New search for ‘stolen babies’
Chilean courts intensify probe into kidnappings and illegal adoptions
SANTIAGO: Prosecutors are revisiting one of Chile’s darkest histories, when under Pinochet’s dictatorship possibly thousands of babies were stolen from their mothers and given away just after being born.
On July 9, 1977, Margarita Escobar gave birth to a baby girl at Paula Jaraquemade hospital.
She saw her for a few moments before staff took her away.
Decades later, Escobar hasn’t given up on meeting the woman her daughter may have become, buoyed by prosecutors’ push for the truth about Chile’s stolen babies and under-the-table adoptions.
She said hospital staff kept her sedated back then.
“Every time I woke up I asked about her, until a midwife told me, ‘Your baby was stillborn’.”
She wasn’t allowed to see the body. “Nobody gave me a document. I don’t even know how I got home. I was totally doped.”
Fast forward to February 1985, and Maria Orellana gave birth in the same hospital to a boy she named Cristian.
“I heard he was a boy, then they gave me an injection and that was the last I knew about it,” she said.
Like other mothers, she was told her baby had died and, as it would be “too cruel” to see the body, the hospital took care of the burial.
“Keep the memory you had of your boy,” she recalls being told.
Like Escobar, Oreland was given no documentation.
“It is as if I had never even been in that hospital,” she recalls, determined like thousands of others to find a child she never held.
Chile’s Special Judge for Human Rights Mario Carroza has probed the kidnappings since January.
Most occurred during Augusto Pinochet’s reign (1973-1990) but others were reported as late as 2000.
Carroza ruled out the state using child stealing as a means of repres- sion, a tool commonly used by the military dictatorship in Argentina.
“It appears more like an illicit organisation to make money from illegal adoptions,” said Pablo Rivera, a lawyer of the National Institute for Human Rights, who filed complaints on behalf of the mothers.
At the heart of the scheme was a network of social workers, nuns, doctors and officials who identified mothers in vulnerable situations.
“In general, the cases are related to low income mothers who gave birth,” Rivera said.
A law in force until 1988 facilitated the scheme by allowing the destruction of biological family documents, Karen Alfaro, a historian at Austral University, said.
For Alfaro, the practise was “also part of Pinochet’s ideology – social violence inflicted on the poorest.”
According to official figures, 26,611 adoptions were registered in Chile between 1973 and 1987, but no register exists for how many children went to families abroad.
Without supporting documents, many mothers have maintained a painful silence for decades.
But as the first cases were made public and search groups were formed on the Internet, they real- ised thousands of women shared their experience.
One of these groups, the “Sons and Mothers of Silence,” has 3,000 members on Facebook, children seeking their biological parents, and mothers grasping for any clue that could lead them to the baby who was snatched from them.
“What we need is for the hospital files, to be opened so people outside Chile can realise they may have been adopted illegally,” says Marisol Rodriguez, the group’s spokesman.
In three years, the group has achieved almost 90 mother-andchild reunions. — AFP