BRAND X

You can get away with buying babies around the world as a US citizen.

Most of the Westerners involved with foreign adoption agencies — like business people importing foreign sneakers — can plausibly deny knowledge of unethical or unseemly practices overseas. They don’t have to know.

Willful ignorance allowed Lauryn Galindo, a former hula dancer from the United States, to collect more than $9 million in adoption fees over several years for Cambodian infants and toddlers.

Between 1997 and 2001, Americans adopted 1,230 children from Cambodia; Galindo said she was involved in 800 of the adoptions. (Galindo reportedly delivered Angelina Jolie’s Cambodian child to her movie set in Africa.)

But in a two-year probe beginning in 2002, U.S. investigators alleged that Galindo paid Cambodian child finders to purchase, defraud, coerce, or steal children from their families, and conspired to create false identity documents for the children. Galindo later served federal prison time on charges of visa fraud and money laundering, but not trafficking.

“You can get away with buying babies around the world as a United States citizen,” says Richard Cross, a senior special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who investigated Galindo. “It’s not a crime.”

- E.J. Graff, The Lie We Love. Published in Foreign Policy, c. November 1, 2008.

Bolded mine.

(Source: brandx)