Jocelyn Koch Aguilera and her mother, Jacquelin Aguilera Betanzo, sit at a small table in the café of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, the center dedicated to those who disappeared during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. The table is completely covered with legal documents, three folders of more than 500 pages with reports, statements, and court orders. Jocelyn and Jacquelin, like the women who took to the streets to protest during the military regime, are also searching for a disappeared person. But in this case, it has nothing to do with the dictatorship, the death flights, or the clandestine torture centers: the two women are searching for Kevin, Jocelyn's younger brother, whom they last saw in 2004, when he was given up for adoption.
For years, the two women have been denouncing the numerous irregularities that occurred during the boy's adoption. It all began in 2003, when Jaquelin, at a time of profound economic and personal hardship, requested to temporarily leave her two youngest children, Jocelyn and Kevin, who were 6 and 2 years old at the time, in a foster home while she looked for work and more stable housing. Jaquelin had been a victim of domestic violence for years and had just moved to Concepción from Santiago after her last partner began using drugs. "I couldn't support my children, so I temporarily left their care in the hands of the State, but I never thought this decision would involve adopting my son," the 61-year-old woman says today.
Jaquelin hoped the two children could be placed in the same home, but they were separated: the eldest, Jocelyn, was sent to the SOS in Lorenzo Arenas, while Kevin, just two years old, was entrusted to the Arrullo home, both in Concepción. “In Kevin's case, it was always different,” Jaquelin recalls. “Every time I went to see him, he cried desperately, saying he wanted to live with me again and that he didn't want to be in the home. The psychologist and social worker who followed our case constantly told me I wasn't capable of raising my son.” Things that didn't happen in the home where Jocelyn had been sent.
The Arrullo home was at the center of a major scandal in 2011—it was also investigated by an investigative commission of the Chamber of Deputies in 2013—after a report by a Chilean radio station revealed a series of child abuse cases occurring within the residence. As soon as Kevin entered the home, Jaquelin was included in an eight-month program in which a team consisting of a social worker and a psychologist would monitor her to try to help her and evaluate her abilities as a mother. The documents collected by Jaquelin and Jocelyn include records of visits to the home, which show that the woman visited her son regularly, at least once a week. Then, suddenly, Jaquelin says, one day in 2004, she went to the home and one of the workers informed her that the boy had been declared suitable for adoption and had been taken along with two other children in a white car. However, the mother maintains that she had not received any formal notification about the decision made by the Chilean courts.
From that moment on, she heard nothing more about her son; wherever she went, she was told they knew nothing, and the woman fell into a severe depression, from which she struggled to emerge. Although Kevin was given up for adoption because the Chilean government deemed her unfit to raise children, in 2010 her daughter Jocelyn left the home where she lived and was once again entrusted to her mother. "Why did the Chilean government take a son away from her, deeming her unfit to be a mother, when she was then deemed fit to raise me, just six years after Kevin was given up for adoption?" she asks. From the moment Jocelyn leaves home, she goes everywhere with her mother looking for her brother: the two women knock on every door, even going to the airport to try to find out if he was adopted by a foreign couple.
