A 42-year-old lawyer who was kidnapped as a newborn by soldiers during Augusto Pinochet’s military regime in Chile, raised in the US, traveled thousands of kilometers to meet, for the first time, his biological mother.

“She didn’t know about me, they took me as soon as I was born, they told her I was dead,” Jimmy Lippert Theiden explained in a video he uploaded to the TikTok platform from the plane he was on to meet the woman who brought him into the world.

“We never held each other, never hugged,” he added.

After walking down the street where she lives, in Valdivia, 740 kilometers south of Chile’s capital, Santiago, with flowers in his hands, Mr. Lippert Theiden, with tears in his eyes, was finally able to take Maria Angelica Gonzalez in his arms .

He traveled to Chile with his wife and their two daughters, who also met their grandmother, as he did his mother, for the first time.

He was able to find her thanks to DNA tests, research on the MyHeritage.com website and the work of Nos Buscamos, a non-governmental organization that tries to reunite families that were mostly separated during the junta.

Thousands of people disappeared during the years of General Pinochet’s dictatorship.

The founder of this NGO, Constanza del Rio, created it because she was unable to find information about her own biological family.

To date, Nos Buscamos says it has managed to find and connect 400 people who had lost their loved ones.

This “is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of cases of infant trafficking during the dictatorship, and even after democracy was restored,” Ms. del Rio explained. “These children were declared dead and sold to foreigners for $10 to $15,000,” he added.