See the emotional reunion between a woman and her birth mom decades after illegal adoption in Chile
By Adi Guajardo
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NEW YORK (WCBS) — A Long Island woman has been reunited with her biological mother 41 years after they were separated at birth in Chile.
Kaitlin Saar’s biological mom, Maria Gonzalez Seguel, touched down Wednesday at John F. Kennedy International Airport.
“Touching her, even like smelling her, it was just so surreal,” Saar said.
Gonzalez Seguel first reached out to Saar on Facebook nearly two months ago. The message unraveled Saar’s life.
“It said, ‘I’m writing to you because this is an attempt to contact you and your biological mother,’ basically to get us together,” Saar explained.
She said she learned over the summer that she was one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of Chilean babies illegally adopted under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
“All of our paperwork said that we were given away willfully because of economic hard times, and so a lot of us never even looked for our families,” said Tyler Graf, with the nonprofit Connecting Roots.
Saar said her parents told her at a young age that she was adopted.
“The story that my parents were told was that she was poor, she was young and she wanted me to have a better life, so she agreed to give me up for adoption,” she said.
Saar reached out to Graf, whose nonprofit works to reunite adoptees with their biological Chilean families. They immediately started the DNA process and, when a match came back, they quickly arranged the reunion.
“We just started talking over the summer, and here she is staying with me in my house, it’s just a dream,” Saar said.
“Lots of beautiful things, happy feelings, a lot of excitement and also sadness,” Gonzalez Seguel said in Spanish.
Gonzalez Seguel said she was 16 years old when she found out she was pregnant, and she spent more than three decades searching for her daughter — time she’s now working to make up.
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