Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction

The 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 went 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 met a woman who strongly resembled her. Colop Chim, it turned out, was not Preat’s mother at all, but a jaladora—a baby broker.

Some 40,000 children, many Indigenous, were kidnapped or otherwise coercively parted from families scarred by Guatemala’s civil war or made desperate by unrelenting poverty. 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. During the war’s second decade, adoption was privatized, overseen by lawyers who made good money matching children to overseas families. Private adoptions skyrocketed to the point where tiny Guatemala overtook giants like China and Russia as a “sender” state. Drawing on government archives, oral histories, and a rare cache of adoption files opened briefly for war crimes investigations, Rachel Nolan explores the human toll of an international industry that thrives on exploitation.

Would-be parents in rich countries have fostered a commercial market for children from poor countries, with Guatemala becoming the most extreme case. Until I Find You reckons with the hard truths of a practice that builds loving families in the Global North out of economic exploitation, endemic violence, and dislocation in the Global South.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction

Shortlisted 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’s

The 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.