7bet gaming or sevenbet How I Discovered I Was Stolen at Birth
For 42 years, my mother thought I was dead.
I, like thousands of Chilean children, was stolen at birth. I was born in a Santiago state hospital on Oct. 31, 1980. My mamá remembers staff members telling her that I was jaundiced and needed to be put in an incubator. Before she could name me or even hold me, I was taken from her. They later said to her, “Your son is dead. You can go.”
What she didn’t know was that I had been taken to a state orphanage just blocks away from the hospital. The plan was simple: Traffickers took babies out of hospitals, then created fraudulent documents to put the children through illegal adoptions. Babies were given to adoption agencies and private adopters, both of whom rarely investigated the babies’ status as orphans. When I was 2, I was adopted from the orphanage by a couple in Virginia, who were unaware that I had been stolen. My American mom and dad offered me an education, a home and a loving family. But I was stripped of my language, culture and Indigenous roots. I was assimilated, given the new identity of an American boy named Jimmy.
Some people will read this last sentence and think: “You should be thankful. You probably had a better life.” Adoptees are often expected to be grateful. But this isn’t about giving an adopted child a better life, this is about stealing kids.
Under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean state promoted international adoptions as a way to reduce poverty rates. Mr. Pinochet was not only a dictator, he was profoundly classist, and his administration sought to better Chile’s economic standing at the expense of the country’s lower economic class. As part of this goal, a national network of judges, lawyers, medical care providers and clergy members frequented churches, hospitals and women’s shelters to take babies from poor and Indigenous women, often single and marginalized — like my mamá.
International adoptions saved the government money, compared to the cost of supporting impoverished families, or so their thinking went. Some adopters even paid adoption agencies tens of thousands of dollars for a child, with many children placed in Europe and North America. According to Chilean judiciary reports obtained by The Associated Press, there were about 20,000 cases of criminal adoptions overall. But civil society organizations estimate there could have been as many 50,000 children and newborns trafficked out of Chile between the 1950s and the 1990s.
In July, I filed a lawsuit against the Chilean state on behalf of all the mamás and their disappeared children, on the basis that the government violated the human rights of both. I am calling on the Chilean government to acknowledge the harm it caused, establish a truth commission to identify all of these victims and to recognize the citizenship of the adoptees and their descendants.
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