Chile's stolen children: 'I was tricked into handing over my baby'

[Judi Lynn]

By Jane Chambers
Temuco, Chile
26 September 2019

Thousands of Chilean children were stolen from their mothers during the military rule of Gen Augusto Pinochet and sent abroad for adoption. A government investigation is looking into how the babies were taken.

Sara Jineo is still extremely upset about what happened when she took her four-day-old baby boy, Camilo, to the hospital in Temuco, southern Chile, in 1988.

"They tricked me," she says. "They made me go to the hospital and said they were going to do a blood test on my baby."

But the woman who took Camilo out of her arms never brought him back. "I looked all over the hospital and when I went outside and asked a policeman for help, he looked at me, laughed, and said I was mad," she says.

Sara, who still lives outside Temuco, has been looking for her son for the last 30 years. She is convinced he was taken abroad. She says a local taxi driver told her about a woman taking a crying baby to the local airport on the same day Camilo disappeared. The child was apparently wrapped in the same distinctive baby blanket she had used.

Her situation is not unique. Sara is part of a generation of mothers and children trying to find each other after being involuntarily separated during Gen Augusto Pinochet's military rule from 1973 to 1990.

More:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-48929112