Arabella Hernández lifts her face from a bag of glue and says she's heard that there might someday be a law to guarantee her rights as a child. Leaning up against a wall at the end of a street full of brothels in a section of Guatemala City aptly known as "The Hole," the 15-year old Hernández doubts a new law would change much in her life. "No one cares about what happens to us," she says, "so we've got to look out for ourselves." 
     Who should "look out" for children is a hot theme in Guatemala these days. With an oft-postponed legal code for children set to take effect on March 27, Guatemalans are arguing about whether the legislation is legal and whether  
it will be good for families and children. 
     In 1990, Guatemala was the sixth country in the world to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In September 1996, the Congress passed legislation bringing the country's laws and bureaucracies into line with the Convention, but granting a year's reprieve before the new code took effect. 
     The code declares that children and youth are full subjects with social, cultural and political rights as well as obligations. It guarantees minors the right to report abuses against them to the authorities, and takes steps to protect them from sexual and economic exploitation. 
     President Alvaro Arzú signed the Código de la Niñez y la Juventud in a special ceremony attended by diplomats and hundreds of children. It was a heady 
moment. "This code announces the end of the homeland of savagery and the birth of the homeland of morality," Congress President Carlos Garcia told the  
audience. 
     Yet such enthusiasm started to wane in 1997 as the date neared for the law to take effect. In August, the president of the Supreme Court, Ricardo Umaña, asked Congress to delay implementation of the law, claiming the judicial system didn't have the resources to open a series of juvenile courts required by the code. Arzú and leaders of his Partido de Avanzada Nacional (PAN), who control the Congress, agreed in September to delay implementation of the code for six months. 
     "The politicians kissed as many babies as they could lay their hands on during their election campaign, but now that they are in power they turn their backs on the children. This is just another form of exploitation of the children for political means. It is a disgrace," declared Arturo Echeverria, the director of Casa Alianza in Guatemala. 
     Since enactment of the code was postponed, the debate over the merits of the legislation has grown more heated. 
     According to Fernando Linares, a conservative lawyer who says he'll be at the Corte Suprema on March 27 to request that the code be declared unconstitutional, the children's legislation is "a socialist project, because it wants to eliminate the difference between what's public and what's private." 
     Linares says similar codes in European countries "have disintegrated the family, have given lots of political power to bureaucrats and created state agencies with more control over children than their own parents." 
     According to César Vásquez, president of the powerful Alianza Evangélica, Guatemalan evangelicals oppose the code because "the function of the father as the head of the family is weakened when his corrective function is restricted." Vásquez says the code "has Marxist roots" and encourages homosexual  
behavior. He warns that evangelical churches are going to closely monitor the  
voting record of Congress members. 
     Nongovernmental organizations that work with children, along with UNICEF, have lined up publicly behind the law, and are pressuring Congress to let the law take effect as scheduled. 
     "For the first time in Guatemala's history, children will have certain judicial rights that have been denied to them in the past. They will have the right to a defense lawyer, the right to be heard in legal proceedings, and a right to be a subject rather than an object of legal proceedings," says Bruce Harris, executive director of Casa Alianza in Latin America.  
     "The legislation protects children against abusive parents and basically puts a sword through the heart of the myth that children are property of their parents and they can do with them what they like," Harris adds. 
     Harris claims opponents are few in number but vocal, and most haven't even read the code. 
     According to Frank LaRue, director of the Centro de Acción Legal para los Derechos Humanos, newfound suspicion of the code from many Congress members stems from their realization that municipal councils set up to enact the code will strengthen the autonomy of local communities at the expense of the central government. 
     In addition, LaRue says the code threatens the profits of those who benefit from adopting Guatemalan children to foreigners--a thriving industry that's linked to high civilian and military officials. 
     Indeed, the wife of the Supreme Court's Umaña, lawyer Susana Luarca, was  
accused last year by Harris and Procurador General de la Nación Acisclo  
Valladares of influence peddling in children's courts on behalf of her clients who were adopting Guatemalan children. 
     Children's codes are en vogue in the region. The legislatures of Costa Rica and Nicaragua each approved children's codes in December. 
     A children's code took effect in Honduras in 1996, but children's activists complain the government has yet to devote the resources necessary for it to function. "The infrastructure and the funds aren't there, and the government says it doesn't have them," says Adalid Irias of Casa Alianza in Honduras. "They're not even complying with 25 percent of the code." 
     The Honduran code called for the elimination of two corrupt government agencies, the Junta Nacional de Bienestar Social y el Patronato Nacional de la  
Infancia. They were to be replaced by the Instituto Hondureno de la Niñez y la  
Familia. President Carlos Flores has appointed directors for the later body, but  
they have not yet begun to work. 
     In El Salvador, following the government's ratification of the U.N. Convention, a team of officials suggested changes in existing laws and practices to bring them into harmony with the Convention. Although no children's code was approved, many of the elements of other children's codes can be found in the country's 1994 Family Law and the 1995 Child Offender Law. 
     According to Mirna Perla, a children's judge in Santa Tecla, legal authorities who deal with kids have been slowly changing their approach to children. "The focus in dealing with young infractors has changed from repression to correction," she says. "The problem is that the government hasn't assumed its responsibility to help institutions respond in a preventative manner, for example, by giving more resources to the Education Ministry. The problems don't go away with just laws, they require economic and social solutions as well."