() — Scott Lieberman, an American living in San Francisco, always knew he was adopted from Chile. What he didn’t know was that he had been stolen when he was a baby.
“I lived 42 years of my life without knowing that it had been stolen, without knowing what was happening in Chile in the 70s and 80s, and I want people to know it (…). There are families out there that can still be reunited” , said Lieberman.
During the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), many babies were given to adoption agencies. Some of the children came from wealthy families, and were taken or given away to protect their reputations. Other babies from poorer families were stolen outright, as seems to have been the case with Lieberman.
In the last decade, has documented multiple cases of Chilean babies being stolen at birth. The country’s authorities claim that priests, nuns, doctors, nurses and others conspired to carry out illegal adoptions, whose main motive was profit.
The Chilean authorities state that the number of stolen babies could run into the thousands, but the country’s investigation into the controversial adoptions has languished over the years. Some of those who participated in the illegal adoptions have died. Many of the clinics or hospitals where the babies were allegedly stolen no longer exist.
When Lieberman found out about the scandal a few months ago, he began to wonder if the same thing had happened to him, and began to reconstruct the story of two deceived families, in Chile and in the United States.
Stolen children
Lieberman’s story begins at the end of 1979 in the city of Cañete, located in the Biobío region, in south-central Chile. Her mother, Rosa Ester Mardones, then 23 years old, had just found out that she was pregnant. Because she was single and struggling financially, she sought help, according to her daughter Jenny Escalona Mardones, Lieberman’s senior by two years.
Escalona told that some Catholic nuns went to visit her mother and offered her a job in Santiago, the capital, where “she would do housework in a doctor’s house.”
Once in Santiago, he also received help from a social worker who, according to Escalona, seemed especially interested in the Mardones case. Throughout the pregnancy, Escalona says, the social worker made her mother sign multiple documents that the young farmer did not fully understand.
The baby was born on August 21, 1980 at the Providencia Clinic in Santiago. He was healthy, but Rosa Ester Mardones could hardly see him after giving birth. The social worker took custody and took the baby away, even before her mother had left the hospital, Escalona says.
When Mardones sought out the social worker to ask about the baby, she was threatened.
“Don’t come looking for the baby anymore because if you do, I’ll call the police and they’ll arrest you,” Escalona told her mother.
“Your son is now in Holland or Sweden. He is in another country. You are a poor, single woman, and you are not capable of raising another child. You have relinquished parental rights anyway.”
During the dictatorship, asking too many questions was risky. For a woman like Mardones, asking the police for help would have been unthinkable.
The baby was indeed in another country, but not in Europe. An American couple had adopted him and had done all the paperwork to legally bring him to the United States, where the baby, now named Scott Lieberman, would grow up.
Scott and his half sister, Jenny Escalona, at their mother’s grave in Chile. (Courtesy of We Wanted)
“I feel more complete”
In an interview with , Lieberman, now 42, said her adoptive parents never suspected that they were adopting a baby that had been stolen from its birth mother.
It wasn’t until late last year, when Lieberman, who works as a video editor, read a report on illegal adoptions in Chile, that he began to wonder if that had been the case for him, too.
With the help of “Nos Buscamos”, a Chilean non-profit organization that seeks to reunite children who were separated from their biological parents, she discovered that she had a half-sister. With the help of MyHeritage, an online genealogy company, Lieberman and Escalona underwent DNA tests that confirmed their relationship.
Lieberman showed his Chilean birth certificate and birth certificate, as well as his US adoption papers.
On April 11, Lieberman flew to Chile to reunite with his birth family. His mother had died of bone cancer in 2015, at the age of 58. He never knew that his son had been adopted by an American family and that he would return to his native Chile less than a decade later.
Instead, he met his half-sister at the Concepción airport. She doesn’t speak English and his Spanish is basic, but no words were needed. Despite being strangers a few weeks before, now they hugged each other as if they had known each other their entire lives. No one, not even those around them, had dry eyes.
Asked how it felt to return to his home country, Lieberman replied: “Very good. Most of my family is here. It’s amazing. So much love.” Members of his extended family had also come, and she later met his biological father as well.
His sister, Escalona, said she felt “very happy”, but without words.
Lieberman thinks he was lucky, especially when he thinks of those mothers and children who haven’t found each other.
“She knew I existed. There are other mothers who have been told their children were stillborn. They don’t know their children could still be alive in another country,” Lieberman says.
Lieberman spent 12 days in Chile, where she visited her birth mother’s grave with her sister.
“Before, I didn’t feel like my life wasn’t complete. I received a lot of love from my family growing up. I have a lot of love from my friends. But now, it’s weird, but I feel more complete. I feel loved in a way I’ve never felt before “, Lieberman told after returning to San Francisco from Chile.
Escalona now believes that the nuns who came to visit her mother when she became pregnant, as well as the doctor whose house she worked in, conspired with the social worker to steal her mother from her half-brother.
He also says that his mother never told him anything about his brother. She believes that a combination of shame, pain, and sadness prevented her from doing it…
“My mother never, ever spoke of the fact that she had had a son and that they had stolen it. It was a painful truth that she kept for many years. I even think that the pain took her away,” says Escalona.
What Escalona knows is from a close relative who helped his mother. That relative was with her mother during the pregnancy and knew details about the birth of the baby and how it was taken from his mother, Escalona said.
The truth has helped Escalona understand things about her mother that previously seemed baffling, such as her mother’s decision to live near the Santiago airport for the last years of her life.
“She liked to go to the airport and she asked us to accompany her. She would sit down to watch the people, especially those who arrived,” says Escalona.
Now he believes that his mother was waiting for her son to return.
His mother returned to Cañete just before she died, where she used to say: “I no longer hear the planes.”
