RIGHT SPEAK: Chilean American Stolen as a Baby Reunites with His Birth Mother 36 Years Later

Chilean American stolen as a baby reunites with his birth mother 36 years later:

Kyle Adler’s discovery that he was stolen from his Chilean mother as a baby came as a shock, sparking an identity crisis that lasted years and led to a reunion with his biological mother earlier this year.

“It’s been so eye-opening to see who my people are,” Adler said. “I feel the love, I feel the compassion, the care — it’s nice to have a family again.”

Adopted by an American family when he was nine months old, the 36-year-old is one of thousands of children who were stolen from Chilean families during the 17-year dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and among hundreds who have been reunited with their birth families thanks to DNA tracing and organizations that are helping Chilean adoptees investigate their pasts.

Others are also working toward justice for the families ripped apart.

The American family that adopted Adler in 1990 raised him in an affluent Chicago suburb.

“My parents didn’t steal me; they didn’t name me Kyle out of malice. They saw me as who they wanted me to become, and there’s a lot of love that was put into that,” Adler said of his adoptive parents Mike and Connie Adler.

Adler believes neither of them knew the circumstances surrounding his adoption.

He said neither were initially supportive of his decision to find his birth mother before they died in 2022.

He grew up to be an overachiever who in adulthood wanted more meaning to his life, he said.

“Suddenly now I found myself where I didn’t know what to do. I knew I was adopted and at that point, I was just like, I need to find my mom.”

The day he was taken

Adler’s biological mother, Ana Maria Navarrete, was a 19-year-old single parent working nights at a fish shop in the seaside city of Coronel, some 533 kilometers (331 miles) south of the capital. She had named him Marcos Antonio Navarrete.

She could only afford a room for herself, so she hired a woman who took Adler into her home as a baby and looked after him. Navarrete told The Associated Press she visited him whenever she was not working.

One day, the caregiver told her he was taken by an American couple after a local priest made arrangements for a baby “in need of a family.”

“And she let them have him,” Navarrete told AP, furious and ashamed. The AP could not independently verify all the details of what occurred.

A police investigator told her the baby had likely been taken as part of a wide-reaching counterfeit adoption network that involved adoption agencies, immigration officials, judges, nurses and even doctors.

No one was held accountable, Navarrete said, and “those years afterward were some of the worst years of my life.”

Lacking family support, she said she eventually surrendered the idea she would get her son back.

No justice

“Justice for the poor did not exist in Chile and it still does not,” said Constanza Del Rio, founder and executive director of Nos Buscamos, a nonprofit organization with online data for thousands of cases. The government estimates more than 20,000 children were stolen from families.

Children of the poor and Indigenous populations were targeted during the Pinochet regime from 1973 to 1990, said Jimmy Lippert Thyden González, who was also illegally adopted and became a human rights lawyer.

“It was an effort to eliminate and eradicate the poor class. It was a way of eradicating the Indigenous population, the uneducated population,” he said.