Chile prosecutes people for suspected baby abduction

Chile prosecutes people for suspected baby abduction

A dark chapter in Chile's history is illuminated again. During the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990, thousands of babies stolen from their biological mothers and sold for adoption, mostly to foreign couples from the US and Europe. In Chile they are called “The Children of Silence”.

First prosecution of child abductors

Now, for the first time in the country's history, a Chilean judge has announced that he will prosecute people who allegedly kidnapped babies. Alejandro Aguilar Brevis, a Supreme Court judge in Santiago, noted that a network of health officials, Catholic priests, lawyers, social workers and even a judge operated in the 1980s. These individuals typically kidnapped babies from low-income mothers and sold them for adoption to foreign couples, achieving amounts of up to $50,000, according to a news release from the Chilean judiciary on Monday.

The investigation and allegations

The ongoing investigation is focused on the city of San Fernando in central Chile and involves two babies who were stolen and given to foreign couples, according to the justice statement. According to that statement, the network was allegedly dedicated to “kidnapping or stealing infants for financial gain,” with the goal of taking them out of the country to various destinations in Europe and the United States.

The judge has filed charges and issued arrest warrants against five people who will remain in custody for the time being on charges of “criminal organization, child abduction and intentional misconduct,” according to the statement. The Chilean government has also submitted an extradition request to Israel for a former family judge who lives there and was allegedly involved.

Systematic kidnapping of babies

The judge ruled that the statute of limitations does not apply in this case because these are “crimes against humanity committed under a military regime and must be punished in accordance with the American Convention on Human Rights and the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.” The investigation was announced Monday, a day after Chilean President Gabriel Boric said a working group he set up last year to investigate cases of stolen babies had submitted its final report.

Following the working group's recommendations, Boric announced that the Chilean government "will create a genetic fingerprint bank that will provide additional resources to trace origins and enable family reunification for the many babies who have been stolen for so long and given to foreign families."

A glimmer of hope for affected families

Constanza del Río, founder and director of Nos Buscamos (We Are Looking For Us), an NGO in Santiago dedicated to reuniting families of stolen babies, expressed cautious optimism. She explains that the efforts of countries like Chile to find the truth about the stolen babies are “very slow and often represent a revictimization of the victims.” Del Río, himself a victim of illegal adoption, filed a lawsuit in 2017 to demand an investigation by the Chilean government. Authorities appointed a special prosecutor, but the investigation came to nothing.

President Boric has stated that the creation of a working group shows that his government is taking the issue seriously and publicly recognizing that the systematic abduction of babies in the past is a fact. There could be thousands of cases. The theft of thousands of babies in Chile has been documented by non-governmental organizations for over a decade. Since 2014, CNN has reported on numerous cases in which stolen babies were reunited with their biological mothers after DNA testing.

First successes and long journeys

Constanza del Río reports that Nos Buscamos alone has built a database that includes about 9,000 cases and has reunited more than 600 parents with their stolen children. Ten years ago, Marcela Labraña, then director of Chile's Child Protection Agency (SENAME), told CNN that her agency investigated hundreds of cases but suspected there could be many more. "This is no longer a myth. We know today that this happened and it was real. It is not a fairy tale told by a few people," Labraña said at the time.

CNN's Cristopher Ulloa contributed to this report.