A Chilean woman whose twin daughters were stolen from her in 1979 has reunited with them for the first time in four-and-a-half decades.
The emotional reunion between María Verónica Soto, 64, and her daughters Maria Beatrice and Adelia Rose Mereu Chessa took place in the Chilean city of Concepción, in coastal Biobío province, after the twins, who are now 46 years old, flew back from Italy, where they grew up.
It was the first time Soto had seen her daughters since they were eight months old. The twins had always known they had been adopted in Chile, but had no recollection of their mother.
In 1979, when Chile was under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, 19-year-old Soto gave birth to the twin girls in the coastal town of Hualpén in Biobío province. After a routine doctor’s visit when her daughters were eight months old, Soto said, she was told her daughters needed to stay for evaluation. She said she was promised medical and nutrition help. But shortly thereafter, she said, the government clinic took her babies from her, accusing her of not feeding them properly. When she went to the police, she was told to go to the courthouse. That’s where she learned her babies had been placed in adoption with an Italian couple. Soto would later learn her daughters’ birth certificates had been altered to say that no parent had shown up to register the babies.
‘Children of Silence’
According to Chilean officials, during the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 to 1990, thousands of babies were stolen from their biological mothers and sold into adoption, mainly to couples from the United States and Europe. In Chile, they’re known as “the Children of Silence.”
Some babies were stolen from vulnerable, impoverished women and illegally sold to adoption agencies, as it appears to be the case with Soto’s daughters. Other newborns were given away by their grandparents who conspired with doctors, priests and nuns to hide a daughter’s socially embarrassing pregnancy. In many cases, the statute of limitations has run out. In others, those who were behind the theft of babies have died. During the repressive dictatorship, when thousands of dissenters were murdered or disappeared, standing up for one’s rights could mean jail or worse.
“They listen to women now. Back then, they didn’t listen to women. They didn’t listen to mothers. We women could not speak up in those years like we can now,” Soto said.
In June, for the first time in the country’s history, a Chilean judge announced he was prosecuting five individuals for allegedly stealing babies for adoption. 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 identified babies from mainly impoverished mothers and sold them into adoption to foreign couples for as much as $50,000, according to a press release by Chile’s judiciary.
The judge charged and issued arrest warrants for the five people, who he said should remain in pre-trial detention for “criminal association, child abduction and willful misconduct,” the release said. The investigation, which is focused on the city of San Fernando in central Chile, is not related to Soto’s case.
‘We finally found our mother’
Soto says she never lost hope that one day she would reunite with her daughters. She just didn’t know it would take 45 years. “Momma always kept looking for you,” she told her daughters during their tearful embrace.
In 2020, she decided to send a sample to a DNA bank in the United States managed by My Heritage, an online genealogy platform. The bank is designed to help connect children with their lost biological parents. “And I said, ‘In this little envelope goes all my hopes of finding my girls.’ And then it happened,” Soto said.
But it was not until early this year that the son of one of the twins decided to submit a DNA sample of his mother. It was a match. That led to several months of planning and back-and-forth calls between the twins, their mother and her family in Chile until a meeting was arranged.
On September 10, the twins flew from Italy to Chile, landing in Concepción. The normally quiet airport turned festive. In addition to Soto and her extended family, journalists and local officials joined a large group of people waiting for the arrival of the twins.
The twins ran to their biological mother’s arms for a long, heartfelt hug as Soto repeatedly said, “Momma always looked for you.” Soto doesn’t speak Italian and the twins have yet to learn any Spanish, but the emotion of the moment needed no translation.
“So many emotions and very, very, happy because we finally found our mother … we want to be with her, with the family, all the brothers, all the uncles, all the cousins, everybody!” Maria Beatrice Mereu Chessa said speaking for both sisters.
“God heard me,” Soto said after the joyful reunion. “For me, this has been like giving birth to my daughters again, but in an adult version.”
Soto and her twins say both families were deceived – their family in Chile and their adoptive parents in Italy who didn’t know the girls had been taken away from their biological mother without her consent.
Even though she spent nearly half a century apart from her twin daughters, Soto says she considers herself blessed. There are many mothers, she said, who have yet to find their long-lost children and others who died waiting for a reunion like hers that never materialized.
“I fought until I found my girls. That’s why I tell those mothers not to stop fighting. Knock on doors because now there are more possibilities [with] technology,” Soto said.
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