The protesters were mostly high school and university students. They carried black balloons, dozens of them – one for each teenaged orphaned girl who died while in police custody in a March 2017 schoolroom fire. Walking in solidarity with the hundreds of other protesters down Guatemala City’s 6A Calle was a small group of Serbian Orthodox Christian nuns. The abbess of the monastery, Madre Inés, told me that she and the nuns of Holy Trinity Orthodox Monastery in Villa Nueva, Guatemala came to the crowded Constitution Square in front of Palacio Nacional de la Cultura to demand those in the Guatemalan government responsible for the girls’ death actually be held responsible.
Advocating for the well-being of Guatemala’s orphans comes naturally to the nuns. For many years they operated the Hogar Rafael Ayau. Named in honor of Madre Inés’s great, great grandfather Don Rafael Ayau, who in the 1850’s founded the first orphanage in Guatemala City ("The Home of Mercy"), the Hogar Rafael Ayau is less than a 30-minute drive away from the peace and quiet of the nuns’ rural monastery. But the Hogar is located in the noise of Guatemala City’s crime-infested Zone 1. Changes in Guatemalan law led to the end of the hogar as a sanctuary for the orphaned girls and boys who found a safe and loving home behind its walls.
But changes in the law, didn’t change the nuns’ commitment to children. Even while their ownership of the Hogar Rafael Ayau was at risk, the nuns were offering job training programs, online education, schooling for children and help for local merchants. And so, when 19 girls (the final number would later climb to more than 40), died in an inferno at the Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción in San José Pinula, it was only natural that the nuns would make their voices heard.
Sadly, no one heard the girls when they complained of abuse and intolerable conditions in the state-run orphanage where they lived. Frustrated with the lack of any improvement, the girls ran away from the facility only to be rounded up by police and confined under lock and key. It was while confined that the girls died in the fire. Although circumstances were chaotic, by most accounts the girls themselves started the fire.
Together with the other protesters, the nuns came to Constitution Square to demand government officials acknowledge their part in the death of the girls. They wanted to see the government take steps to correct the deeper, more pervasive social problems that plague Guatemala. Indeed, the country suffers from a societal wide lack of personal responsibility.
In a public letter released after the fire, Madre Inés pointed to “fiscal centralization” as the root of the problem. Through its use of tax money, she wrote, the Guatemalan government is creating “monstrous cities” that attract “people from the countryside” who come in search of “better jobs” and more economic opportunities.
As in other parts of the world, the unintended consequence of these policies is that newcomers to the city, “sever ties with the families” and “lose their sense of belonging,” all while never finding the economic success that inspired their move in the first place.
From her point of view, families are destroyed and “thousands of children ‘displaced.’”
It was these displaced children who died in the fire in a state-run home for minors on the outskirts of Guatemala City.
And so those black balloons ask, Who is to blame? Who is responsible? I went to Guatemala to find out. The answer I came to understand is that many people were responsible even if they were not equally so.
Shared responsibility, limited blame
There is first of all the girls themselves. They ran away from their institutional home. But acknowledging this shouldn’t blind us to the culpability of the adults who put the girls in this situation.
And so those black balloons ask, Who is to blame? Who is responsible? I went to Guatemala to find out.
Then there are the parents, though not all of them. Some were simply unable to financially care for their daughters. Others, Francisco Goldman reports in his March 2017 New Yorker article, “felt that their daughters were in need of discipline” they couldn’t provide. Other parents sent their daughters to the Hogar “to protect them from the notorious mara street gangs that terrorize poor urban neighborhoods.”
Still other girls were there by court order “because they’d been abused by family members, or because they were living on the streets.”
The immaturity of the girls and the good intentions of parents, social workers and the courts who hoped to spare children from the effects of poverty and crime all played a role in the events leading up to the fatal fire.
But as Madre Inés suggests, outside NGOs who lobbied to change government policy also had a central role in the deaths.
UNICEF and the naked public square
In our conversations, Madre placed the blame for the girls’ death in large part on the shoulders of UNICEF representatives who lobbied Guatemala to abolish “all volunteer” [that is, private religious and secular] residential care homes even though these homes “cost the government nothing.” The rationale is to protect children from illegal adoptions by “corrupt, privately run international adoption agencies”
While the abuses are real, researchers such as Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet have argued that shutting down international adoption programs in Guatemala deprives thousands of children per year of the chance to grow up in nurturing homes, rather than life-destroying orphanages. “That’s an evil that should count for more,” she writes.
In 2007, National Center for Adoptions (Centro Nacional de Adopciones or CNA) took over all adoptions in Guatemala. This is how the girls would eventually come to live, and die, at Hogar Seguro.
Madre Inés says even though she and others sounded the alarm that government orphanages we “mis-managed and abusive” those in charged “turned a deaf ear to the warnings.” It was this combination of “good intentions and irresponsibility of UNICEF” and the Guatemalan government that “produced a macabre outcome, a fire that devoured” the lives of teenage girls who had every right to expect that they would be safe while in the government’s care.
One hopeful sign is that in the aftermath of the fire the Guatemalan government is turning to private, religious affiliated groups to help care for orphans. But the government’s willingness to at least consider partnering with Evangelical Christians doesn’t extend to Roman Catholic ministries even though they represent the country’s largest religious tradition. Much less did the government look for assistance from the Orthodox Christian Madre Inés and her nuns.
Orthodox Christians make up only a tiny portion of Guatemala’s religious believers. But though she represents a small community with few resources, on the day of the fire, Madre Inés contacted President Jimmy Morales, offering to care for the children “displaced by the fire.” At the same time, she said that “at the insistence of Guatemalan citizens, a petition to the government was developed to demand that the government change back to the original civil law to allow adoptions and to restore the oversight of abandoned children to the Judges of the Juvenile Court in order to stop the abuses” that led to the fire.
Instead, the Attorney General of Guatemala filed a lawsuit against the nuns in what would ultimately turn out to be an unsuccessful attempt to confiscate the Hogar Rafael Ayau. Rather than taking steps to correct the factors that contributed to a national tragedy, the government acted to punish its critics.
The government's action is based on the fact that legally the nuns do not own the orphanage. Instead, the nuns have what is called in legal jargon a “usufruct” which gives them the right to use the property “to do works of mercy” for a term of 50 years. Unlike outright ownership, the usufruct describes a situation in which a person or group of persons is allowed to use the real property (often land) of another but without any legal claim of ownership to the property.
Though the nuns eventually won their court case, all is not well for them. The usufruct wasn’t given to the monastery but personally to Madre Inés. This was 20 years ago and so while the usufruct is good for another 30 years, it is not outside the realm of possibility that with Madre’s death, the nuns may once again face the loss of their property.
With this loss would also come the loss of the new works of mercy the nuns do. But even while facing legal challenges to their ministry, the nuns didn’t stop caring for the youth of Guatemala.
Mercy outlawed but not undone
As the lawsuit worked its way through the courts, and threatened the long-term viability of their ministry, the nuns continued to care for underprivileged or abandoned children at the Hogar Rafael Ayau. To understand the importance of their work—and the odds they face daily—it helps to keep in mind where in Guatemala City the hogar (Spanish for “home”) is located.
Zone 1 an extremely dangerous part of the old city. I slept there my first night in Guatemala.
My room was Spartan. Seeing the photo I posted on Facebook, one of the parishioners at the church I pastor in Madison, Wisconsin, (who was born in the former USSR) said it looked like “a Soviet hotel.”
I’m a lightly sleeper so it wasn’t any surprise that I woke up about 3 a.m.
What was a surprise was the “pop, pop, pop” of gunfire just outside my room. Suddenly my “Soviet hotel” with its cinderblock walls and steel roll down shades over the windows seemed a much nicer—and safer—place to spend the night.
It is in this crime infested neighborhood that the nuns operate First Special Education Public School, for children with developmental and intellectual challenges.
Like my room, the school is basic by American standards. But the children are joyful, sweet and affectionate. They were also very forgiving of my bad Spanish (though somewhat incredulous that an adult—and a priest at that—had such trouble expressing himself).
Along with the special school, the nuns also train in the trades at the Municipality Workshop School. Over 100 students (more and more of whom each year are young women) who find themselves outside the formal education system are learning the skills necessary to find employment in the construction trades as carpenters, electricians and landscapers.
