Al veertig jaar hopen Braziliaanse moeders op vergiffenis na schimmige adoptieprocedures - NRC (For 40 years, Brazilian mothers

Al veertig jaar hopen Braziliaanse moeders op vergiffenis na schimmige adoptieprocedures - NRC (For 40 years, Brazilian mothers have been hoping for forgiveness after shady adoption procedures - NRC)

Foreign adoption Brazil For years, foreign adoptions took place in Brazil under shadowy and illegal circumstances. The Brazilian-Dutch foundation PDBH uses DNA testing to help Brazilian mothers and adopted children in the Netherlands find each other.

With a cotton swab, Liza da Silva-Alijaj carefully scrapes some mucus from the inside of Raimunda Aparecida Vieira da Silva's (54) mouth. She hands the DNA swab to her colleague, who carefully puts it away. “Parabens mamae! Congratulations mom!” exclaims Alijaj. There is loud applause and cheering and Raimunda sighs deeply. “I suddenly feel much lighter, like a weight has been lifted off my shoulder,” she says. "This DNA test is my last hope to find my son."

The next mom sits down, opens her mouth, and gets the swab pressed against the inside of her cheeks.

In the auditorium of the parliament building of the state of São Paulo, Brazilian women who gave their child for adoption in the 1980s and 1990s come and go these days. They were often underage, poor and had unwanted pregnancies. Abortion is forbidden in religious Brazil. Under pressure from family or authorities, they renounced their child – sometimes without realizing it themselves. There are also cases in Brazil of children being stolen from hospitals. For years, foreign adoptions took place under shadowy and illegal circumstances where shady organizations and individuals earned a lot of money, as a subsequent investigation has shown.

Under the leadership of the Brazilian-Dutch foundation PDBH (Pessoas Desaparecidas Brasil e Holanda – Missing persons Brazil and the Netherlands), which helps Brazilian adopted children in the Netherlands to find their biological family, two hundred free DNA tests will be taken from Brazilian mothers in the coming days . The kick-off is in the metropolitan São Paulo, where most Brazilian adopted children in the Netherlands come from. With a team of six employees from the Netherlands and four from Brazil, the foundation also conducts tests on 'distance mothers' in two other cities (Fortaleza and Campina Grande). The hope is that a match will be found with Brazilian children in the Netherlands whose DNA has already been taken, in order to bring biological families together.

No child benefit

“Look, Alessandro was just four months here,” says Raimunda. After the DNA test, she shows a picture of her son on her phone, born on June 15, 1983. She has traveled four hours to get to São Paulo and donate her DNA. At two in the morning she was already on the bus.

Raimunda Aparecida: "I was still a child myself and saw no other choice"

Raimunda was fifteen when she got pregnant. “I was on my own,” she says. “I had no money, my family couldn't help me and Alessandro's father left me behind. Child benefit or family support did not exist at that time. The life I envisioned was wandering the streets with my child. I didn't want that kind of life for Alessandro”. She went to a children's home and gave her child to a counselor. “I have not looked back. The emptiness and the pain never go away. I would like to ask Alessandro to forgive me. I was still a child myself and saw no other choice.”

Each new mother who enters the auditorium receives a warm welcome from the other mothers. Maria Rocha Cabral (50) has tears in her eyes when she is hugged by one of them. “I always felt very lonely in my grief, but now I see all women who have gone through the same thing,” she says emotionally.

She was nineteen when she temporarily placed her newborn daughter Katia with a friendly couple out of sheer necessity. “I went to work because there had to be bread on the shelf. My family lived far away, in another state. After four months I went back to the couple to pick up my daughter, but they wouldn't give her back.”

Maria Rocha: 'I always felt very lonely in my grief, until now'

Maria went to child protection, but it was judged that the baby would not be well off with either her or the couple: the couple lived in poor circumstances and she, Maria, was too young. “I tried to explain that I would move in with my mother in the countryside with my daughter. But then I was told that it would be better if I gave up my child. The judge said, “You are still young. You have a whole life ahead of you to get married and start a new family." I said I wanted to raise my daughter.” Under duress and with the promise that she could see her daughter every two weeks, she signed a document that she later says she did not know what it said. She never saw daughter Katia again.

Stricter conditions

The countless abuses in foreign adoptions to the Netherlands in the years 1967-1997 came to light in 2021 in a damning report. Then Minister Sander Dekker (Legal Protection, VVD) immediately suspended foreign adoptions. It is now possible again, but under strict conditions.

Brazil is one of the countries that the research was extremely critical of. For years, birth certificates and adoption documents have been tampered with and information about the reason for adoption has been fabricated. Until the 1990s, it was not mandatory in Brazil to put the mother's name on a child's birth certificate. “It also made it easier to give children up for adoption without the mother's consent,” says Liza da Silva-Alijaj of PDBH. “It is precisely this mess with birth certificates and documents that gives adopted children a lot of unrest. They don't know who they are, and later in life that can cause major problems with their identity.”

This was also the case with Patrick Noordoven, who took the Dutch state to court a few years ago. Noordoven was adopted from Brazil in 1980, through what later turned out to be an illegal adoption, with the help of Dutch intermediaries and diplomats. As a baby, Noordoven was picked up from a hospital in São Paulo by Dutch adoptive parents and traveled with them, with forged papers, to the Netherlands. They registered him as their own child at the municipality. For twenty years he searched for his biological parents. In the end, the judge ruled that Noordoven must receive compensation from the State, because it withheld legitimate information about his adoption. That verdict led to the investigation of the ministry.

Dozens of children in the Netherlands, like Noordoven, were adopted illegally: they have no certainty about their identity. That is why PDBH does the DNA tests: it is the only way to get 100% certainty. In Brazil, the DNA is first tested at the renowned genetic laboratory Genera. It then goes to the Netherlands, where it is checked whether there are matches with the adopted children of the foundation. The DNA of the mothers also ends up in large international DNA banks, such as My Heritage and Family Tree.

PDBH carries out the DNA program with financial support from the Ministry of Justice and Security. The foundation has now found the biological family of four hundred Brazilian adopted children in the Netherlands, with or without the help of DNA.

Birthday

The pain of distance mothers and adopted children is what drives PDBH founder Liza Alijaj, who herself was born in Montenegro and is of Roma descent. She was given up because her then 16-year-old mother could not take care of her. She was eventually reunited with her family. In the Netherlands, where she ended up with her biological mother at the age of eleven, she met her (now ex-)husband, an adopted Brazilian. Together they went looking for his biological family. “That grew into this foundation. Adopted children who come to me often say: why didn't my biological mother look for me? I therefore tell them that the mothers often do not know how to search. By bringing the DNA tests to the mothers, we also hope to help the children.”

The Brazilian Raimunda and her two other children celebrate Alessandro's birthday every year. “He will be 40 soon,” she says. "I hope he has a good life. Every day I ask God to watch over him.”

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