San Francisco Frontiers - 'Worst is over' as Chile's 'stolen' babies reunite with mothers

Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad.

"The worst is over," Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago.

Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the United States.

Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to 1990 -- most of them during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Garcia lives in Puerto Rico, where she works in the financial sector. On her way to reunite with her biological family, she spoke to AFP at a hotel in Houston.

She broke down in tears as she recounted how, as a child, she accidentally found out she was adopted, and then tried for years to shelve the knowledge, before finally making peace with it.

"I am fortunate. I have my mom and dad (in the United States), and now I have another mom and three brothers" in Chile, she said.

Last October, a DNA test confirmed her origins and Garcia arranged to meet her birth mom through the foundation Connecting Roots, which has so far reconnected 36 Chilean women with children taken from them against their will.

- 'Trickery, threats and coercion' -

Infants were taken from their mothers in Chile in a money-making scheme involving doctors, social workers and judges, according to investigations into the matter.

They were delivered to foreign adoptive parents, in some cases for as much as $40,000.

"How were these children taken? Some were (falsely) declared dead at birth, others were stolen from hospitals and institutions or taken from mothers who were manipulated and pressured into giving them up for adoption through trickery, threats and coercion," Connecting Roots vice president Juan Luis Insunza told AFP.

Before Saturday's reunion, Bizama recounted how she was bullied into giving up her newborn daughter by a social worker who told her she could not adequately care for another child.

She was 23 years old at the time, with two other children and a job as a domestic worker, she told AFP in her home city of San Antonio, some 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Santiago.

The father of the child had left her.

"Then they took the baby, and once everything (the paperwork) was done, they sent me away... I left, looking around, not knowing what to do. I wanted to run and find my baby, but it was already done."

Bizama said she "never forgot" about Adamary, even though she did not know even her name.

"She was always here in my mind, in my heart. That's why now I call her 'daughter of my heart'."

For Garcia, whose search started last year after she read an article about baby thefts in Chile, "it has been complex to process this new reality," in which she regards both her birth and adoptive mothers as victims.

But from the first video call with Bizama, she said, she felt "only love."

- 'Out of the blue' -

In Coconut Creek, Florida, the apartment of Adamary's adoptive mother Doria Garcia's abounds with photos of her daughter at different ages.

The 80-year-old Cuban-American told AFP how in 1984, she traveled to Chile to receive her three-month-old daughter, after completing "the usual procedures."

"I have her little face ingrained in my memory: when they handed her to me, smiling," the retired medical assistant recalled.

"And when I held her in my arms, I swear it felt like my heart was bursting."

With pride she describes her daughter as a professional with a good job, but above all "happy."

It was through Adamary's journey that she learned about Chile's stolen babies, she said, and expressed gratitude that her daughter has found a "family that, out of the blue, appears when she's already 41 years old."

burs-ps/mlr/acb

H.King--SFF