The plan was simple: Traffickers took babies out of hospitals, then created fraudulent documents to put the children through illegal adoptions. Babies were given to adoption agencies and private adopters, both of whom rarely ensured the legitimacy of their status.
Under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean state promoted international adoptions as a way to reduce poverty rates. Mr. Pinochet was not only a dictator, he was profoundly classist, and his administration sought to better Chile's economic standing at the expense of the country's lower economic class.
Some people will read this last sentence and think: You should be thankful. You probably had a better life. Adoptees are often expected to be grateful. But this isn't about giving an adopted child a better life, this is about stealing kids.
I was stripped of my language, culture and Indigenous roots. I was assimilated, given the new identity of an American boy named Jimmy.
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