MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Sunday, May 31st 2026 - 21:00 UTC
Adler, 36, was given up for illegal adoption in 1990 to a US couple who raised him in an affluent suburb of Chicago
US citizen Kyle Adler, taken as a nine-month-old baby during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, was reunited this year with his biological mother, Chilean national Ana María Navarrete, thirty-five years after the forced separation. The reunion, which took place on Valentine's Day at Santiago airport and was documented by the Associated Press news agency, illustrates the scale of a network of fraudulent adoptions that during the Chilean military regime (1973-1990) took more than twenty thousand children from poor and indigenous families, according to official estimates.
Adler, 36, was given up for illegal adoption in 1990 to a US couple who raised him in an affluent suburb of Chicago. His biological mother, then 19 and without the resources to raise him alone, worked night shifts at a fishmonger in the coastal city of Coronel. Navarrete entrusted the baby's care to a woman who, she later recounted, handed him over to the US couple through the intervention of a local priest. “I am so happy to finally meet him, my dream came true,” Navarrete said following the reunion. Subsequent police investigations confirmed that the case was part of a fraudulent adoption network involving agencies, public officials, judges, nurses, and doctors. None of those responsible has been prosecuted.
