Guatemalan baby snatchers

In Contemporary World Issues II, the third-semester core course in my undergraduate major in International Relations, we studied biases in the reporting of overseas events in American news media. One of our texts argued that, instead of helping explain important political or even sociological movements in the rest of the world, the media focuses on sensationalized stories that tend to portray non-Americans as irrational and even frightening.

One of our case studies was the tragic story of an American woman who was beaten nearly to death by a mob in Guatemala, because they believed she was stealing babies for their organs.

The Washington Post article we read had little explanation for what might be behind this attack:

Rumors of baby stealing have circulated in the region for years, but they exploded in Guatemala this spring. It is impossible to know what -- or who -- is behind them, but human rights observers and Western diplomats suspect that right-wing elements in the military are behind the baby-parts stories -- that these forces want to destabilize the country and further weaken President Ramirode Leon Carpio, whose government has been negotiating a peace agreement to end the country's 33-year guerrilla war.

A Reuter correspondent called the mob's mentality "Magic realism on acid."

But now, 15 years after Weinstock was attacked, the Guatemalan government has just disclosed that hundreds of Guatemalan babies WERE stolen, by the military, to be sold to adoptive parents in the US (and several other countries). In some cases, the babies' parents were even killed.

I guess that Guatemalan mob had good reason to be scared of babysnatchers after all.