'We found your birth mother': How Chile's children were stolen and adopted worldwide

While exact number of cases is unknown, human rights groups believe at least 20,000 babies were taken between the 1960s and 1990s.

Between the 1960s and 1990s in Chile, human rights groups believe that upwards of 20,000 babies were taken from mostly low-income mothers and adopted out to unsuspecting parents in foreign countries.

The practice amounted to an elaborate human-trafficking operation that involved a network of midwives, doctors, social workers, nuns, priests and judges, many of whom got rich off the scheme while fulfilling a key goal of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s regime to make Chile an economic success.

The practice came to light in 2014, when an investigative news agency called CIPER wrote about some cases involving a priest and a doctor. That’s also when the stolen babies, now adults, started learning that they weren’t voluntarily given up like they always believed.

Since 2014, nonprofits say they’ve helped reunite at least 650 people who were taken from their Chilean mothers and adopted to families in the U.S., Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Peru and Australia.

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Here’s what you need to know about Chile’s stolen babies, how the scheme worked and what’s being done to address the wrongs of the past:

Four babies

USA TODAY has interviewed four of Chile’s stolen babies and two of their birth mothers. All were adopted out to parents in the United States and are now in their 40s.

Each adoptee was taken in a different way.

Karina del Carmen Valdes Lara said that a midwife told her that her baby daughter died of asphyxia after she was born in 1981. Valdes got to hold her daughter once before the baby was taken away and later adopted out to a couple in Staten Island, New York.

Valdes later learned that her baby was alive and that her own mother had agreed to the plan because she didn’t approve of having children out of wedlock. Valdes and her daughter, Rachel Smolka, reunited in February after 40 years apart.

Matt Molokie said that his mother, Adela del Carmen Vasquez Mercado, was held captive the last five months of her pregnancy. When she gave birth, she was told that she couldn’t keep the baby because she couldn’t care for him. Molokie, who was raised in Staten Island, reunited with his mother in June after nearly 40 years.

María Angélica González told USA TODAY that hospital staff lied to her and told her that her baby had died. Her son, Jimmy Lippert Thyden of Ashburn, Virginia, began looking into his past after reading USA TODAY's coverage of the issue and reunited with González and met four siblings in Valdivia, Chile, on Aug. 17.

And Rosa Mardones Peña, who died in 2015, likely was tricked or coerced into giving her son away to a child trafficker posing as a social worker, said Suzi Wortman, a volunteer with Nos Buscamos, an NGO dedicated to reuniting stolen children with their Chilean families.

In that case, Peña’s son, Scott Lieberman, was adopted out to parents in the San Francisco area. He was unable to reunite with his mother before her death because he only learned he had been taken from her earlier this year.

How it worked

Many of the mothers whose children were taken were just like Valdes, Vasquez and Peña, said Constanza del Río, the founder and president of Nos Buscamos.

They were lied to, told their babies had died or simply that they couldn’t keep them. Sometimes they were told their babies needed to stay in the hospital for a while and that they could go home; when they returned, the babies would be gone and no one — not hospital staff nor police — would listen to their pleas, del Río said.

“We are talking about human rights violations,” she said.

Once the babies were taken from their mothers, their adoption papers would be filled with lies, like their mother was raped and didn’t want them, or that both parents had abandoned them.

The documents, signed off by judges in on the scheme, were written to make it look like their mothers all voluntarily gave up their babies, according to Chilean Adoptees Worldwide.

It’s not believed that adoptive parents in foreign nations, including the U.S., knew the truth behind where their babies came from.

In the cases USA TODAY has written about, the adoptees said their adoptive parents were just as shell-shocked by the news as they were.

How stolen children are identified

Most of Chile’s stolen children in the U.S. have found out about their pasts by stumbling across news stories. For example, a USA TODAY story about one man’s reunion with his family in Chile led six people to reach out to Nos Buscamos and discover the truth about their pasts, del Río said.

Molokie, the Staten Island man who said his mother was held captive before he was taken, was among the six who found out the truth through the USA TODAY story, he said.

“I got a little pop-up notification on my phone: ‘Man from San Francisco reunites with his family in Chile after being stolen,’” Molokie said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m from Chile, let me click on it.’ And I had no idea any of that stuff was going on. And then you provided the information of the agency on the website so I uploaded my info onto the registry, and a half-hour later, they're like, ‘Yeah, we found your birth mother and you your half-sister … I couldn't believe it. It was insane.”

Since then, Molokie has grown close with both women and flew to Chile in June to meet them.

Thyden, the Virginia man who reunited with his birth mother in August, also found out by reading the same USA TODAY story that Molokie read, he said. "You have no idea how much you've changed my life," Thyden said.

Both the other Chilean adoptees USA TODAY spoke with, Smolka and Lieberman, also found out the truth by reading news stories.

Right now, such stories are the best way nonprofits have to connect Chilean families with their long-lost children, del Río said.

What next

So far, it’s only nonprofit groups like Nos Buscamos and Hijos y Madres del Silencio that are working to reconnect adoptees with their birth families.

Nos Buscamos, for example, gets no government funding and relies on volunteers for the often lengthy work involved in confirming relationships with DNA tests.

Recently, Nos Buscamos was able to improve part of the process with a partnership with MyHeritage. Before, Chilean families would have to travel to Santiago to submit a DNA test. Now, Nos Buscamos can travel to them with MyHeritage tests.

Del Río said the Chilean government has done virtually nothing to help and has failed to acknowledge what happened or apologize for it.

“We have been working with the last three presidents and all of them have congratulated us because of what we are doing, but still the government or the state of Chile hasn’t recognized this as a historical thing that really happened,” she said. “We are trying to get this government to recognize it … to avoid it from continuing in the future and try to compensate the people who have suffered this. And we’re not talking about money, we’re talking about human things. Apologies.”

For now, anyone who suspects they’re among Chile’s stolen children can register with Nos Buscamos and try looking up their adoptive last name here.

"It's moving slowly but we started in 2014 and nobody knew about this and now I'm talking with a journalist in the United States," del Río said. "It's not as fast as we would like but it's working ... One by one."