MEXICO CITY (apro).– After 42 years, Jimmy Lippert Thyden was reunited with his mother. He had been adopted in Chile when he was born, but his parents were victims of a network of “false adoptions.”
Hospital workers had taken María Angélica González’s son from her arms after he was born. They told him that he had died. More than 40 years later, she met him in person at his home in Valdivia, Chile.
“I love you so much,” Jiummy told her birth mother, as they hugged and cried. “It left me breathless. I felt suffocated by the huge moment. How do you hug someone in a way that makes up for 42 years of hugging?,” she questioned.
Since April, Jimmy had been searching for his biological mother, after learning about how children born in Chile who had been reunited with their biological parents were adopted with the help of the organization “Nos Buscamos.”
This group discovered that Jimmy was born prematurely in a hospital in Santiago, the capital of Chile, and was placed in an incubator. They asked his mother to leave him at the hospital, after they told her he had died, so they would take care of his remains.
“The paperwork I have for my adoption says that I have no living relatives. And, in the last few months, I found out that I have a mother and four brothers and a sister,” he commented, from Ashburn, Virginia, where he is a criminal defense attorney.
The organization “Nos Buscamos” estimates that, between 1970 and 1980, dozens of children were taken from Chilean families. This is during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that began on September 11, 1973 after overthrowing the government of President Salvador Allende.
“The real story was that those children were stolen from poor families, poor women who didn’t know it. They didn’t know how to defend themselves,” said the organization’s founder, Constanza del Río.
