Stolen Identity: A Journey of Rediscovery

For a staggering 42 years, my mother lived with the unbearable pain of believing I was dead. I was born in a state hospital in Santiago, Chile, on October 31, 1980, like countless other children who were tragically stolen from their families. My mamá recalls how hospital staff informed her that I had jaundice and needed to be placed in an incubator. Before she could even name me or hold me in her arms, I was taken away. They coldly told her, “Your son is dead. You can go.”

What she didn’t know was that I had been transported to a state-run orphanage, mere blocks away from the very hospital where I took my first breath. The operation was chillingly straightforward: traffickers abducted infants from hospitals, creating fraudulent documentation to facilitate illegal adoptions. These stolen children were then handed over to adoption agencies and private adopters, who rarely bothered to verify the legitimacy of these adoptions. When I was just two years old, I was adopted by a couple in Virginia, blissfully unaware that my life had been built upon a foundation of deceit. My American parents provided me with an education, a loving home, and a supportive family, yet in the process, I was stripped of my language, culture, and Indigenous heritage. I was assimilated and given a new identity as an American boy named Jimmy.

Some may read this and think, “You should be grateful. You probably had a better life.” This sentiment is a common expectation placed upon adoptees. However, this is not a matter of simply providing a child with a better life; it’s about the profound injustice of stealing children.

During the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean government actively promoted international adoptions as a means to alleviate poverty. Pinochet was not only a dictator but also a staunch classist, and his regime sought to improve Chile’s economic standing at the expense of the nation’s marginalized, particularly the poor and Indigenous populations. To fulfill this objective, a national network involving judges, lawyers, healthcare providers, and clergy frequently invaded churches, hospitals, and women’s shelters to seize babies from vulnerable women—often single and impoverished, like my mamá.

International adoptions, as the government rationalized, saved money compared to supporting destitute families. Some adoptive parents even paid adoption agencies exorbitant fees—sometimes tens of thousands of dollars—for a child, with many of these innocent lives shipped off to Europe and North America. According to judiciary reports in Chile obtained by The Associated Press, there have been approximately 20,000 documented cases of criminal adoptions. However, civil society organizations estimate that the true number of children and newborns trafficked out of Chile could be as high as 50,000 between the 1950s and the 1990s.

In July 2024, I took a courageous step and filed a lawsuit against the Chilean state on behalf of all the mamás and their stolen children, asserting that the government had egregiously violated the human rights of both parties. I am demanding that the Chilean government recognize the harm it has inflicted, establish a truth commission to identify all the victims, and acknowledge the citizenship of the adoptees and their descendants.