Thread by @gumby4christ

In 1992, Honduras suspended its international adoption program when it was uncovered that babies were kidnapped, taken to "fattening centers" and then placed for adoption once they made weight. One such center was run in the home of a top aide to US-backed Pres. Rafael Callejas.

This same aide—Ruben Zepeda Gutierrez, who served as Callejas's Attorney General—was earlier named by a Honduran judge as a member of Honduras' drug trafficking network. The judge, who warned the country was "becoming a narco-state," was promptly fired. digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewconten…

The baby trafficking ring generated $3mil in less than a year and involved some 200 lawyers. Young women were paid $55/mo during their pregnancies and $370 upon delivery, while the lawyers earned as much as $7,000 per adoption. digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewconten…

As noted in the AFP article above, the infants were given false identification documents. Their adoptions were were arranged through 12 adoption agencies operating in the US, none of which were registered in Honduras.

Who adopted these children? One person we know of is Reagan's man in Honduras, John Negroponte, who, with his noble-born duchess wife, adopted five kids from the country. One of these, Sophia, is currently facing murder charges for stabbing a man to death. foxnews.com/us/john-negrop…

But the Negropontes' role in Honduras's corrupt adoption network actually goes deeper, as documented in Margaret E. Ward's memoir, "Missing Mila, Finding Family: An International Adoption in the Shadow of the Salvadoran Civil War."

In 1983, Mead & her husband were tipped off to a boy in a Honduran orphanage who needed adopting fast. The couple was sped through the adoption process with the help of Diana Negroponte, who also met them at the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa. They adopted the boy & named him Nelson.

Only many years later would the family come to learn that Nelson's mother was a Salvadoran guerilla who was killed in a government raid on a FMLN safe house in Tegucigalpa. Nelson (née Roberto) is one of the estimated 800 children disappeared during El Salvador's civil war.

An organization called Pro-Búsqueda notes that there are 923 registered cases of disappeared children during the Salvadoran civil war, and 2,354 adoption visas were issued by the State Dept during this time. Yet, amazingly, the org has found only 61 of these children in the US.

Vast discrepancies such as these have no doubt fed into an even grimmer possibility, one that may sound ludicrous but which received broad international coverage: that these disappeared children were sent to the US & Europe to serve as living organ banks. core.ac.uk/download/pdf/2…

This story caused quite a stir. It was lent credence by an August 1988 Reuters, which ran a version of the story based on the statements of a Parguayan judge. Apparently due to some miscommunication with a stringer, it was reported that the US embassy "refused" to comment."

Later that month, AP reported that US officials were "frustrated" by the allegations of organ harvesting and blamed the persistence of the story on "Soviet disinformation." AP throws a bit of shade at Reuters ("a respected news agency") for circulating the story.

Certainly, Soviet media did promote the story. A 1987 article in Izvestiya opens, "In Guatemala…the international mafia has bought up children with disabilities and sent them to the [US] for 'treatment.' There, the butcher medics cut out their hearts, kidneys, and eyes…."

In Latin America, the story seems to have been widely believed to be true. As late as 1994, a crowd in Guatemala beat up 2 Americans and set the home of a justice of the peace on fire because of suspected involvement in the trafficking of baby parts.

"But, Gumby," I can hear you asking, "is there any truth to the 'baby parts' stories??" To which I respond with a heartfelt, "idk."

It's certainly interesting that the same sorts of stories pop up (& persist) in so many different countries—Honduras, Guatemala, Paraguay, Brazil.

At the very least, as documented above, some very shady things were going on with these Central American adoptions. Let's add some more...

One of the US adoption agencies ferrying kids out of Honduras was run by a Texas man named Gary Bennett. Per the AP, Bennett "gave up his Porsche and two Corvettes" to build an airplane runway in Honduras...with Oliver North.

Bennett would fly from Ft. Worth to Honduras, where he'd visit Contra camps. There, he'd supposedly bury dead babies and take live ones (at the request of their mothers ofc). If there was ever an organ harvesting op going on, this is almost certainly where it was happening.

According to Congressional testimony by USIA official Cresencio Arcos, at least one of Bennett's flights, into Miskito territory, was paid for by the US government. Iran-Contra operative Elliot Abrams seems to have been particularly interested in the "Gary Bennett project."