There could be up to 50,000 international adoptions during the 17 years of civil-military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew the government 50 years ago, according to the President of the People’s Unity (UP). The Chilean justice system is investigating a procedure carried out between 1950 and 2000 for the adoption of minors with Chilean citizenship into families abroad. However, “98% of the cases” occurred between 1973 and 1990, the years when Pinochet was in power. “There are more than a thousand complaints,” says Marisol Rodríguez. The consensus and conservative figure for all minors who have “left” the country is 20,000. These include numerous court proceedings, foreign civil and notarial registers, investigations by international institutions and human rights movements, and the restoration of historical memory.
The adoptions advocated by the Chilean state were apparently legal. The adoptive families apparently adopted, they did not appropriate, and their bad faith is doubtful; The minors’ European destination was generally European countries with center-left governments that received Chilean political exile; Babies were not born to militant, imprisoned or disappeared mothers, but to poor single mothers.
The private law institution of international adoption, in its proposed form, aimed to improve public relations between the Chilean state and the receiving states. The care of minors “who had nothing to do with the national political situation” wanted to be interpreted as a sign of good will, of humanity, of the human face of a dictatorship: as a reason for understanding, as a step, in short, in the direction of democracy . The extent to which this operation was successful is a point that is beginning to be debated.
The general horror and common criminal classifications can obscure the perception of the differences, however clear, between the crimes against humanity entailed by the Chilean international adoption system and the systematic baby appropriation plan carried out by the Argentine civil society -military dictatorship led, cloudy national reorganization process (1976-1983). In addition to the greater difficulties and reluctance of post-Pinochetist democratic governments to face the past, there is the complicated Chilean and international legalism that must be breached in the search for an elusive truth, but is never missing.
Dictatorship, domestic politics: in a proprietary society there is no place for the dispossessed
In his only personal and direct intervention in the 1988 referendum, which he lost, Captain General and President Augusto Pinochet asked voters to vote for a new YES to the 1980 Constitution. The measure of his personal taste was voted on by a commission of experts. In 1981 it was passed positively and is still the basic law in force in Chile. The argument Pinochet made in that final television ad was simple: if he were to lead the country for another seven years, a society of property-owning families, not proletarians, would be complete, he put it in a play on words. A society of families with their own homes, their own retirement and full employment.
One of the extremes to which his government had attempted to accomplish this task was the relentless neoliberalism of its various economic programs: wealth creation and rich families.
The other extreme, less known in this regard, was the system of intercountry adoption. In a state that enshrined its own principle of subsidiarity in its constitutional text and justified its displacement with reverence for the regulatory superiority of the market, adoptions helped make up for any shortfalls and prevented the government from spending to alleviate extreme poverty and need. It was supposed to make poor families disappear, which made the stats ugly. And, it was suggested to families, society and mothers reluctant to give their offspring up for adoption, didn’t a better, more prosperous fate await them abroad? Wasn’t it selfish to keep the children in Chile, where they would have a harder and closer life? The mothers were often in the majority, single parents, teenagers, farmers, domestic workers, or skilled in all of these situations, and they were always poor. Consent, which is almost never completely absent, can never be considered completely voluntary.
According to this Pinochet state idea of costs and benefits, adoptions freed families from burdens on their path to self-sufficiency. They persisted in the nuclear family model, in which spouses were married before the law: a prerequisite for benefiting from allotments for housing built in new, popular neighborhoods. And they also functioned from this point of view as a mechanism for social-demographic regulation: if there were fewer poor people, there would be less poverty, if there were fewer children, there would be less malnutrition, in this calculation of the pursuit of goals that translates into proportions in pie charts could become.
The established family was at the heart of Pinochet’s doctrine of economic growth and the fight against social inequality. Differences were fought to achieve equality. This framework corresponds to “the implementation of a childhood policy whose aim was to promote and increase adoptions,” explains the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of the Universidad Austral de Chile. “It was part of a conspiracy, a coordination between different actors and institutions and an alliance between judges,” specifies historian Karen Alfaro.
Dictatorship, foreign policy: the only privileged are the children
During the Pinochet era, adoption rules became less strict. Not because of a general laxity or violation of the rules, but rather because their wording was deliberately changed so that lax behavior – apart from venality or bad faith or forgery of documents or covert violence, invisible at first glance – would never be illegal. So it happened that European nations with socialist governments or with strong centre-left parliamentary representation in the 1970s (such as Sweden, Italy, Denmark and even Labor Britain and Democrat Jimmy Carter’s United States) or 1980s (France, whose first socialist president, Mitterrand, traveled to Chile in 1972 to have his photo taken with Castro and Allende), committed recipients of the Chilean political exile, also received minors to complete the adoption, who were “without parents or several dependents entered”. a stewardess,” explains the president of Sons and Mothers of Silence (HMS).
For the Chilean dictatorship, adoptions improved the RREE at a time when they had to resign themselves to keeping it full only of other right-wing dictatorships, such as the civil-military dictatorships of the Southern Cone (aligned by Plan Cóndor, divided by the border conflict with Argentina ), those of Taiwan or South Korea and apartheid in South Africa. New profitability calculation, this time on a global level. The adoption system was promoted in the Western embassies in Santiago de Chile, where the network that advocated it began to form. For the receiving countries, for their governments at the time and for the families who adopted them, the decision was, on the contrary, seen as a gesture against Pinochet: a minor was saved from the Latin American dictatorship in which he would grow up in a Western democracy.
Argentina, a mirror that models but distorts
The Argentine dictatorship’s baby thefts are perhaps becoming increasingly well known. The purpose of these means, their circumstances, origin and practice are based on completely different orientations. The minors were born in secret detention centers or fell into the hands of oppression because they were with their families at the time of their illegal detention. They were given away or sold to Argentine families, the vast majority of them. Liberators and appropriators knew the illegality of their actions. In many cases, adoption was disguised under the guise of legitimate parentage. The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo have managed to restore the identities of more than 130 people and estimate that around 300 more remain to be found.
In Argentina, the fact that crimes against humanity have been committed on the national territory both makes the work of grandmothers easier and more difficult. In Chile, the apparent legality of the actions, the apparent goodwill of the adopters at the time of adoption, and the extraterritoriality of the adoption destination country pose particular challenges for investigations and higher costs in the future. “We need truth, justice and reparation. That’s a tremendous fact. There are thousands of families affected who need containment and support. We have had 300 meetings, but most of them are taking place online because children and mothers cannot travel,” says the president of HMS.
Up to the identity always
HMS’s next step will be at the United Nations: in Geneva to present the situation and needs to the Committee against Enforced Disappearances. And the II Congress of Chilean Adoptees in Europe is taking place on the island of Sardinia in Italy. They are pinning their hopes on Gabriel Boric’s government. Judging by the decisive actions already taken on these issues in Chile for the first time, they may also be the most decisive they have seen in the 50 years they have lived in Pinochet’s shadow.
Conditions