VIDEO: Guatemala Calls a Halts to Mass Adoption

Guatemalan authorities have halted the mass adoption process of some 2,800 children after discovering that some of them had been kidnapped.

More than a year after her 8 month old baby, Esther, was kidnapped, Ana Escobar spotted her child with a caretaker, in Guatemala's Attorney General's office.

(SOUNDBITE) (Spanish) Mother of the recovered girl, Esther Sulamita, Ana Escobar, said: "Then I started telling them she was my child and the National Council of Adoptions did not agree to return the child to me. The caretaker went off with my child and someone from the Attorney General's Office told me it was too late, I had missed her again and there was nothing they could do to help me."

Esther was about to be taken to the U.S.- one of hundreds of kidnapped children put up for adoption in Guatemala.

Escobar says her baby was kidnapped in March 2007, when three people walked into her shop and beat her up and locked her in a closet.

When she freed herself, her baby was missing.

The two were reunited in 2008, after DNA tests proved Esther was Escobar's kidnapped child.

Escobar is one of the more fortunate.

In May, authorities looked into about 2,800 individual cases to check whether the babies had been legitimately put up for adoption by their mothers.

Guatemala has the highest per-capita adoption rate in the world, a lucrative business for private lawyers who run the trade and are sometimes accused of forging papers or paying mothers to sell their children.

Founder and director of `Fundacion Sobrevivientes,` (Survivors Foundation) - A non-governmental social service institution which helps women who have suffered from violence, Norma Cruz, says: "The levels of corruption are so high that there are doctors and civil workers who extend birth certificates, there are mothers who pose as false mothers of these poor creatures and there is even lack of security with DNA tests."

Social workers say 800 babies and children are still unaccounted for.

Back in Guatemala City, Escobar and her baby are safe, but its been a challenging reunion, because of Esther's poor health.

Escobar is urging prospective adoptive couples in the U.S to make sure the child is not a kidnapping victim and has been put up for adoption legally.