CNN
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It’s a dark chapter in Chile’s history.
During the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990, thousands of babies were stolen from their biological mothers and sold into adoption, mainly to foreign couples from the United States and Europe. In Chile, they’re known as “The Children of Silence.”
And now, for the first time in the country’s history, a Chilean judge announced he was prosecuting individuals alleged to have stolen babies in the country.
Alejandro Aguilar Brevis, a Santiago Court of Appeals judge in charge of the investigation “determined that in the 1980s” there was a network of health officials, Catholic priests, attorneys, social workers and even a judge who detected and delivered stole babies from mainly impoverished mothers and sold them into adoption to foreign couples for as much as $50,000, according to a Monday press release by Chile’s judiciary.
The investigation, which focuses on the city of San Fernando in central Chile, involves two babies who were stolen and handed over to foreign couples, according to the judiciary statement.
According to the statement by Chile’s judiciary, the ring allegedly focused on “abducting or stealing infants for monetary gain” with the purpose of “taking them out of the country to different destinations in Europe and the US.”
The judge charged and issued arrest warrants for five people, who he said should remain in pre-trial detention for “criminal association, child abduction, and willful misconduct,” the release said.
The Chilean government has made an extradition request to Israel for a former Chilean family court judge who now lives there and was allegedly involved, the release added.
CNN contacted the judiciary to determine if those involved have legal representation and how they respond to the allegations, but there has been no response so far.
The judge ruled that the statute of limitations does not apply in this case because as “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, one day after Chilean President Gabriel Boric said that a task force he created last year to investigate cases of stolen babies has issued its final report.
Following its recommendations, Boric said the Chilean government will “create a genetic fingerprint bank that will provide additional means of searching for origins and enable family reunification for the many babies who were stolen for so long and given to foreign families.”
Constanza del Río, founder and director of Nos Buscamos (We Are Looking for Each Other), a Santiago NGO dedicated to reuniting families of stolen babies said that she feels cautiously optimistic because actions by countries like Chile to find the truth about the stolen babies have been “very slow and something that revictimizes the victims.”
Del Río, herself a victim of an illegal adoption, filed a lawsuit in 2017 demanding an investigation by the Chilean government. Authorities named a special prosecutor, but the investigation went nowhere, she said. Another prosecutor took the case for five years only to declare last year that he hadn’t been able “to establish that any crimes have been committed,” according to Del Rio.
President Boric has said creating a task force proves his government is serious about the issue and has spoken publicly about it, recognizing the systematic theft of babies back then as a fact.
There could be tens of thousands of cases. The theft of thousands of babies in Chile has been documented for over a decade by non-governmental organizations. Since 2014, CNN has reported about multiple cases where people stolen as babies have reunited with their biological mothers after DNA tests proved they were, in fact, related.
Constanza del Río says Nos Buscamos alone has built a database that includes about 9,000 cases and has helped reunite more than 600 parents with their stolen children.
Ten years ago, Marcela Labraña, the then-director of the country’s child protection agency (SENAME, by its Spanish acronym), told CNN her agency was investigating hundreds of cases but suspected there could be thousands more.
“This is no longer a myth. We know nowadays that this happened, and it was real. It’s not a tale that a couple of people were telling,” Labraña said at the time.
