Fully prepared to be infuriated by yet another attack on Guatemalan adoptions, I was surprised to find that Dateline NBC did a fairly decent piece on the problems that existed in the now defunct adoption system in Guatemala.

Yes, they highlighted the bad and ugly. The facilitator by the name Thanasis is what I consider the scum of the earth; a person whose greed for money overrides any moral and ethical behavior on his part. The children, such as Angie and her two sisters who were victims of his plots, are physically and/or emotionally scarred for life, and their parents left to grieve for children they had no intention of giving up for adoption. The prospective adopting parents who sent him money for adoptions that were never completed have suffered financially and emotionally.

In Guatemala he will not be brought to justice. He is a sociopath, and will no doubt be onto another scheme now that he cannot facilitate adoptions. The question that probably remains on the minds of people who watched this show is just how many people like him were involved in adoptions in Guatemala. Hopefully he was one of few.

The adoption agencies that used Thanasis even after he was banned by the US Embassy should have their licenses revoked immediately. They share the guilt of kidnapping children, falsifying paperwork, and stealing money from adopting parents. Too few adoption agencies in this country have been held accountable for shoddy policies and less than honest procedures.

Although Dateline chose not to show ethical and legal adoptions, they did interview Troy from Guatadopt last, leaving a positive image of a family that has adopted three girls from Guatemala ethically. Troy delivered a powerful message when he reminded the viewers that 30,000 children die in Guatemala every year, and we should be adopting more children than we are now, not less. I’m in total agreement.

Bad and ugly sell and NBC knows this, but to their credit they did not make sweeping generalizations about all adoptions from Guatemala. They did not focus on the rumors about “baby farms” and only suggested that there are suspicions that some women have babies just for the money. In addition, they did not cast a negative light on adoptive parents. For this I am grateful.

However, I wish they had used their cameras to expose the horrific poverty of the country; we had only brief glimpses of this in the program. Surely they could have shown some of the thousands of street children and the insides of the crowded orphanages holding over 20,000 children.

Focusing on the children who will never have families is crucial to understanding the need for adoption from third world countries like Guatemala. For now the “bad guys” have been stopped, but the media shows little interest in what happens to the children who are never going to have families. The children are always the ones to suffer and that is the horrible tragedy.