The illegal adoption business in Chile is not a story (only) of the dictatorship
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.
After many attempts, they managed to locate the psychologist who had been following Kevin's case at the Arrullo home, who told them to forget about it, that Kevin was fine. He even advised the mother to see a psychiatrist to overcome the situation.
On the pile of documents the two women have compiled over the years, which attest to the irregularities that occurred during the adoption process, there is a framed photo of Kevin. In that portrait, he is a smiling child, and more than 20 years later, for Jocelyn and Jaquelin, Kevin still looks that way: they don't know how he has grown today, they don't know if he is alive or dead. For them, Kevin is that image crystallized in time. Jocelyn, now 27, has a tattoo on her forearm: it is her and her brother, back to back, embracing. "I just want him to know that he is my greatest treasure and that I will never stop looking for him, as long as I live," she whispers, moved.
20,000 illegal adoptions
Almost a decade ago, a major scandal erupted in Chile, which has become an internationally known case, involving 20,000 adoptions carried out during the Pinochet dictatorship. This estimate is from the judge who opened the first case in 2017, Mario Carroza, currently a Supreme Court Justice. The Chilean justice system and a brigade of the PDI (the country's investigative police) have been investigating the matter for years. However, due to a major justice reform, both teams only handle cases occurring up to 2004, and complaints related to subsequent years are referred—separately—to the Carabineros (National Police) or the Ministry of the Interior. Therefore, there is no Chilean public entity that investigates complaints of irregular adoptions that occurred in the last 20 years, grouping them together into a single group. For the same reason, there are no official figures on how many complaints have been filed since 2004, and the justice system has never investigated to find common patterns or charge alleged perpetrators.
In recent years, however, dozens of public complaints have been filed about illegal adoptions in Chile, in various locations across the country, involving children who, in most cases, were adopted by European couples. During this investigation, we have compiled dozens of reports of illegal adoptions in the country, with cases dating back to 2024. These adoptions occurred during the current democracy and were always managed by SENAME, the National Service for Minors , the Chilean state entity that handles everything related to minors, including adoption. SENAME has been at the center of enormous controversy for years due to the numerous irregularities detected in its management.
The most serious known case is that of the horrific abuse suffered by minors in the homes managed by the entity, a scandal that came to light after the publication of an investigation conducted by the PDI in 2017, which revealed that in 100% of the 240 homes investigated, minors had suffered abuse: a total of 2,071, of which 310 were sexually motivated. And every year in Chile, new scandals erupt, primarily related to child prostitution rings, in which those responsible for the homes force the minors in their care into prostitution, according to many of the complaints filed by parents with the PDI and reported by local media.
Although the country's adoption system has undergone profound revisions and improvements since the dictatorship, there are anomalies and modus operandi that seem to be consistently the same, from the 1970s to the present day. The families of origin are always poor and often involve single mothers from marginalized areas. Parents are not notified of their children's suitability for adoption, they are arbitrarily prohibited from visiting the institutions, and children are given up for adoption abroad without prior verification of the presence of other relatives in the country who could take care of the child, as stipulated by law. Not to mention that there are institutions that, despite being under investigation by the PDI and the Chilean justice system and having dozens of complaints since the 1970s, continue to be accredited by the State.
Kevin's alleged illegal adoption was reported to the competent prosecutor in 2020 by Patricia Muñoz, a Chilean lawyer who was appointed as the Chilean State's first Children's Ombudsman from 2018 to 2023. She now states: "I have reported several cases of irregular adoption, and many others have been brought to my attention. These were completely flawed processes in which the biological parents had no chance of regaining custody of their children. Families who received absolutely no help from the State and only learned later that their children had been given up for adoption." Between 2010 and 2020, 70% of Chilean children adopted outside the country were adopted by Italian families. Italy and the United States are the two countries with the most adoptions worldwide, but in Chile, Italians clearly hold the top spot: there are seven accredited Italian institutes, five of which are currently operating.
Between 2010 and 2020, according to data provided by Sename (National Sename), a total of 4,512 children were adopted in Chile, of which 844 were adopted by foreign couples. The countries that adopted Chilean children between 2010 and 2020 were Spain, Denmark, Australia, the United States, Belgium, New Zealand, and Sweden, and the countries that received the most children were Italy, Norway, and France. However, the number of children adopted in Italy was clearly higher in those 10 years: between 2010 and 2020, 587 children arrived in Italy, while 95 arrived in Norway and 91 in France.
Among the cases analyzed throughout this investigation, there are several in which women turned to the State seeking protection, reporting abuse at the hands of their partners. Instead of receiving help, they suffered the theft of their children. This is the case of Giannina Riccardi, now 32, who—after reporting domestic violence—lost custody of her daughter, Ignacia, in 2018, who was later given up for adoption.
For years, Giannina denounced the abuse the girl suffered at the home and the irregularities that occurred during the process. In 2020, she created the Facebook page Madres Desesperadas (Desperate Mothers), where she compiled hundreds of complaints that had occurred across the country. Ignacia was given up for adoption when she was seven years old by the Nido de Hualpén home, which was closed after several parents reported a pedophile ring that paid staff to abuse minors. “I did everything the judge asked me to do to get my daughter back,” Giannina recalls today. “I found a better job, left my abusive partner, and rented a bigger house,” she continues. “But after she was given up for adoption, I tried to commit suicide several times; once, I jumped from the fourth floor of my building. I walked past Ignacia’s room, and the pain of not seeing her in bed tore me apart.”
In 2014, another mother also publicly denounced the illegal adoption of her children, chaining herself in front of the Puerto Aysén cathedral, beginning a hunger strike, and collecting dozens of testimonies from other mothers with similar cases in her region. Her name is Yohanna Oyarzo, now 41 years old, and in 2011, her three sons—Gabriel, Benjamín, and Erick—then ages 5, 4, and 2, respectively—were taken from her and later given up for adoption to a French couple, despite the mother's protests, who, she claimed, had done everything the courts had required in the preceding months to regain custody of her children. The adoption of Yohanna's children was carried out by the Eleonora Giorgi orphanage in Puerto Aysén, an orphanage run by Sister Augusta Pedrielli, a distant cousin of the famous Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who financed the purchase of the land where the orphanage stands . The orphanage was closed in 2015 after dozens of complaints following Yohanna's hunger strike.
Sister Augusta confirmed to EL PAÍS that she bought the land thanks to Pavarotti's donation. Cristina Pavarotti, the tenor's daughter, also confirms the contact between her father and Augusta Pedrielli between 1989 and 1990 and that her father "decided to send three incubators and shoes for the children." "At the same time, although I haven't found any documents about the monetary donation that made it possible to acquire the land, I consider it probable. At the same time, I can say that the contact between Sister Augusta and my father was limited to that period of time," she added.
Yohanna still remembers the hours and days of visits and reports that her children suffered abuse, and that one of them had told her he had been sexually abused by an older girl during his time at the home. “Not a day goes by that I don't think about my children,” Yohanna says today. “It's a pain that will never end. I can only move forward because I have hope that one day I'll be able to hug them again.”