SANTIAGO (The Thursday Times) — A Chilean mother has been reunited with two of the three sons who were taken from her at birth during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, after one of them traced her through a DNA test decades later.
Teresita Padilla, 66, met Tim Rolnick, 41, and Travis Murdoch, 37, in Santiago on Wednesday. Both were raised in the US state of Maryland. Travis’s twin brother, Chris, could not travel because of severe injuries from a car accident in 2013.
“God gave me back my children, whom I thought I had lost forever,” Padilla said. Her eldest son, Alberto, who stayed in Chile and led the search for his brothers, died before he could meet them.
A DNA test in 2020
Rolnick found his birth family through a DNA test in 2020, while looking for his medical history. Nos Buscamos, a Chilean group that helps people separated by irregular adoptions, helped arrange the reunion.
Padilla has said her children were taken from her in hospital. “First they took Tim… later, I had my twins, they took them, too,” she said. Rolnick described meeting her as “very surreal” and “shock, in a good way”.
Thousands of families
Judicial reports and Chilean authorities say about 20,000 children were given away through forced or irregular adoptions under Pinochet’s rule from 1973 to 1990, many of them sent abroad. Nos Buscamos estimates that more than 50,000 families were affected.
At least 3,095 people were killed or disappeared under the military government, according to official figures.
