By Meritxell Freixas |
Santiago de Chile (EFE).- Four US citizens arrived Saturday in Santiago de Chile to meet for the first time in person their biological families, from whom they were separated during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and sent abroad by a system of illegal adoptions.
Some 20,000 Chilean minors were irregularly adopted by foreign families between 1970 and 1990, according to figures from the Justice system. Of these, only 1,000 have reunited with their families.
“There are 19,000 people of whom we have no idea what happened,” says Juan Luis Insulza, vice president of the organization Connecting Roots, which since 2021 has been working to reunite US citizens with their roots in the southern part of the continent.
Although there are records of these practices since the 1960s, it was during the dictatorship when most cases were recorded, a practice enabled by the participation of doctors, midwives, judges, notaries, immigration authorities, and religious leaders.
Dictatorship in Chile separated mothers and children
Teresa del Carmen Araya waits for the arrival of the flight from Houston, from where her daughter Jada Thiemann is traveling.
Teresa re the day she gave birth and how she was told to relinquish the baby when she was born.
“I didn’t want to, but they caught me anyway. I had inscribed her through the Civil Registry, I recognized her as my daughter so she wouldn’t be able to leave the country, and I wanted to exit the hospital through another door, but I couldn’t,” she recalls.
She arrived home alone, without her baby girl, and “with her milk still flowing.”
She isn’t alone, at the airport Edita Bizama is also waiting for her daughter Adamary García, whom she had to give up for adoption in 1984 because “she had no way to raise her”. And Claudia Diaz carries a banner that reads ‘Welcome sister Natalie,’ as she waits anxiously for her sister behind the fence at the arrivals gate.
“Maybe my destiny wasn’t to be with her, or it was for the mother she had. I don’t know how to explain it,” Teresa its with nerves and bewilderment before hugging her daughter for the first time. They were separated for more than 30 years and spoke only once by video call.
Teresa believes that she was targeted for “being a single mother and having a precarious economic situation.”
A vulnerable profile
Most of the mothers who are victims of illegal adoptions respond to the same profile: young or underage, alone and in vulnerable conditions.
According to the 2023 Annual Report of the National Institute of Human Rights (INDH), the departure of minors abroad was mainly by two methods. Guardianship of the child was awarded to a third party so that it could travel and be adopted under the laws of the country of destination, or by ing a false death certificate of the baby in the Civil Registry, to be later ed by the adoptive parents as their own in another country.
According to the INDH report, The Chilean State does not recognize as victims those adopted illegally between the 1960s and 1990s. Moreover, “it is far from contributing to establishing the truth or achieving reunions.”
Insunza insists that knowing the truth “allows healing, closing cycles because there are families who have spent years with the uncertainty and pain of having lost a baby that died at birth, that was stolen, or that they were forced to give it up for adoption.”
The Chilean government launched a pilot plan in 2022 to locate victims of illegal adoptions and to clarify the irregularities committed during the Pinochet dictatorship. The initiative works alongside the judicial investigation that opened in 2018 to investigate around 700 cases. EFE
mfm/ags
