A Houston firefighter who was stolen at birth recently met his birth mother in Chile for the first time.
According to NBC2 in Houston, Tyler Graf, 38, learned on 22 May that he was stolen from his mother when he was a child. Luckily, he was adopted by what he called a "loving, caring family" who raised him but had no idea that he was not put up for adoption, but rather taken from his birth mother.
His adoption papers said that his birth mother, Hilda del Carmen Quezada, now 65, gave him up because she was impoverished and had "other children to support," according to The New York Times.
In reality, Ms Quezada has been the victim of a lie. The Chilean government, under dictator Augusto Pinochet, told her that her son had died two weeks after his birth.
“I asked for the body and they refused, saying it was too small,” she said.
Her son was not the only Chilean child stolen during that time. Throughout the Pinochet era, it is estimated that hundreds of children were effectively trafficked to adoption brokers who moved the children outside of the country. The situation is still under investigation in Chile, where officials believe thousands of more state-sponsored kidnappings may have occurred.
Karen Alfaro Monsalve, a professor at Chile's Austral University who has researched the coerced adoptions, said the Pinochet regime used the method to control population growth for the sake of supporting the nation's economy.
“What we ultimately had was an outflow of poor children who were seen as a stumbling block to achieve the country’s economic development,” she told The Times. “Pinochet had a type of forced migration that helped control population growth and enable the country’s neoliberal shift.”
The discovery that Mr Graf was adopted was one of coincidence. Marisol Rodríguez, the founder of Hijos y Madres del Silencio – Children and Mothers of Silence – which works to reconnect families torn apart by forced adoptions, reached out to Ms Quezada and told her a story. Ms Rodríguez's son, a firefighter, traveled to Houston to train alongside American colleagues. He struck up a friendship with Mr Graf, who revealed he had been adopted from Chile.
Ms Rodríguez's son tracked down Mr Graf's adoption records and brought them back to Chile, where he gave them to his mother. They came to believe that Mr Graf was Ms Quezada's birth son, and a DNA test later confirmed their suspicions.
“I couldn’t digest the information,” Ms Quezada said. “I couldn’t grasp what was happening.”
Mr Graf was told in May that his birth mother was still alive – and she hadn't given him up for adoption.
“Every muscle in my body tightened up and squeezed the tears in my eyes,” Mr Graf told The Times. “I felt like I had been hit by a bat and was seeing stars.”
Weeks later, Ms Quezada flew to Chile to meet her son. Local journalists arranged the meeting - which Mr Graf was not aware of – and documented their reunification.
“It was the closest hug,” Mr Graf said. “They just left us alone in each other’s arms and we hugged and she kissed me and we just stood there crying.”
He also learned that he had three biological sisters who had not been taken from Ms Quezada.
Since the reunification, Mr Graf said he has been walking a tight rope between families, doing his best not to offend either of his mothers, biological and adoptive.
“But now, I’m in between families. I do not want to hurt my adoptive parents’ feelings or my birth mothers’ feelings, so it is kind of a fine balance right now," he said. "I’m trying to figure where I fit in the middle of all this."
