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Four families torn apart by Chile’s illegal adoption scandal finally found each other decades later. They describe the emotional moment they met – and how they pieced together the lives they had spent apart.
For Sara Melgarejo, the wait at Santiago airport was agonising. The 65-year-old had travelled about 30km north from San Bernardo, a working-class suburb of the Chilean capital, for the reunion. She walked the length of the building trying to calm her nerves, holding her breath for the arrival of the two children she had spent the last 40 years believing were dead. “My heart was…
Gladys Muñoz remembers her baby’s first cries as clearly as if they were yesterday. She holds onto that moment from 44 years ago, including her quick glance at his tiny feet – a memory she has fought to keep close in her mind as time has passed. It’s the only proof she really has that her child even existed.
Alberto was born premature to 17-year-old Muñoz and her husband on 10 April 1979 in a hospital in Providencia, a neighbourhood in the Chilean capital Santiago. Over the following days, as she recovered in hospital, Muñoz says she was denied access to her son.
Muñoz was told Alberto…
Aman who was kidnapped as a newborn in Chile four decades ago and raised in the US by a family who had no idea says he is grappling with a range of emotions after getting to meet his biological mother for the first time.
“Nothing compares – it was a clash of feelings for me,” 42-year-old Jimmy Lippert Thyden told the Guardian after USA Today this week documented his emotional reunion with…
PANAMA CITY, 5 December 2022 - Amidst growing migration flows, violence, and climate hazards, an estimated 16.5 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean will require humanitarian support in 2023, UNICEF alerted today at the launch of its Humanitarian Action for Children appeal.
Over recent years, the region has experienced one of the world’s largest migration crises outside conflict areas. Coupled with increased poverty exacerbated by the residual effects of COVID-19 pandemic and the global economic decline, climate shocks and violence, the flow of children on the move from…
In a tiny house on the outskirts of Lima, Gabriela Zarate lives with her husband and eight children. Four are her own. The other four, two girls aged seven and 15, and two boys aged nine and 12, are the children of her younger sister, Katherine.
It is hard to squeeze them all in. The boys sleep two to a bunk bed, with the girls sharing a tiny room at the back of the house. "It's always been a struggle to put food on the table for my family," Gabriela says, "and with four more children it's even more difficult".
In June 2020, when Peru was already struggling to contain…
PANAMA CITY, Oct 11 (Reuters) - On their trek north towards the United States, some 19,000 migrant children have crossed the dangerous jungles that sprawl the border between Panama and Colombia so far this year, the United Nations children's agency UNICEF said Monday.
The number of children who crossed the Darien Gap is almost three times higher than the total for the previous five years, it said in a statement, adding that one in five migrants crossing the border are children, and half of them is under five years old.
In 2021, at least five children were found dead in the jungle, the…
African American children are suffering long-term disadvantages as a result of vast and growing disparities in the wealth of US families, with Black families with kids having access to barely 1 cent for every dollar enjoyed by their white counterparts.
The shocking racial wealth gap between families, and its impact on Black and Hispanic kids, is revealed in groundbreaking new research by scholars on US inequality. It shows that the basic wealth levels of families from different racial and ethnic backgrounds have diverged to such a stark degree in the past three decades that the future…
This article from the Guardian tells the story of an adult adoptee, adopted from Chile to Sweden, whose search for her biological mother revealed that she had been "stolen" from birth. The article describes how many women in Chile in the 1970s and 80s, mostly from poor and minority backgrounds, had been tricked or coerced into giving up their babies for international adoption, as part of a national strategy to eradicate childhood poverty which began during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The Adoption of Children (Amendment) Bill has been presented to Guyana's National Assembly of the Twelfth Parliament, according to this article from iNews Guyana. "The amendment of the Act will provide for the insertion of the new Second Schedule of the Principal Act – Hague Convention of May 19, 1993, on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption," says the article. "It will allow for more scrutiny regarding international adoption to protect the nation’s children from exploitation, trafficking and abuse."
According to this article from Kaieteur News, a newly installed Adoption Board, which falls under the purview of the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security in Guyana, has begun processing adoption cases that were left unattended for a few years. At the first official meeting of the new Board, "it was highlighted that on top of its list of priorities is assisting the Child Care and Protection Agency (CPA) in the process of ensuring children are safely kept in stable environments as well as seeing that they receive proper adoptive care."
The Board also met with…