Estela looks down at her hands and her eyes easily well up with tears. She has shed so many over the last 31 years regarding the whereabouts of her daughter, it is clear that this is an emotional wound from which she may never recover. Her hardened face gives way.
“All I want to know is that she’s healthy and doing okay,”
We meet in a non-descript social room in a downtown apartment compound in Bogota where 26 other people are here for the same thing. They are here to meet one another, share their experience of giving up a child for adoption either legally or pressured, or as an adoptee to locate their parents or siblings and submit their DNA with the tireless help of a Dutch foundation called Plan Angel and try and locate their families.
“The trauma of being tricked into giving a child up for adoption is for life,” one participant says, gesticulating. “This is worse than having the fetus taken out, it’s emotional damage,” she continues.
The conversation is constant and it jumps rapidly from threats to sue the Colombian state for its complicity in what is referred to by Marcia Engel, director of Plan Angel and herself an adoptee raised in Holland as, “legalized child trafficking,” to real fear that their children may have been sold for their organs or into the sex trade.