised that those who shall we say, have absolutely no frickin’ buisness being adopters, no way, no how, are able to get a hold of kids.

For the right price children can be gotten.

More disturbing still? The sheer number of paps DEMANDING the Guatemalan adoption machine be ramped back up to full capacity. Despite the fact that the odds are there’s a very real possibility that any kid they would get via that process may well have gone through well, you can only begin to imagine what. But they STILL insist the market be crowbarred back open. Because stolen kid or not, they still want one.

Besides, they bleat ‘MY agency is clean’, ‘MY adoption is clean’, MY kid wasn’t one of THOSE kids!’

Keep telling yourself that honey, ’cause the rest of us aren’t going to be repeating, or standing silently by through such steaming piles of fantasy any longer.

Guatemalan adoptions are usually “private” adoptions. There are “Guatemalan attorneys” involved in Guatemala. It’s a bit different from an orphanage adoption from Russia or China. Usually Chinese & Russian kids are “abandoned” and/or parental rights have been “terminated”. The children are usually then “wards of the state” [anybody out there who knows better - please correct me - this is my understanding of it]

The Barretos must have had some puppy mill scheme going down – in order to finance those Guatemalan adoptions, they must have been moving major volume of cainines.

I agree with “Bastardette” – too many of these stories have been cropping up within the last six months.

We need serious intervention right now–just not a shutting down of IA, but lots of work stateside. I have never seen so many bad stories in so short a time as the last few months. We’re going to see a ramp-up of domestic propaganda–baybee harvesting and fostercare.

And thanks for all you do!