Son stolen at birth hugs Chilean mother for first time in 42 years

Washington, Aug. 30: What seems like an unremarkable greeting between mother and son was in this case anything but.

Forty-two years ago, hospital workers took María Angélica González’s son from her arms right after birth and later told her he had died. Now, she was meeting him face-to-face at her home in Valdivia, Chile.

“I love you very much,” Jimmy Lippert Thyden told his mother in Spanish as they embraced amid tears.

“It knocked the wind out of me. I was suffocated by the gravity of this moment,” Thyden told The Associated Press in a video call after the reunion. “How do you hug someone in a way that makes up for 42 years of hugs?”

His journey to find the birth family he never knew began in April after he read news stories about Chilean-born adoptees who had been reunited with their birth relatives with the help of a Chilean nonprofit Nos Buscamos.

The organization found that Thyden had been born prematurely at a hospital in Santiago, Chile's capital, and placed in an incubator. González was told to leave the hospital, but when she returned to get her baby, she was told he had died and his body had been disposed of, according to the case file, which Thyden summarized to the AP.

“The paperwork I have for my adoption tells me I have no living relatives. And I learned in the last few months that I have a mama and I have four brothers and a sister,” Thyden said in the interview from Ashburn, Virginia, where he works as a criminal defence attorney representing “people who look like me” who cannot afford a lawyer.

He said his was a case of “counterfeit adoption.”

Nos Buscamos estimates tens of thousands of babies were taken from Chilean families in the 1970s and 1980s, based on a report from the Investigations Police of Chile which reviewed the paper passports of Chilean children who left the country and never came back.

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

The child-trafficking coincided with many other human rights violations that took place during the 17-year reign of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who on Sept. 11, 1973, led a Chilean coup to overthrow Marxist 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 jailed for political reasons.

Over the past nine years, Nos Buscamos has orchestrated more than 450 reunions between adoptees and their birth families, del Río said.

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

Nos Buscamos has been partnering for two years with genealogy platform MyHeritage, which provides free at-home DNA testing kits for distribution to Chilean adoptees and suspected victims of child trafficking in Chile.

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

Thyden sent the cousin his adoption papers, which included an address for his birth mother and a very common name in Chile: María Angélica González.

It turns out his cousin had a María Angélica González on their mother’s side and helped him make the connection. (AP)