Chile's stolen children: a new effort offers hope to Pinochet-era international adoptees
Chile’s stolen children: a new effort offers hope to Pinochet-era international adoptees
Charis McGowan in Giethoorn and Santiago
Sun 14 July 2024 at 5:00 am GMT-5·6-min read
Mirjam Hunze grew up in the quiet Dutch town of Lunteren, but always felt too loud, too different, too curious in her strict Protestant household. She was 10 years old when she found out she had been adopted from Chile, sparking a lifelong quest to find her biological family. Hunze’s Chilean birth certificate and passport listed her Dutch adoptive name, with the fields for her biological parents and place of birth conspicuously crossed out.
Hunze’s Dutch adoptive parents – who were unable to conceive biologically – had been given the number of a Dutch woman, Gertie Vogel, who lived in Chile and told them she could secure a baby. They paid an undisclosed amount for Mirjam, who arrived in Amsterdam on 19 October 1972, brought over by a KLM flight attendant.
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Hunze is one of an estimated 20,000 Chileans who were adopted abroad under irregular circumstances between the 1950s and the 1990s, most of them during the 17-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Babies were smuggled to the Netherlands, Sweden, the US, France and other countries through extensive networks of priests, nuns, judges and social workers who exploited lax government protocols and the demand for international adoptions. Significant sums of money changed hands in the process.
Over the past decade, the advent of self-testing DNA kits and online social networks has led to hundreds of Chilean adoptees finding their biological parents, uncovering shocking stories in which biological parents were falsely told their babies had died in childbirth, or were coerced into temporarily handing over their babies to social workers, never to see them again.
More:
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/chile-stolen-children-effort-offers-100047546.html