“I knew she would find me,” says Edita Bisama, 64, from her home in the seaside town of San Antonio of Chile, after finally reuniting with her daughter, almost 40 years after taking her during her dictatorship. Augusto Pinochet.

Adamari Garcia left her mother a few days after her birth and was sent abroad for adoption. It is one of the up to 20,000 children who, according to authorities’ calculations, were hardly detached by their parents from the junta who considered international adoptions as a means to reduce childish poverty.

“There was a social worker who was persistent, very persistent,” Bisama said. It was in 1984 and Bisama, who had two young children, had spoken during her pregnancy about the possibility of the infant for adoption. But then he made second thoughts.

“But the social worker said, how would you raise three children? You have no job, you have no home, you have no stability. ” After the birth of her daughter, Bisama stayed with her for five days, taking care of and feeding her. Then, she was transported to an office that abstained for a few hours there, forced her to give the baby and sent her back to her city by bus.

The woman has kept it a secret by most of her family members for decades. She had no name or some way to find her daughter.

Thousands of kilometers away, Adamari Garcia, who grew up in Florida and now lives in Puerto Rico, knew she was adopted but had no information on her adoption conditions. A friend talked about Tyler graffle, a Texan firefighter who learned that he was grabbed when he was a baby during the dictatorship in Chile, and founded a non -governmental organization, Connecting Roots, to reunite the adopted children with Their biological families.

The organization linked Garcia with the Bisama family through her sister’s birth certificate. The DNA test then confirmed that Edita and Antamari were a mother and daughter.

Garcia, now 41 years old, looks like her biological mother and her two sisters. Like her older sister, she adores dogs – the two women, separately, have saved dozens of dogs. However, its Puerto Rican pronunciation makes it stand out from the rest of the family, who speak the Chilean Spanish.

“We were looking at each other and we weren’t talking much,” said Garcia, reaping the first time she saw her mother via the Zoom platform. “I was looking at her eyes and thinking, that’s what brought me to life and, my God, how much I look like her.”

Last week, the family met closely.

Garcia is one of the five adopted children that NGO Connecting Roots brought back to Chile this year. Graf said the government supports the organization’s efforts, noting that its goal is not a politician but simply to reunite the families “before it’s too late”.

“Mothers grow old, some have died. So we fight with time, “he explained.

Usually, the parents who adopted babies had no idea of ​​the conditions of their “kidnapping”. Garcia said her adoptive parents were very supportive when she decided to find her biological family. Now, she is doing intensive lessons in Chilean … cuisine, music and culture and plans to make a trip to Patagonia with her sisters.