International adoptions: children “exported” from Chile to Switzerland

More than 20,000 Chilean children were offered to adoption abroad until the early 1990s. With the help of the Embassy in Santiago for Switzerland.

Since the end of the 1970s, always more couples have started to adopt children in Switzerland from abroad, and often from countries that were then said to be in the process of development. Switzerland did not count at that time enough orphans for couples wanting to fill their desire for a child, and also extract them from poverty. More than 15,000 children have been adopted until the year 2000 according to statistics.

Chile was particularly appreciated “due to the white color of the skin,” said the Swiss Embassy in a note in 1989. At least 384 of them were adopted by Swiss couples. We have made up for Swissinfo in total 34 anonymized files, extracts from the archives of various Swiss cantons, concerning these adoptions.

Up to 20,000 allegedly abandoned children have been offered to adoption in Chile, according to several estimates. Orphans who were often torn from their mothers with doubtful intermediaries taking advantage of the situation. Adults, these children require explanations and repairs.

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Supposed abandonment of the mother

Domiciled in Vevey, in the canton of Vaud, Angeline-Lolita Masson was adopted at the age of three months. “I always thought it was my biological mother who had abandoned me,” she says. During his adoption, a lawyer had explained to adoptive parents that a sex worker had left aside the newborn and that it was he who had saved him.

But two years ago, Angeline-Lolita Masson, now 37 years old, finally discovered the pot with roses. His real mother, Clementina Rosa Becerra León, also in search of her child for a long time, had in fact been forced to abandon him, and the lawyer had undoubtedly perceived money.

The number of mothers who have suffered the same fate is in the thousands. In March, in front of the Santiago Human Rights Museum, hand -knitted slippers and showing the way for a cardboard figurine removing a child were shown during an installation of the Hijos Y Madres del Silencio (HMS), bringing together organic mothers from Chile.

Often unmarried and young pregnant, and from many ethnic minorities, these women mostly came from the countryside or poor districts of the big cities of Chile. They had been removed their children shortly after birth. Hospital staff told them that the latter were stillborn. Social workers or parents of the mothers concerned also forced them to abandon them.

The role of Chilean courts

Investigations carried out by various media, in particular by the Chilean Ciper information portal, made it possible to establish that judges had played a leading role in these completely irregular adoptions. They themselves were part of a larger network made up of hospital staff, lawyers, social workers as well as international adoption agencies. The mothers, whose children were removed under stress or fraudulently, had been identified very early to be able to make these adoptions grow. In early June, a Chilean court issued a first arrest warrant against a judge involved in such kidnappings and four other people are accused of the same crime.

Although most of these facts go back over thirty years, these abuses can continue to be criminal proceedings in Chile. Justice is indeed the principle that could be here, depending on the case, human rights violations with the effect of a suspension of prescription.

It was during the dictatorship in Chile between 1973 and 1990 that this export of children experienced its peak. It was then impossible to counter the decisions of the courts. Mothers who dared to contradict the versions of stillborn children at the hospital were likely to be arrested. And under the regime of the military junta, an arrest could lead to torture, even to death.

As a rule on paper

Of these 34 files, little of information contains information on the origins of these children. Authorizations to leave the territory have sometimes been preserved. But few documents relating to the consent of mothers or about the abandonments themselves. Information which is however compulsory for adoption procedures in Switzerland.

Some files are richer with, for example, legal proceedings granting couples for couples with a view to future adoption in Switzerland. The minutes indicate that the biological mother was however present and that she herself agreed with adoption or that she had “left”-as it is sometimes written-the child in the hospital. The relationships of social workers refer to the precarious living conditions of natural parents. Everything seemed a priori in good standing on paper.

However, according to my research on behalf of the German magazine observerthese protocols contained largely wrong statements. Those in particular natural parents have been partially invented and signed consents were falsified. The mothers from which the child was removed were neither informed nor involved in these procedures.

The Swiss Embassy favored these adoptions

At the time, the Swiss authorities would have had the means to react. In August 1988, the weekly Sunday newspaper had published an investigation into child traffic in Chile. The article deciphered how this system placed allegedly abandoned children for sums up to 22,400 Swiss francs. The article was supported that this “mafia” was fed by creeping poverty, the little prevention and enslavement to the junta.

In the federal archives in Bern, a report containing documents from the Swiss Embassy in Santiago shedding a little more. We learn that instead of fighting these illegal activities and informing the authorities in Bern about these abuses, the embassy continued to encourage these adoptions. Letters emanating from its staff had advised couples in Switzerland until the early 1990s. Addresses of adoption agencies and information on the region where there were the most children to adopt in Chile had been sent for example. Finally, Swiss embassies staff stationed in other countries had sometimes expressed their interest.

As early as 2020, the Swiss government apologized for its breaches and studies were diligent to examine the extent of abuse in detail.

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The end of irregular adoptions

With the end of the dictatorship, as early as 1990, the field of activity of the intermediaries which were soaked in these illegal adoptions itself restricted. The Chilean state quickly undertook reforms to combat generalized corruption within the judicial system and limited adoptions abroad. In 1999, three years before Switzerland, Chile joined the International Convention of Hague on the protection of children and cooperation in matters of international adoption. As only adoptions with member states of the Convention could materialize, it was in fact the end of the adoptions from abroad in Switzerland.

Still, more than thirty years after the facts, thousands of people are still looking here for their biological parents, there of their missing children. The Chilean organization HMS requests the states which were once involved in these practices of helping to go back to the genesis of these adoptions. The creation of a DNA database could be crucial, because those of biological parents were often false or so incomplete. In early June, the Chilean government approved this request and announced the imminent creation of such a platform.

In Switzerland, people like Angeline-Lolita Masson still have the impression of being abandoned by the Swiss authorities. “Learning the truth has weighed,” she said. She claims more support and an approach to the errors made in line with the real needs of the victims.

“Admittedly, I have always been welcomed” on site, she continues, in Chile. But due to the institutional chaos which sometimes reigns there, his stays have often been preceded by months of waiting, coupled with countless administrative procedures. “I am talking about a moral repair here and the possibility of spending more time with my biological family”.

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Text reread and verified by Benjamin von Wyl, translated from German by Alain Meyer/Op