For 42 years, my mother thought I was dead.
I, like thousands of Chilean children, was stolen at birth. I was born in a Santiago state hospital on Oct. 31, 1980. My Mamá remembers staff members telling her that I was jaundiced and needed to be put in an incubator. Before she could name me or even hold me, I was taken from her. They later said to her, “Your son is dead. You can go.”
What she didn’t know was that I had been taken to a state orphanage just blocks away from the hospital. The plan was simple: Traffickers took babies out of hospitals, then created fraudulent documents to put the children through illegal adoptions. Babies were given to adoption agencies and private adopters, both of whom rarely ensured the legitimacy of their status. When I was 2, I was adopted from the orphanage by a couple in Virginia, who were unaware that I had been stolen. My American mom and dad offered me an education, a home and a loving family. But I was stripped of my language, culture and Indigenous roots. I was assimilated, given the new identity of an American boy named Jimmy.
Some people will read this last sentence and think: “You should be thankful. You probably had a better life.” Adoptees are often expected to be grateful. But this isn’t about giving an adopted child a better life, this is about stealing kids.
Under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean state promoted international adoptions as a way to reduce poverty rates. Mr. Pinochet was not only a dictator, he was profoundly classist, and his administration sought to better Chile’s economic standing at the expense of the country’s lower economic class. As part of this goal, a national network of judges, lawyers, medical care providers and clergy members frequented churches, hospitals and women’s shelters to take babies from poor and Indigenous women, often single and marginalized — like my Mamá.
International adoptions saved the government money, compared to the cost of supporting impoverished families, or so their thinking went. Some adopters even paid adoption agencies tens of thousands of dollars for a child, with many children placed in Europe and North America. According to Chilean judiciary reports obtained by The Associated Press, there were about 20,000 cases of criminal adoptions overall. But civil society organizations estimate there could have been as many 50,000 children and newborns trafficked out of Chile between the 1950s and the 1990s.
In July 2024, I filed a lawsuit against the Chilean state on behalf of all the mamás and their disappeared children, on the basis that the government violated the human rights of both. I am calling on the Chilean government to acknowledge the harm it caused, establish a truth commission to identify all of these victims and to recognize the citizenship of the adoptees and their descendants.
Like other Chilean babies, I was given a fake name by traffickers to be smuggled out of the country. Because of the differing names on my faked Chilean paperwork and my American adoption documents, I was told I’m unable to obtain my Chilean citizenship under the identity I use today. After what the state put us through, adoptees should be recognized by the name we choose, and receive the benefits of full Chilean citizenship, like any other person born in that country.
Counterfeit adoptions were happening in Chile and in other countries, like South Korea and Colombia. As a response to human and legal problems in inter-country adoptions, an international treaty, the Hague Adoption Convention, was created in 1993. The treaty established an extra degree of protections for inter-country adoptees, to ensure a child’s right to grow up in a loving family environment. It was also meant to prevent the sale and trafficking of children. But, like other treaties, the agreement can’t require any nation to sign on and they are left mostly regulating themselves. To date, over 100 countries have signed on to the convention. From 1948 to 2019, inter-country adoptions accounted for around 1.1 million children worldwide. The United States alone has accounted for more than 300,000 international children adopted since 1989.
I began to discover the criminality of my adoption in 2011, after my American mother, who I call Mom, gave me my adoption records. I’d always heard the same story my parents believed to be true: Mamá — possibly too young or without enough resources — gave me up for adoption in Chile, and I ended up in the United States. But when I read my papers, I noticed discrepancies. One document stated that I was born in a hospital to a known mother; another listed that I had “no living family.” For years, this bothered me, but I didn’t look into it further. To find the truth, I would have had to travel to Chile itself, whose language and customs I didn’t know. Twelve years later, my wife sent me an article about a man, also adopted from Chile. Except he hadn’t been legitimately adopted — he was a stolen child. His story felt too similar to mine for me to ignore.
In 2023, I submitted my DNA and adoption documents to Nos Buscamos, a Chilean nonprofit that helps reunite families like mine. The organization told me that the lawyer whose name was on my adoption paperwork was a notorious Chilean trafficker. Nos Buscamos advised me to submit my DNA to MyHeritage, a platform that supplies DNA kits to women in Chile. My DNA matched that of my Mamá’s cousin, who had sent her DNA to the company’s database. After I contacted her and learned the false story Mamá was told after my birth, 42 years of lies came undone. My American Mom and Dad learned they had been duped into an illegal adoption. Mamá learned her baby had been stolen, and I learned I had been robbed of my family in Chile. That August, my wife, children, and I — the baby boy with “no living family” — flew to Chile, where we met Mamá, my siblings, their families and my extended relatives. I had a large living family, indeed.
After our reunion, I realized that nobody was working to provide reparations to these mamás and their disappeared children, and I took action. I’m now collaborating with the Chilean law firm Colombara Estrategia Legal to fight for government reparations on the basis that the Chilean state failed to protect its babies and women.
Although it’s long been public news that counterfeit adoptions occurred during Chile’s dictatorship, no significant action has been taken to identify all inter-country adoptees. In a speech at the presentation of Chile’s National Human Rights Institute 2023 annual report, President Gabriel Boric acknowledged that these events took place — and that they warranted further investigation. But despite this and a meeting I attended with him last year, Mr. Boric hasn’t acknowledged the state’s culpability commissioning these illegal adoptions. During a July 2024 visit to Sweden, where parents also unwittingly adopted trafficked Chilean children, Mr. Boric and Chile’s minister of justice, Luis Cordero Vega, met with the country’s prime minister. They agreed that Chile and Sweden would work together to investigate these acts, but no such effort has been made by the United States.
Through my lawsuit, I hope to place these crimes on a larger stage. They have harmed me and countless other adoptees. The Chilean government allowed my Mamá to believe I was dead for 42 years. Now they will all know I — and all those other missing children — am very much alive.
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