image source, Reuters
Tim Roinick and Travis Murdoch live in the United States, where they arrived after being adopted by local families in the 1980s.
What they did not know is that their biological mother, Teresita de Jesús Padilla, never wanted to give them up for adoption. But the military regime that governed Chile, his country of origin, decided otherwise.
And just this week, almost 40 years after that trip, Teresita managed to hug two of her children again.
"God has given me back my children, who I thought I had lost forever," the woman told the Reuters agency, after meeting them again in Santiago.
Both Travis and Tim, as well as Travis's twin brother, were taken from Teresita by members of the forces supporting the Augusto Pinochet regime while she was hospitalized.
This practice was part of the state terrorism exercised by the dictatorship for almost two decades and which included the disappearance and death of some 3,000 people linked to left-wing parties and other dissident groups.
The children grew up in the US and knew that they had been adopted, but they did not know the circumstances under which they had arrived to their new families.
"I feel like I've known Teresita my whole life. There's a connection," Tim told the AP agency after the meeting.
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"I will remember this meeting for a lifetime."
According to several official documents obtained by news agencies, during the 17 years of the Chilean military regime, nearly 20,000 cases of forced adoptions were recorded.
Some organizations, however, raise that figure to around 50,000 cases.
"We don't know exactly how many children were taken from Chile," Constanza del Río, director of the NGO Nos Buscamos, told AP.
Del Río pointed out that vulnerable women from the poorest regions of the country were the main victims of networks that also included social workers, doctors and judges who altered documents to remove children from the country.
In the 1970s, Chile was the third country with the highest number of illegal adoptions, after South Korea and China.
A medical examination
According to the Murdoch brothers' story, the story of their search for the truth began in 2020, when Tim needed to know his medical history and discovered that he had an entire family in Chile.
During these inquiries, he learned that his relatives, especially his cousins, had been searching for him for decades through a foundation, which soon contacted him.
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"A Pandora's box opened there," he explained.
The first thing he discovered was that he had three brothers: two twins - including Travis's brother, Carl - who also lived in the US and another who remained in Chile.
"I always wanted to have a brother. Now I have three," he told Reuters.
Tim contacted them and, in the middle of this year, they decided to travel to Santiago to meet Teresita. Carl was unable to travel to the Chilean capital due to the consequences of an accident he suffered in 2013.
Teresita was waiting for them. Today he is 66 years old and has lived much of his life in a precarious economic situation.
In 1985 she became pregnant and gave birth to her eldest son. He thought the hospital was a safe place where he could take refuge and receive help. But there she was a victim of abuses of trust that ended up separating her from her children, not once, but twice.
"Those women took my children away under threats and that's why I have suffered all my life," she told Reuters.
According to Travis and Tim's story, the intention now is to maintain and strengthen the bond with the biological mother they have just met, on the other side of the continent.
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