Courts and DNA help Chile mothers search for ‘stolen babies’

SANTIAGO: Prosecutors are revisiting one of the darkest chapters of Chilean history, when under the Pinochet dictatorship hundreds and possibly thousands of babies were stolen from their mothers and given away just after being born.On July 9, 1977, Margarita Escobar gave birth to a baby girl at Santiago’s Paula Jaraquemade hospital. She saw her daughter for only a few moments before staff took her away.Four decades, Escobar hasn’t given up on meeting the grown woman her daughter may have become, buoyed by the prosecutors’ push for the truth about Chile’s stolen babies, and under-the-table adoptions.She told AFP hospital staff kept her sedated back then. "Every time I woke up I asked about her again, until a midwife told me, ‘your baby was stillborn.’"She wasn’t allowed to see the body. "Nobody even gave me a document. They sent me home. I don’t know how I got there. I was totally doped."Fast forward almost 10 years, to February 1985, and Maria Orellana gave birth in the same hospital to a boy she named Cristian. "I heard that he was a boy, then they gave me an injection and that was the last I knew about it," she told AFP.Like other mothers, she was told her baby had died and, as it would be "too cruel" for her to see the body, the hospital took care of the burial. "Keep the memory that you had of your little boy," she recalls being told.Like Escobar, Oreland was given no documentation "There is nothing. It is as if I had never even been in that hospital," she recalls now, determined like thousands of other mothers to find a child she never held.Tasked with helping thousands of mothers in the same situation, Chile’s Special Judge for Human Rights Mario Carroza has been investigating the kidnappings since January. Most occurred during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) but others have been reported as recently as 2000.Carroza has ruled out the state using child stealing as a means of repression, a tool commonly used by the military dictatorship in Argentina. Instead, he says the ultimate goal was financial gain, making Chile’s situation more reminiscent of Spain.The first trial in a case of "stolen babies" under Francisco Franco’s 1939-75 regime has just begun. The practice in Spain continued there long afterward for monetary gain."We have not established a link with a policy of state repression. It appears more like a kind of illicit association, an organisation set up to make money from illegal adoptions," said Pablo Rivera, a lawyer of the National Institute for Human Rights, who has filed complaints on behalf of the mothers.At the heart of the scheme was a network of social workers, nuns, doctors and municipal officials who identified mothers in vulnerable situations.

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