Santiago de Chile/Prensa Latina
The launch of the international campaign to search for minors stolen during the dictatorship took place this Friday at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile.
The initiative, by the Fundación Hijos y Madres del Silencio (HMS) and the organization Cheil Chile, was presented in the context of the fourth International Congress on Illegal Adoptions and Trafficking of Girls and Boys, held in this capital.
Marisol Rodríguez, president of the HMS foundation, explained that they have been working for 10 years and in that period they achieved more than 300 family reunions.
“We need the State to take charge, that there be a search policy to repair this historical debt,” Rodríguez demanded.
For her part, the director of the museum, María Fernanda García, recalled that the majority of the mothers who were victims of this crime were young people from rural areas and from vulnerable families.
“Here we face the horror of horror,” he said, and considered that it is time for us as a society to make a commitment to the search for these minors, estimated at more than 20,000.
The launch of the campaign was attended by victims of the theft of their children; as well as Chileans adopted in Sweden, various Government authorities, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, as well as representatives of civil society.
Sara Emilia Díaz told Prensa Latina how in 1974, when she gave birth at the Barros Luco hospital, they did not let her see the baby, they sedated her to make her sleep and the next day they told her that the child had died and they were going to leave him for study. .
“I was 16 years old at that time, the dictatorship (1973-1990) was just beginning, so we had no right to complain and the last time I came they told me that if I insisted, things would go badly for me,” he recalled.
Deputy Boris Barrera referred to the work he has been doing with the Hijos y Madres del Silencio Foundation, which made it possible to prepare a bill, presented a couple of months ago before Congress, referring to the right to identity of origin, which addresses this problem.
The initiative, which is now in the Parliament’s Constitution Commission, is based on the Argentine experience, where many children were also robbed and kidnapped, the legislator told Prensa Latina.
He added that these human rights violations were committed not only in hospitals in the capital, but also in Iquique, Temuco, Antofagasta and throughout Chile.
Doctors, social workers who worked for the State, and judges who signed the false adoption reports were involved in these practices, he assured.
Barrera expressed the need for the government to urgently put forward the bill, for the State to take charge of this process, form an inter-ministerial committee and create a kind of truth commission similar to the Valech or the Rettig Report. .
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