After 40 years apart, a Chilean mother reunites with two children stolen during dictatorship

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Four decades after a brutal separation, Teresita de Jesús Padilla was able to embrace two of her children again, after they were taken from her native Chile by hospital workers in one of the thousands of illegal adoptions under the late Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

“God gave me back my children, whom I thought I had lost forever,” Padilla said moments after meeting Tim Rolnick and Travis Murdoch, 41 and 37, respectively, during their reunion in Santiago, Chile's capital.

The brothers, along with Travis's twin, were taken from their biological mother while she was still in the hospital. Their case is part of one of Chile's darkest chapters when child-trafficking coincided with many other human rights violations during Pinochet's 17-year reign. During the dictatorship, at least 3,095 people were killed or forcibly disappeared, according to government figures, and tens of thousands more were tortured or jailed for political reasons.

Both of Padilla's children grew up in the United States. They knew they were adopted but were unaware of the shadowy history behind their origins.

“It felt almost like I've known Teresita my whole life. I just felt a connection,” Rolnick said after reuniting with his biological mother. “It’s definitely something I will remember for the rest of my life."

Rolnick discovered in 2020 that he had an entire family in Chile who never stopped thinking of him. He also learned he had two brothers living just a few hundred miles from his home in Maryland.

“It all started when I was trying to find out about my medical history” through a MyHeritage DNA test, he explained.

Soon after, distant cousins and social organizations dedicated to investigating and reuniting families who had been illegally separated began contacting him. “And then it was like opening up Pandora’s box."

As he continued searching for answers, Rolnick discovered not only that he and his two brothers had been trafficked to the United States, but that he also had another sibling who remained in Chile.

Four years after Rolnick was illegally taken from his mother’s arms, his brothers, twins Travis and Chris, suffered the same fate and were also adopted by an American couple. Rolnick decided to reach out.

“I always wanted a brother, so I got three!” he said.

Today, the brothers share a close bond. Murdoch recalled being nervous and wondering whether his brother would show up.

“Then we met and he looked just like me and I was, like, this is super weird, very surreal," he added. “We started talking and getting to know each other and we clicked pretty quickly. Hanging out with him now feels like we’ve known each other for our entire lives.”

Six years after that initial contact, the two brothers were finally able to share their first embrace with Teresita in the Chilean capital . While Travis flew to Santiago, Chris was severely injured in a car accident in 2013 and was physically unable to make the long journey.

“A lot of nerves, I think more nerves for her than for me,” Murdoch said about the reunion. “I think for her it’s nice to finally meet us and move on from all this."

According to Chilean judicial reports obtained by The Associated Press, approximately 20,000 cases of forced or criminal adoptions took place during the 17 years of Pinochet’s military regime . However, civil society organizations such as Nos Buscamos estimate that more than 50,000 Chilean families have been affected.

“We still haven’t been able to identify the actual number of children who were taken out of Chile," Constanza del Río, the NGO’s director, told AP.

Del Río explained that the most vulnerable women, particularly those from Chile’s poorest regions, were the main targets of a child-trafficking network made up of social workers, doctors, judges and lawyers who arranged for children to be taken out of the country. In the 1970s, Chile was the third-largest exporter of children for illegal adoptions, after China and South Korea.

Padilla, now 66, was one of these women. Her father died when she was four and her family struggled with poverty since.

When she became pregnant, she saw the hospital as a refuge that could help her find a better life for her babies. However, she never expected that they would be violently taken away from her not just once, but twice.

“These women took my children away from me under threats, through sheer terror, and I suffered because of it my entire life,” Padilla said.

Despite the bittersweet feelings surrounding a reunion that finally took place after 41 years of pain and anguish, mother and sons share a common desire: to rebuild a fragmented family, create new memories and write the next chapters of a future that is only beginning.

“There’s no reason to look into the past too far and from here we can work toward the future,” Murdoch said.

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