Aug 28, 2023 at 9:49 PM Update: 29 minutes ago
A man kidnapped as a newborn in Chile 42 years ago has been reunited with his family earlier this month. He was adopted in the United States by a family who knew nothing about the kidnapping.
Jimmy Lippert Thyden grew up in a North American family thinking his parents were dead. Until he read something in the media about a California man who was kidnapped from Chile as a baby. It got Thyden thinking: Could the same thing have happened to him?
With the help of the Chilean non-profit organization Nos Buscamos, Thyden learned that he had been placed in an incubator at a hospital after being born prematurely. His mother was told he had died and his body had been disposed of.
A DNA test linked Thyden to a cousin who then made contact with his birth mother. Thyden tells news agency AP how his biological mother reacted when she first spoke to him.
‘Oceans full of tears’
“Mijo (my son), you have no idea how many oceans of tears I’ve cried for you. How many nights I’ve lay awake praying that God would let me live long enough to find out what happened to you.”
Thyden traveled to Chile earlier this month with his wife and their two daughters to meet his newly discovered family. The American newspaper USA Today reported on the reunion.
When Thyden entered his mother’s house, there were 42 balloons hanging there. One for every year they hadn’t seen each other. He popped the balloons one by one to remember all the lost years.
Already 450 children reunited
According to Nos Buscamos, tens of thousands of babies were abducted from Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. At the time, dictator Augusto Pinochet was in power in the South American country.
Over the past nine years, the nonprofit has reunited more than 450 lost children with their parents, according to its director. Other non-profit organizations do similar work.
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Image: AP
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2023-08-28 19:49:00
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