Son stolen at birth 42 years ago in Chile hugs his biological mother for the first time

“Hi Mom”. What seems like an ordinary greeting between mother and son is not in this case.

42 years ago, hospital workers took the son of Maria Angelica Gonzalez from his arms immediately after he was born and was later told that he had died. She now met him in person at her home in Valdivia, Chile.

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“I love you so much,” he told her. Jimmy Lippert Thyden her birth mother as they tearfully hugged each other.

“It took my breath away… I felt suffocated by the enormity of this moment”said Thyden to The Associated Press in a video call after the meeting. “How do you hug someone in a way that makes up for 42 years of hugging?”

Her journey to find the birth family she never knew began in April after reading news about Chilean-born adoptees reunited with their birth relatives.s with the help of Nos Buscamos, a Chilean non-profit organization.

The organization discovered that Thyden had been born prematurely in a hospital in Santiago, the capital of Chili, and was put in an incubator. TO gonzalez they told her to leave the hospital, and when she returned for her baby, they told her that she had died and that her body had already been taken care of, according to the case file, that Thyden he summed up to the AP.

“The procedures I have for my adoption say that I have no living relatives. And in the last few months I found out that I have a mother and four brothers and a sister.”said Thyden in the interview from Ashburn, Virginia, where he works as a criminal defense attorney representing “people who look like me” who can’t afford a lawyer.

He said his was a “falsified adoption” case.

Nos Buscamos estimates that tens of thousands of babies were taken from Chilean families in the 1970s and 1980sbased on a report by the Chilean Investigative Police that reviewed the paper passports of Chilean children who left the country and never returned.

“The real story was that these children were stolen from poor families, poor women who didn’t know it. They didn’t know how to defend themselves.” commented Constanza del Río, founder and director of Nos Buscamos.

Child trafficking coincided with many other human rights violations that took place during the 17-year rule of General Augusto Pinochet, who on September 11, 1973 led a coup in Chile to overthrow President Salvador Allende. During the dictatorship, at least 3,095 people were killed, according to government figures, and tens of thousands more were tortured or imprisoned for political reasons.

In the last nine years, Nos Buscamos has coordinated more than 450 meetings between adoptees and their biological familiesDel Rio said.

Other nonprofit organizations do similar work, including Hijos y Madres del Silencio, in Chile, and Connecting Roots, in the United States.

Nos Buscamos has been associated for two years with the genealogy platform MyHeritagewhich provides free home DNA test kits for distribution to Chilean adoptees and suspected victims of child trafficking in Chile.

Thyden’s DNA test confirmed that he was 100% Chilean, linking him to a first cousin who also uses the MyHeritage platform.

Thyden sent his cousin his adoption papers, which included his biological mother’s address and a very common name in Chile: María Angélica González.

It turns out that his cousin had a family name Maria Angelica Gonzalez from his mother and helped him make the connection.

But González did not want to answer her phone calls until he sent her a text message with a picture of his wife and daughters.

“Then the dam just burst”said Thydenwho sent more photos of the American family that adopted him, his time in the United States Marine Corps, his wedding, and many other memorable moments in his life.

“I was trying to show her 42 years of a life that was taken from her. It was taken from both of us,” she added.

He traveled to Chile with his wife, Johannah, and their two daughters, Ebba Joy, 8, and Betty Grace, 5, to meet their newfound family.

Upon entering his mother’s house, Thyden was greeted with 42 colored balloons, each of which represented a year of lost time with his Chilean family.

“There is an empowerment in popping those balloons, an empowerment in being there with your family to take inventory of all that was lost.” explained.

Thyden remembers his biological mother’s response to learning about him: “Son: you have no idea how much I have cried for you. How many nights I spent awake praying that God would allow me to live long enough to find out what happened to you.

González declined to be interviewed for this story.

Thyden, along with his wife and daughters, visited the Santiago Zoo, where his American family took him for the first time after adoption. This time his tour guide was his biological sister.

back home from gonzalezThyden realized that he and his mother share a love of cooking.

“I have my hands in the same mass as my mother”, he said as they made empanadas together. He vowed to continue using the family recipe to stay connected to his family and his culture.

Thyden said her adoptive parents support her journey to reunite with her birth relatives.but who were “involuntary victims” of a wide network of illegal adoptions and are struggling with the reality of the situation.

“My parents wanted a family, but they never wanted it like this,” said. “Not for extortion of another, for robbery of another.”

Through a spokesperson, her parents declined to comment.

Yes ok Thyden successfully reunited with his birth family, he acknowledges that reunification may not go as smoothly for other adoptees.

“It could have been a much worse story.” express. “There are people who discover truly unfortunate details about their origin.”

while he was in ChiliThyden and Del Río met with one of seven investigators working to address thousands of falsified adoption cases like theirs.

“We don’t want money, we just want human recognition that this horrible event happened in Chile, and the commitment that this will not continue to happen in the future,” Del Rio said. “We are trying to make a difference. Not only with Jimmy and his family, but we want to make it, the change, in the country ”.

Thyden He also met with Juan Gabriel Valdés, the Chilean ambassador to the United States, to seek that the government recognize the systematic manipulation of adoptions.

He said there was no mechanism—financial or otherwise—to help Chilean adoptees in their efforts to visit their country of origin. He added that he sold a van to pay for his family’s plane tickets and other expenses.

“People need to be able to decide… what their name will be, where their citizenship will be. They should have access to both,” she said. “They should have all the rights and privileges of a Chilean citizen because this is something that happened to them, not that they chose.”

The Chilean embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Source: Elcomercio

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I am Jack Morton and I work in 24 News Recorder. I mostly cover world news and I have also authored 24 news recorder. I find this work highly interesting and it allows me to keep up with current events happening around the world.