This is a translation of the original article in Portuguese. Read the original (Português).
Chilean Teresita de Jesús Padilla has been reunited, after 41 years, with two children who were taken from a Chilean hospital during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The meeting took place in Santiago, to which the siblings travelled from the United States, the country where they were raised.
According to the American newspaper the LA Times, the two grew up without knowing where they came from. Only later did they learn their origins and return to their homeland, where they found their mother.
The case is an example of a much bigger problem. An estimated 20,000 cases of forced or criminal adoption are believed to have occurred during Pinochet’s regime, which ruled Chile between 1973 and 1990. Many of these children ended up with families abroad, which makes it even harder for birth parents to find out where their children are.
Stories like Teresita’s show that the wounds left by Latin America’s dictatorships remain open. The search for separated families continues, decades later, and depends largely on adult children who, upon discovering that they were adopted under irregular circumstances, decide to look for their roots.
The issue also resonates with Brazil’s reality. In Brazil, cases of babies and children appropriated during the authoritarian period are also under investigation, and relatives continue to search for answers about the fate of their loved ones.
For those who have lived through this kind of separation, the reunion carries a weight that goes beyond the emotion of the moment: it confirms, with faces and names, the scale of a crime that for a long time went unrecorded and kept out of public debate.
Reporting from LA Times (p. 3, Santiago (Chile)).
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