In the final phase of the government of Sebastián Piñera, and in the midst of the announcement by the ministerial cabinet of future president Gabriel Boric, in recent days Chile has taken another step in reviewing crimes committed by the military during the dictatorship — and towards historic reparation to who suffered with them.
Last week, the president who leaves office on March 11th launched a project that aims to speed up the search for babies kidnapped in the regime of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). In short, the initiative will make contributions of money and the purchase of DNA kits so that organizations dedicated to this search can carry out their work.
Justice Minister Hernán Larraín said that, in this way, the Chilean government will “collaborate with people whose children were adopted irregularly or were falsely registered, having been taken from mothers and fathers, in acts that go against human dignity”. Despite the intentions, the program was criticized in society and even among the associations possibly benefited.
First, due to the delay: the matter was among Piñera’s campaign promises in 2017, but only now has it come into force. Secondly – and mainly – because, according to these groups, the State abstains from any responsibility for the crimes by the way in which the initiative is designed.
“These are crimes committed by the State, so we ask that the State establish a National Commission for Truth, Justice and Reparations” that can centralize the searches, he said in a statement to Hijos y Madres del Silencio. The organization that began its work in an organized way in 2014 is dedicated to identifying minors kidnapped from their parents in the 1970s, similar to what the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo do in Argentina.
When talking about kidnappings of babies during the Southern Cone dictatorships, this Buenos Aires group is the best-known example. Since 1978, the grandmothers have found 138 people and given them back their original identities — Argentine repression is believed to have snatched more than 500 children from their mothers, handing them over to be raised by people close to the military or by themselves.
In the neighboring country, Hijos y Madres del Silencio is also looking for at least 579 babies who were taken from their parents mainly in the 1970s, at the beginning of the Pinochet dictatorship. Although the atrocious practice had the same end, its motivations were, on some scale, different.
In Argentina, child abduction was generally related to family political activity. The stolen babies were generally the children of leftist militants, Montoneros (a Peronist urban guerrilla) and other opponents of the military regime (1976-1983). Killed in detention centers or thrown into the Rio de la Plata in the so-called “death flights”, these people did not know the fate of their children.
In Chile, an investigation that has been carried out by Judge Mario Carroza since 2018 has shown that the motivation for these crimes was different. Under the pretext of acting in a regime plan to eradicate poverty in the country, religious, social workers, judges, doctors and nurses acted, paid by the State, as intermediaries between humble families —many of them Mapuche indigenous peoples— and foreigners interested in having children. .
Adoptions were made via payment to the Chilean State.
According to the reports collected in the investigations, it was common for the biological parents to be told that the baby had died shortly after birth, while the adoption certificates contained a false statement that the child had been voluntarily delivered. Adoptive parents were told that they were children from very humble families, who said they were not in a position to raise them, or prostitutes who did not want responsibility, because they did not know who the father was and did not count on his help.
“It was really a business, a very profitable business and based on a crime against humanity”, he tells leaf Marisol Rodríguez, from Hijos y Madres del Silencio. The association has already promoted 230 meetings and also counts 237 children looking for their biological parents and 357 families looking for their children. Among the countries where most Chileans were illegally delivered are Sweden, the USA, Argentina and Uruguay.
For Carroza, although 579 illegal adoptions by foreign couples in the 1970s are under investigation, that number could be much higher, between 700 and up to 20,000.
The lack of legal support for families and abductees was another problem pointed out in the Piñera government project by critics of the text. Deputy Boris Barrera, from the Communist Party, was one of those who made this point, based on the support that involves the association of Argentine grandmothers.
He states that the Chilean program does not cover aspects such as psychological support teams, lawyers and technicians who can help from obtaining new documents to the relationship with biological and, mainly, adoptive families – since many of them are subject to legal process, depending on what they knew about the process.
The parliamentarian also echoed the fact that the program delegated to NGOs a responsibility that would belong to the Chilean State.
Other criticisms of the plan involve the DNA kits being purchased — which would not match the standard needed for this type of search — and the absence in the text of a government commitment to create a genetic database, along the lines of what is used. in Argentina by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. The resource, an international reference in cases of missing persons, would keep the information under the protection of the identity of those who undertake to leave their material there to search for relatives.
“Discovering yourself as an adult being a person taken so young from your family is something traumatic. A government project must be more comprehensive in terms of what it can do for these citizens, who are Chileans”, says Barrera.
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