Forced adoptions in Chile, mothers and children in search of the truth

Between the 1960s and the 1990s, more than twenty thousand Chilean children were adopted and taken abroad by French, Italian, American, Belgian and even Canadian families. Adoption encouraged by the dictatorship of General Pinochet. But years later, voices began to be raised in Chile: several thousand biological mothers had in fact never agreed to have their babies given up for adoption. RFI went to meet these women in Chile, but also children adopted in France, who are looking for their origins.

From our correspondent in Chile,

1,200 kilometers south of Santiago, on the island of Chiloé, Ruth Huisca puts wood in the stove which warms the main room, in the middle of the southern winter. This domestic worker, aged around fifty, welcomes us in a red house with the typical architecture of the island, with its facade covered in wooden shingles.

In the mid-1980s, Ruth lived and worked in Osorno, in the south of the country. She became pregnant by her boyfriend when she was 17, and he was 16. He moved to another town, and Ruth gave birth to a baby girl alone at the Osorno hospital. But she doesn't dare return to her home in the countryside. “  At the time, I couldn't have come back to my grandparents with a baby. They would have thrown me out, they would have given me a beating. So I was afraid to tell them I was pregnant. And I looked for a pension for my daughter, I entrusted her to a lady I trusted.  »

For the first few months, Ruth sees her baby every day, and at the same time works in a bar. But customers are rare, and she finds a better-paid job on the island of Chiloé, 200 kilometers away. Her daughter, Claudia, remains in board with the same person, a former work colleague. “  I gave him 5 thousand pesos a month, it was a lot of money at the time. But I fell ill, and for six months I was bedridden. I never knew exactly what I had. And I couldn't send money at that time. So this lady reported me  ,” says Ruth over coffee and biscuits, while the rain begins to fall outside.

Ruth is summoned to court, accused of abandoning her daughter. At that time, she barely knew how to read, having left school at 12. She does not understand the documents presented to her. “  The social worker here told me that I was young, that one day I was going to get married and have many children and not to worry. And that I had to sign. I asked her if I was going to be able to see my daughter again, she told me yes. She assured me that if I didn't sign, I would be arrested. I was afraid of going to prison. And I ended up signing. »

She then realizes that these documents were papers to give Claudia up for adoption. And despite searching the police station, Ruth never found her daughter.

It was only a few years ago that she realized that she was not the only one who had experienced a similar story.

“I heard her crying. Then I never saw her again."

Back in Santiago, Aída Cáceres welcomes us in a small house, in the commune of Padre Hurtado. Before settling in the capital, she also lived in southern Chile. She lost track of her second child just after giving birth at Coronel hospital, 500 kilometers from the capital.

“   At 21, I became pregnant with a little girl. I arrived at the hospital with complications. My daughter was born, and I clearly remember the nurse saying, “Look how beautiful your daughter is.” That's all I remember. I heard her crying. And then I never saw her again. “, she says.

A caregiver tells her that her daughter is dead. But Aída can't believe it, and she tries to find out for sure. We are then in 1986. “  I looked for her in the Coronel hospital, but she was not there. I asked what happened to him, asked lots of questions. Until I found this nurse. And she told me, 'Your daughter is not dead. She was sent to a juvenile home.' They said I abandoned her! But I've never been to court, I've never signed adoption papers, ever.  »

Aída searched for her daughter for years, without success. But three years ago, she received messages on Facebook from France. “  Are you my mother? ”  ". “  I will never forget that question. »

Since then, she regularly checks in on her daughter, despite the language barrier. Marie, that's her current name, soon sends him a copy of her adoption file.

“  There you go, that’s her passport…  ” she says, leafing through the file, which she printed and keeps carefully. She lingers on her daughter’s ID photo: “  She was still a baby…! », she sighs.

And she is surprised at how quickly her daughter was adopted. “  Because she was born on September 21, and on December 17 of the same year, she was already leaving Chile, with a court decision saying that a French couple was coming to pick her up. And then in the report, it says that I was living on the street, and that I was an alcoholic. Even though I have never drunk a drop of alcohol! And I have always been quite a homebody, always had a roof over my head.  »

Hundreds of complaints filed

In Chile, more than 700 complaints have been filed in recent years for forced adoptions, which took place mainly during the period of the Pinochet dictatorship, between 1973 and 1990. But the Chilean judicial police and victims' associations estimate that since In the 1960s, more than 20,000 Chilean children may have been irregularly adopted. One of these associations is called “  Hijos y madres del silencio  ”, (“Children and mothers of silence”). Marisol Rodriguez, who is looking for her big sister, is the spokesperson for this NGO created in 2014 to help mothers find their children.

“  There are around 12,000 of us in a private Facebook group. We do everything online. To help mothers and their families in their search, we ask them to take a DNA test because they don't really have any other way to find their loved ones. Children adopted abroad, on the other hand, often have documents, the name of a city, a last name... We do the research with them but we also suggest that they take a DNA test to be sure, because the papers they have are often false. Unfortunately, only 250 searches have been successful so far. “, says Marisol Rodriguez.

The women victims of these forced adoptions were mainly poor, young, single, and sometimes from the indigenous peoples of Chile, notably the Mapuche people. Some were illiterate.

The association has identified a series of people and institutions whose names appear in forced adoption files. “  Nuns and priests were involved, very often social workers too. Lawyers, judges... Hotels... There was a whole network , assures Sol Rodriguez, co-founder of the association. And it was also about making the adoptive parents believe that they were doing something good. Not that they had come looking for a child who had disappeared from the hospital.  »

These middlemen used the same methods to take children away from their mothers. “  The first was to tell the mothers that their child had died at birth, but without giving them the body ,” explains Sol Rodriguez.The second method more often concerned mothers who worked as domestic workers or in the countryside for example: these people told them that they would take care of their children during the week, and that they could come and pick them up on weekends. . But after a few weeks, they gave them up for adoption without their consent. Finally, in the third case, they told the mothers that their newborns had very serious illnesses, which could not be treated here. And that if they loved their child, they had to give him up for adoption, so that he would not die in Chile.  »

For more than 700 children, the last known address in Chile, indicated on their passport, was that of several hotels in Santiago.

Guido, 59, worked in one of these hotels, which has since closed. For the first time, he agreed to tell RFI what he saw. We find him at his home, in the southern suburbs of the capital, after his day of work.

When he was an employee at the hotel restaurant, between 1979 and 1997, he met many couples who came to adopt children in Chile. “  They stayed for about two months, ” he remembers. At first, they were alone for a week or two. Then someone appeared who gave them all the contacts. And then the children would come  ,” he says. “  After about two weeks, they would go down to the hotel restaurant to do the paperwork with the lawyers, and I would serve them at the table. Italians only adopted babies, never older children. And the French and Australians adopted children around 3 or 4 years old.  »

Today, he wonders about the role the hotel played in these adoptions. For example, he remembers a woman who was officially a public relations director. “  She had her office there, but she never really worked as a public relations person. When foreign couples arrived, they always sought to speak with her. She was the link between the lawyers and the adoptive parents, because she spoke French and English.  »

A spike in adoptions under the dictatorship

Irregular adoptions took place before and after the dictatorship of General Pinochet. But if these networks were able to function without problem under the military regime (1973-1990), it is in particular because the junta itself had decided to promote the adoptions of poor children by foreign couples.

This is what historian Karen Alfaro showed in her research. She teaches at the Austral University of Chile, in Valdivia, and has been working on this subject for several years. “  Under the dictatorship, Chile became one of the main countries from which children left to be adopted abroad,” she explains. Forced adoptions of children are part of a policy of social violence against these poor families. It was a kind of social eugenics. »

At the time, the regime transformed Chile into a laboratory of neoliberalism, under the influence of the “  Chicago Boys  ”, recalls the researcher. “  The dictatorship was trying to show off its economic development. In this context, these poor social categories, and the “irregular minors” as they called them, were perceived as a problem , underlines the researcher. The press designated them as “the great problem” of our country.  »

In the midst of the Cold War, the dictatorship feared that when they grew up, these children would join the opposition. On the other hand, the leaders of the military junta did not want to spend money on social programs. “  They therefore intend to significantly increase the number of adoptions of Chilean children ,” noted Karen Alfaro. For this, the adoption procedures are then simplified. » During her research, the historian showed that children were sold between 6,500 dollars, for a baby, and 150 thousand dollars, for a set of siblings.

But for her, under Pinochet in particular, the motivations of intermediaries were often ideological, more than financial. “  I was able to conduct interviews with social workers involved in cases of irregular adoptions,” explains the historian. And they said that these practices took place within the framework of an institutional policy. They were convinced that they had saved children from their own families, because they believed that they were destined for poverty, for chaos. There were therefore ideological reasons among many civil servants, doctors, judges and social workers . »

A diplomacy of adoptions

Finally, according to its research, the regime used these adoptions to renew diplomatic relations with several Western countries which had welcomed a significant number of Chilean exiles and where the dictatorship was particularly criticized for human rights violations which occurred there. Sweden, for example, has been one of the main destination countries for Chilean children adopted abroad. At the time, Swedish authorities were alerted to irregularities, but decided to turn a blind eye.

During the same period, France was the fourth country where the most Chilean children were adopted, according to partial data compiled by Chilean consular authorities. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for its part, indicates that 1,706 Chilean children have been adopted in France since 1981, without further details, despite several reminders from us.

The right to know one's origins

Thousands of kilometers from Santiago, these children grew up and some today seek to know their story. Lucile Gimberg, from the RFI branch in Spanish, went to meet them in the southwest of France. Near Toulouse, the Chilean Adoptees Worldwide association organized an information meeting at the end of July in a village hall.

A few dozen people are present, including Johanna Lamboley. She is one of the representatives in France of this NGO. “  I was adopted in Chile in 1986, at the age of 5 and a half,” she explains. I was stolen from my biological mother, who I lived with. She spent 36 years looking for me.  »

Thanks to the association, Johanna found her mother. But she considers that this subject is still too little known. “  There is a silence in the world of adoption in France, so we want to alert Chilean children who are looking for their roots that we exist, that they can contact us and that we can try to help them as much as possible. as possible, to reconnect with their identity  ,” she says.

Rebuilding yourself around your personal history

Not all adoptions of Chilean children were necessarily irregular. But the results of research often provoke contradictory emotions.

Laetitia Bourgier, 34, also managed to contact her biological family in Chile. After searching for years, she appealed to the National Juvenile Service in Santiago, who finally found her mother, and sent her a letter and a photo of her. “  When I see his photo, that’s it, I see who I look like! We have the same nose, the same mouth, the same eyes and eyebrows  ,” she says with a big smile. “  When you are adopted, the question of who you look like is the first question you ask yourself. Before anything else, “who do I look like?” And there it is! “, she remembers. In the mail, “She tells me that she never gave me up for adoption. That, for me, is still a relief. I tell myself it wasn't just in my head. But it's not simple. It changes my entire story, which is the foundation of my identity as a person. It was a psychic tsunami, this discovery. I wouldn't have done it years ago because I wasn't strong enough. And that called a lot of things into question. When I returned to France, I asked myself: what is my life like? Did I really choose her? and my work?  ".

Laetitia also discovers that her mother was told that she had died in the hospital. And she realizes that her birth certificate has been falsified.

Today, she questions France's responsibility in these affairs. “  We can only wonder. There are still many, many children who left Chile for France, who passed through the French embassy, ​​she emphasizes. They know how the laws work. However, children have left the country without certain mandatory documents... There are quite a few gray areas. It would still be very surprising if they hadn’t questioned that  ,” she points out.

A welcome committee at Toulouse airport

Victims' associations believe that most often, the adoptive parents were not aware that these children had in fact never been abandoned. Laetitia's father, André, supported his daughter in the search for her origins. He is one of the rare parents to agree to talk about the steps he took with his wife at the time. “  It was actually very simple. We already knew that adoptions were very difficult in France. It took 4 or 5 years, and even then, it wasn't easy, he explains to Lucile Gimberg, from the RFI channel in Spanish. And we knew it was easier to adopt in a foreign country.  » The couple knows several people who have already adopted in Chile. They therefore choose to leave for Santiago.

Their friends give them contacts and addresses. A sort of hand-written adopter's guide, thanks to which they found Laetitia in a hospital after only two weeks there. They only pay translation costs, administrative costs in the courts, assures André Bourgier. He and his wife do not notice anything that seems unusual to them.

On their return, they are awaited at Toulouse airport by a very enthusiastic welcoming committee. “  About fifteen or twenty friends, who had already adopted little Chilean children. They were waiting for us almost like the messiah, at the airport. It’s a fabulous emotion! »

In France, the court pronounces the full adoption of Laetitia without difficulty. So when his daughter told him that she had been forcibly taken from her biological mother, “  At the time, of course, it did something to me, because you still have to digest it  ,” remembers André Bourgier. But today, he says, he is happy that Laetitia was able to find her biological family. “ Now, when she talks about her story, she’s a little more liberated. She is less stressed  ,” he believes.

Taboo

For other parents, however, broaching this subject with their adopted children seems unthinkable. This is what happened in the family of Alban Dubaux, 30, whom Lucile Gimberg met during the information meeting of the Chilean Adoptees Worldwide association, near Toulouse.

This young gendarme was adopted in Punta Arenas, the southernmost city of Chile, in Patagonia. On his passport, which was issued in Chile, when he was only 15 days old, Alban already bore his French first and last name. An irregularity which today complicates the search for its origins, but did not prevent it from leaving the country without incident, then being adopted in France. “  From what they told me, my adoptive parents were contacted before I was born  ,” he explains.

At first, his parents tell him where he comes from. But around the age of 6, his mother found him rummaging through his adoption file. Then she turns away, and refuses to talk about her origins again. A few years later, Alban realizes that the papers have disappeared.

“ It’s impossible to get my hands on the documents I saw when I was little. And after talking with my parents, I saw that it was very taboo, impossible to talk with them anymore. It was really violent, really to make me stop snooping and stick my nose elsewhere. “, he says.

Despite the opposition of his adoptive parents, Alban decided to continue the research on his own. He got married three years ago, and he and his wife would like to have children. But before that, Alban would like to know his own story. “  What matters most to me is really knowing what happened. Why was I abandoned? Is this intentional? Not intended ? And I need to touch the flesh of my flesh, whether it’s a brother, a sister, a grandparent…  ” he says.

Being able to hold your biological mother in your arms is also what Johanna Lamboley, from the Chilean Adoptees Worldwide (CAW) association, wants. If health restrictions allow, she will go to Chile this year, for the first time since her adoption. And she appeals to the French authorities. “ We would just like the French government, as the governments of Sweden, Holland and elsewhere have done, to help us and also recognize that there were some errors in their processing of adoption files “, she specifies.

In Santiago, Aída Cáceres also dreams of meeting her daughter in person. But for the moment, she cannot afford a plane ticket to France. 

Finally, for the Hijos y madres del silencio association, it is urgent that the investigations already underway in Chile move forward. According to its co-founder, Sol Rodriguez, these forced adoptions could constitute crimes against humanity. “  We cannot leave all of this under the rug when there has been so much injustice. Mothers are dying right now without knowing where their children are, she regrets. It's terrible because these are child thefts and here in Chile there have been thousands. »

She recalls that forced adoptions also concern countries other than Chile. Finally, she asks the government of her country to relaunch a DNA data bank project, created to help mothers find their children, but which has been at a standstill for a year and a half.