Chile’s stolen children: a new effort offers hope to Pinochet-era international adoptees

Mirjam Hunze grew up in the quiet Dutch town of Lunteren, but always felt too loud, too different, too curious in her strict Protestant household. She was 10 years old when she found out she had been adopted from Chile, sparking a lifelong quest to find her biological family. Hunze’s Chilean birth certificate and passport listed her Dutch adoptive name, with the fields for her biological parents and place of birth conspicuously crossed out.

Hunze’s Dutch adoptive parents – who were unable to conceive biologically – had been given the number of a Dutch woman, Gertie Vogel, who lived in Chile and told them she could secure a baby. They paid an undisclosed amount for Mirjam, who arrived in Amsterdam on 19 October 1972, brought over by a KLM flight attendant.

“My adoption wasn’t done through an agency, but a network of individuals,” said Hunze in the picturesque town of Giethoorn, where she now lives with her partner and children.

Hunze is one of an estimated 20,000 Chileans who were adopted abroad under irregular circumstances between the 1950s and the 1990s, most of them during the 17-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Babies were smuggled to the Netherlands, Sweden, the US, France and other countries through extensive networks of priests, nuns, judges and social workers who exploited lax government protocols and the demand for international adoptions. Significant sums of money changed hands in the process.

Over the past decade, the advent of self-testing DNA kits and online social networks has led to hundreds of Chilean adoptees finding their biological parents, uncovering shocking stories in which biological parents were falsely told their babies had died in childbirth, or were coerced into temporarily handing over their babies to social workers, never to see them again.

Now Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, has announced the formation of a taskforce drawing on several government branches and state institutions to investigate irregular international adoptions.

“The first phase is to organise the information we have and get all contacts in place,” said Luis Cordero Vega, Chile’s justice and human rights minister, in an interview. “[We] must go beyond judicial and criminal investigations to pursue the truth. Adoptees need to know their origins.”

Chile’s past efforts to reunite families have been dogged by problems – a 2019 state initiative to create a genetic databank was indefinitely paused when the pandemic hit. A judicial investigation into adoption irregularities was launched by the Chilean supreme court in 2018, but the process has been marred with controversy. In April, the investigation’s sole judge, Jaime Balmaceda, was dismissed after telling a newspaper that he found “no evidence of criminality”. He added that it was not a crime for medical professionals to deceive mothers into thinking their babies were dead, but instead a “morally reprehensible act”.

Balmaceda’s comments provoked rage from social organisations in Chile, which successfully rallied for his dismissal in May. His replacement, Guillermo de la Barra, took over on 1 July.

“Judge Balmaceda did not view these cases as a matter of state responsibility,” said Karen Alfaro, an academic at the Austral University in Valdivia who researches illegal adoptions. “Many cases were closed due to lack of evidence because those responsible had passed away.”

Balmaceda also reached the controversial conclusion that the adoptions were not linked to the 1973-1990 Pinochet dictatorship, a finding which Alfaro and others have strongly disputed. “The Chilean dictatorship was deeply classist. It sought to generate economic development at the expense of eugenics against the lower classes,” she said, and has published work proving the dictatorship actively pushed international adoption policy to slash poverty rates.

So far, only civil organisations have worked to help reunite biological families. Cordero Vega stresses that the government’s renewed efforts will “establish a policy” to help adoptees find their roots “as a state obligation”.

About 2,200 Chilean babies were adopted by Swedish parents from 1970 to 1990, and on a state visit to Sweden earlier this month Cordero Vega and Boric met Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, pledging the two countries would work together to investigate irregular adoptions.

Viví Haggren’s adoption was arranged through the Swedish NGO Adoption Centre in 1973. Her adoptive parents had been put in touch with Anna Maria Elmgren, a Swedish Adoption Centre employee who lived in Chile.

Elmgren oversaw dozens of Chilean adoptions to Sweden, including Maria Diemar’s, who found her biological Chilean mother in 2003. Diemar’s mother told Maria that she had been stolen at birth, and forced into signing a document that she was unable to read.

After hearing the stories of fellow Chilean adoptees like Diemar, Haggren questioned the circumstances of her own adoption. Her Swedish parents were told she was abandoned by her birth mother at a hospital – but Haggren found contradictions in her paperwork.

“All my papers are false. I have a birth certificate dated May 25, with my name, Viví Haggren. But, according to my adoptive parents, I wasn’t named until August 28,” she said. “So how can my Swedish name already be on the papers dated in May?”

Elmgren is now in her 90s and still lives in Chile. Her attorney told the Guardian in 2021 that the adoptions she oversaw met the requirements of Chilean law.

Related: Adoptee stolen at birth sues Chile over thousands of dictatorship-era thefts

Haggren hopes that the renewed Swedish and Chilean efforts will finally provide answers and that Elmgren will be legally obliged to provide more information. “She’s old now, but she should be held responsible,” she said.

Both Sweden and the Netherlands have recently halted international adoptions after thousands of adoptees from countries including South Korea, Colombia, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Ethiopia discovered that their documents had been forged or tampered with. In 2021, the Swedish government launched an investigation and plans to publish the findings this year.

The Netherlands published a report in 2021, but the findings did little apart from acknowledging widespread irregularities in international adoptions.

Hunze says Dutch authorities have refused to help her, and her individual quest for answers has been blighted by misinformation. In 1998, Hunze contacted Gertrudis Kuijpers, a Dutch woman living in Chile, to find her biological family. Within two years, Kuijpers, who called herself a nun, said she had found Hunze’s Chilean family.

Twenty years later, Hunze and her Chilean family decided to take a DNA test – only to find they were not relatives: Kuijpers had scammed them. “That day was hell,” said Hunze. “I was screaming, crying.”

Dozens of Chilean adoptees have accused Kuijpers of crimes including extortion and trafficking, which she strenuously denied before she died last year. An investigation by the Dutch press revealed that Kuijpers was not a nun and had been kicked out of several convents for manipulation and dishonesty.

“She was a criminal,” said Hunze, who now runs the Dutch-based organisation Chilean Adoptees. Hunze says that Kuijpers belonged to a large network, with many culprits still alive, living in the Netherlands.

She hopes that the Chilean state efforts will yield answers and pressure the Dutch government to act – fast. “The Dutch victims want to testify,” she said. “There is a criminal web that knows what happened, and so many are already gone, or dead.”