Nearly forty years after three of her children were forcibly taken from her in Chile, Teresita Padilla on Wednesday embraced two of them again, back in the country where they were born. Her sons Tim Rolnick, 41, and Travis Murdoch, 37, travelled from their home in Maryland to Chile for the reunion — two grown American men sitting on either side of the mother they were taken from as small children, holding her hands.
The reunion is the latest victory for the activists who use DNA testing and meticulous document-hunting to uncover thousands of child thefts and irregular adoptions carried out during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Authorities estimate as many as 20,000 children were forcibly taken from their parents by the military government, which argued that forced international adoptions would reduce child poverty. The children were sent abroad — many of them to the United States and Europe — and raised by other families, in large numbers of cases without their parents ever having consented.
What brought Padilla's sons home was genealogical research and DNA testing, with the help of Nos Buscamos, a Santiago-based organisation that is part of the broader effort by activists and relatives to reconnect the families separated by Chile's adoption scandal — one of the many human rights abuses of Pinochet's rule from 1973 to 1990. A DNA match can do what forty years of paperwork could not: prove, beyond argument, that the man in Maryland is the child who was taken in Chile.
Padilla had three children taken from her. On Wednesday she held two of them. The search that produced this reunion is the same search hundreds of other Chilean mothers — and thousands of now-adult children raised in America and Europe, many of whom grew up never knowing they were taken — are still living through, one DNA kit and one archive at a time.
For families, this is what the work of Nos Buscamos and groups like it actually delivers: not a report or an apology decades too late, but a mother holding her children's hands in the same room. And for the adoptees in the United States who have begun testing their DNA in recent years, it is proof the answers can still be found — the records exist, the matches are being made, and reunions that were impossible for forty years are now happening one family at a time.
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