SANTIAGO, Chile: Stolen at birth under Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and raised in the United States, the 42-year-old lawyer travelled thousands of miles to South America to meet his biological mother for the first time.
“She didn’t know about me because they took me at birth and told her I was dead,” Jimmy Lippert Thyden said in a TikTok video while on a plane to meet his mother for the first time. “When she asked for my body, they told her they got rid of it. “So we never held each other, we never hugged.”
Lippert Thyden walked down the street in his mother’s hometown of Valdivia, about 740 km south of the Chilean capital, with a bouquet of flowers in hand tearfully hugged Maria Angelica Gonzalez, his biological mother, and told her he loved her.
He travelled to Chile with his wife and two daughters, who met their grandmother for the first time.
Lippert Thyden was reunited with his family through DNA tracing through MyHeritage.com and Nos Buscamos, a Chilean NGO that helps reconnect people who were separated during the 17-year dictatorship. During Pinochet’s rule, which ended in 1990, thousands of people disappeared and tens of thousands were tortured.
Nos Buscamos founder Constanza del Rio created the organization after she was unable to find information about her own biological family. The NGO says it has managed to help around 400 people reunite with their families.
“This case is one of hundreds or thousands of cases of child trafficking during dictatorship and democracy,” del Rio said. “These children were declared dead and sold to foreigners for $10,000 or $15,000.”
