Thousands of Chilean children were stolen from their mothers
during the military rule of Gen Augusto Pinochet and sent abroad for adoption.
A government investigation is looking into how the babies were taken.
Sara Jineo is still extremely upset about what happened when
she took her four-day-old baby boy, Camilo, to the hospital in Temuco, southern
Chile, in 1988.
"They tricked me," she says. "They made me go
to the hospital and said they were going to do a blood test on my baby."
But the woman who took Camilo out of her arms never brought
him back. "I looked all over the hospital and when I went outside and
asked a policeman for help, he looked at me, laughed, and said I was mad,"
she says.
Sara, who still lives outside Temuco, has been looking for
her son for the last 30 years. She is convinced he was taken abroad. She says a
local taxi driver told her about a woman taking a crying baby to the local
airport on the same day Camilo disappeared. The child was apparently wrapped in
the same distinctive baby blanket she had used.
Her situation is not unique. Sara is part of a generation of
mothers and children trying to find each other after being involuntarily
separated during Gen Augusto Pinochet's military rule from 1973 to 1990.
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Many of the mothers, including Sara, were Mapuche, the
largest indigenous community in Chile.
Making up around 7.5% of the 17 million population, they
often live in poverty in rural areas in the south and say they are treated like
second-class citizens, deprived of their land and culture.
Though illegal adoptions did not start during the Pinochet
years - and many were also going on in neighbouring Argentina - they were
ramped up under his rule, and with a specific aim.
The Pinochet government wanted to eliminate extreme poverty,
particularly among children. The strategy was to simply take children out of
the country, according to Jeanette Velásquez, who works for volunteer group
Hijos y Madres del Silencio (Children and Mothers of Silence).
She says social workers, nuns, doctors, lawyers and
international adoption agencies were all involved in a slick operation, which
sent babies to developed countries, including Holland, the United States,
Sweden and Germany.
"Some women tell me horrific stories about how they
were breast-feeding their baby when it was pulled from their arms. There was a
lot of violence," she says.
In other cases, the pressure was more psychological. Social
workers would tell mothers they were too poor to keep the child, or that they
had too many other children already to cope with another.
Vulnerable mothers, mainly single mothers, were specifically
targeted.
Some women were forced to sign paperwork they did not
understand. Some were even told their children had died.
What happened?
- Some 20,000 children were adopted by foreign couples
during the Pinochet era
- Chile's Court of Appeals says at least 8,000 of those are
suspicious cases
- Some activists believe that number is much higher
- Almost 200 mothers have been reunited with their children
Alejandro Quezada's mother was one of those women. She was
just 14 and a single mother, from a rural area outside of Valdivia, in the
country's south.
Shortly after giving birth at home, she took her baby son
for a check-up at the local hospital. There, he was whisked away from her, with
staff insisting he was ill. She was later told he had died and his body had
already been disposed of.
"When she started screaming, they gave her an injection
and she didn't wake up for three days," says Alejandro.
Women like Alejandro's birth mother were never given death
certificates or allowed to see the body of their child. They were told it would
upset them and the climate of fear during the Pinochet era stopped them from
asking further questions.
Alejandro only started piecing the story together much later
in life. In 1979, when he was just a few weeks old, he was sent to The Netherlands.
He says he was adopted by a Dutch couple who considered
themselves part of the Flower Power generation and wanted to help poorer
countries. They were told his mother had voluntarily given him up for adoption.
"During my teenage years, I had so many questions about
my identity," says Alejandro. "Even though I love and appreciate my
adoptive parents, I felt depressed and alone and went off the rails."
In 1997, when he was 17 years old, he travelled to Chile
with his adoptive family to meet the Dutch nun who had arranged his adoption.
She took Alejandro to meet his birth mother.
He immediately noted their physical resemblance, but it was
not an easy encounter. "I had so many questions for her and it was very
frustrating, because we couldn't understand each other and the nun wouldn't let
us see each other for very long," he says.
Alejandro, who had grown up speaking Dutch, decided he
needed to learn Spanish so he and his birth mother could talk to each other
without a translator.
It was not until he was 30 and living in Chile that he
finally learned the truth: his mother had never wanted to give him up but had
been told he was dead.
Courtesy of Alejandro Quezada
It took years for Alejandro to learn that his mother had not
wanted to give him up for adoption
The nun who arranged the adoption and used to shuttle back
and forth between the two countries is now living in The Netherlands.
She has spoken publicly about the adoptions she was involved
in and has insisted that she did the right thing. She said she believed that
she created better lives for Alejandro and the various other children given in
adoption.
Alejandro's experiences led him to found a charity, Chilean
Adoptees Worldwide, which helps other adoptees find their mothers.
The search is often arduous. The adoption documents rarely
list the full names of both parents. Sometimes names and identity numbers were
deliberately changed.
Alejandro has found the registry office in the capital,
Santiago, to be a good source of information, as original handwritten birth
certificates sometimes hold clues.
A government investigation started in 2018 as mothers
demanded answers about why their children were taken from them against their
will.
A growing number of people who were taken as children from
their biological mothers also started discovering the truth behind their
adoptions.
Because of the growing number of complaints a special police
unit was formed last March, which is working with mothers in regions where many
of the children were thought to have been taken.
A DNA test has become the final piece in the puzzle. The
government and charities helping the mothers want them to do the test so their
DNA forms part of a central data bank managed by the government that will help
adoptees find matches.
But the women are expected to pick up the costs themselves
and each kit costs around $100 (£83) - which is around half a month's salary
for the majority of them.
Jaime Balmaceda, a judge at the Court of Appeals, is
involved in the government investigation. He is in charge of working out which
of the adoptions were legitimate and which were not.
His theory is that money was changing hands and that is what
he is trying to prove.
Not everyone is convinced the investigators are digging deep
enough. Critics think that the Chilean state is trying to shield the judges,
social workers, nuns and others involved in getting the children out of the
country from prosecution.
Those who want to see justice done say the advanced age and
poor health of some of those suspected of involvement in the forced adoption
scheme should not be a barrier to prosecution.
Mr Balmaceda says delays in the investigation are not
deliberate but that the process is long and often hampered by missing
paperwork. "We are not trying to protect anyone, or waiting for people to
die so they can't be brought to justice," he insists.
For Alejandro, jail-time for those behind his forced
adoption has never been the goal.
The nun who arranged for him to be sent to The Netherlands
recently visited Chile and faced questioning as part of the government
investigation. But Alejandro says he does not want her to go to prison as she
is in her 80s now.
"We've been treated inhumanely, but that doesn't mean
that we should treat other people like that." Making sure something like
this never happens again is more important to him.
"If you want to adopt because you want to help, that is
one of the most noble things in the world," he says. "But you need to
make sure you have all the information, because children will have questions
about their biological roots and you need to make sure that you know the answers."
