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ADOPTION REALITY: CHILE
SAN
ANTONIO, Chile, Feb 25 (Reuters) - "I knew she'd find me," Edita
Bizama, 64, said from her home in the Chilean port city of San Antonio
after finally reuniting with the daughter who was taken from her over 40
years ago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Adamary
Garcia was removed from her mother a few days after birth and sent
abroad for adoption, one of as many as 20,000 children that authorities
estimate were forcibly taken from their parents by a military government
that saw international adoptions as a way to reduce child poverty.
"There
was a social worker that was persistent, really persistent," Bizama
said. It was 1984 and Bizama, who already had two young children, had
expressed an interest in adoption during her pregnancy. But then she
started having doubts.
"But
the social worker said, how are you going to raise three children? You
don't have a job, you don't have a home, you don't have any stability."
Bizama
said she spent five days with her daughter, holding and feeding her,
before she was taken to an office a few hours away, forced to hand over
her baby and sent on a bus back to her hometown.
It was a secret Bizama kept from most of her family for decades. She had no name or way of finding her daughter.
Thousands
of miles away, Adamary Garcia - who grew up in Florida and now lives in
Puerto Rico - knew she had been adopted but knew nothing about the
circumstances.
Then
a friend shared a story about Tyler Graf, a Texas firefighter who found
out he had been taken as an infant during the dictatorship and had
started an NGO, Connecting Roots, to reconnect adoptees with their
biological families in Chile.
Traced
via her sister's birth certificate and then confirmed with a DNA test,
Connecting Roots identified Bizama as Garcia's birth mother.
Garcia, now 41, looks like her mother and two sisters. Like her older sister, she has a fascination for dogs - they have rescued and fostered dozens of dogs between them.
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