Courts and DNA help Chile mothers search for 'stolen babies'

Prosecutors are revisiting one of the darkest chapters of Chilean history, when under the Pinochet dictatorship hundreds and possibly thousands of babies were stolen from their mothers and given away just after being born.

On July 9, 1977, Margarita Escobar gave birth to a baby girl at Santiago's Paula Jaraquemade hospital. She saw her daughter for only a few moments before staff took her away.

Four decades, Escobar hasn't given up on meeting the grown woman her daughter may have become, buoyed by the prosecutors' push for the truth about Chile's stolen babies, and under-the-table adoptions.

She told AFP hospital staff kept her sedated back then. "Every time I woke up I asked about her again, until a midwife told me, 'you're baby was stillborn.'"
For Alfaro, the practise was "also part of the Pinochet dictatorship's ideological struggle, a type of social violence inflicted on the poorest."
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