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Introduction

Forced and irregular adoptions constitute one of the most serious and largely unacknowledged human rights violations in Chile’s recent history. For decades, thousands of children were separated from their birth families through practices that included the falsification of documents, fraudulent birth registrations, coercion of vulnerable mothers, and the operation of organised child trafficking networks. These practices, which persisted over several decades, remained hidden from public scrutiny until relatively recently.

Chile’s experience is particularly significant from a comparative perspective. As the first major Latin American sending country in the history of intercountry adoption to embark on a sustained process of recognition, accountability, and institutional reform in response to these practices, it offers an important case for analysis. Driven largely by civil society and victims’ organisations, this process has achieved important legal, legislative, and institutional milestones in recent years—developments that deserve close attention from both academic research and policy debates.

This blog post traces the key moments of this trajectory, from the public emergence of the phenomenon to the most recent measures adopted by the Chilean state, situating the case within the broader international debate on illegal adoptions and the right to identity.

The key role of victims’ associations: making a crime against humanity visible

During the 1970s and 1980s, Chile became one of the world’s eight largest sending countries for intercountry adoption. This phenomenon developed in a context shaped by the military dictatorship (1973–1990), extremely weak legal regulation, deep social inequalities, and limited institutional oversight of adoption processes. The legislation in force at the time permitted legal devices such as ‘assumptions of birth’, through which a child could be falsely registered as the son or daughter of a person other than the birth mother, thus facilitating the child’s transfer into the international adoption system.

Intermediary networks operating through hospitals, clinics, residential homes, and religious institutions played a central role in the recruitment and transfer of infants. Mothers, typically young, impoverished women with limited access to information about their rights, were deceived or coerced into relinquishing their children. In numerous cases, they were falsely informed that their babies had been stillborn. These were not isolated incidents: judicial investigations have confirmed the existence of organised trafficking networks involving lawyers, Catholic priests, social workers, healthcare officials, and even judges, who transferred children from impoverished families to foreign couples in exchange for payments. It is essential to note that, unlike the Argentine case where the appropriation of minors was directly linked to political repression and the forced disappearance of opponents, in Chile mothers were not targeted for their ideological beliefs but rather deceived and coerced on account of their social and economic vulnerability.

Meaningful legal reform only arrived after Chile ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990) and the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption (1999), incorporated into national legislation through Adoption Law 19.620 (1999), which designated SENAME (the National Service for Minors) as the central authority responsible for adoption policy and international cooperation. Yet despite these regulatory advances, the Chilean state made no proactive effort to investigate or provide redress for past irregular practices.

The public visibility of forced adoptions in Chile was not the result of state action but of investigative journalism and civil society activism, driven largely by the mobilisation of parents whose children were removed and of adoptees sent abroad. It was not until 2014, when the so-called Joannon case came to light, involving a priest proven to have acted as an intermediary in illegal adoptions. Crucially, this breakthrough did not stem from any official initiative, but from the work of investigative outlets (e.g. CIPER, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale), as well as television documentaries. This underscores the extent to which the main drivers of truth-telling and accountability in this field have been the media and civil society rather than state institutions.

That same year, key civil society organizations were founded, including the NGO Nos Buscamos and the foundation Hijos y Madres del Silencio. Later on, other associations would also emerge, such as Chilean Adoptees Worldwide. Victims’ organisations estimate that the total number of affected cases may reach around twenty thousand, while available evidence suggests that these practices extended well beyond the dictatorship years and continued at least into the 1990s. This challenges any attempt to confine this history to a single political regime and underscores the structural character of the phenomenon.

Over more than a decade, these associations have facilitated hundreds of family reunions through privately organised DNA testing, in the absence of any state-provided mechanism. Their advocacy efforts have extended to both the national and international levels: the appearance of Hijos y Madres del Silencio before the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances in Geneva in September 2023, within the framework of the first anniversary of the Joint Declaration on Illegal International Adoptions (2022), illustrates how it has been civil society, not the state, that has sustained international pressure and demanded recognition of these acts as crimes against humanity.

Legislative, Judicial, and Institutional Advances (2018–2025)

Between 2018 and 2025, important progress was made, but the process was far from linear. Rather than a period of steady advancement, these years were shaped by partial gains, structural constraints, and repeated episodes of stagnation, with renewed momentum driven largely by the persistent advocacy of victims’ organizations rather than by proactive state leadership

At the legislative level, in November 2018, the Chamber of Deputies established the first Special Investigative Commission on irregularities in adoption and birth registration processes. Its final report represented a significant breakthrough in terms of official recognition: it concluded that the abduction of minors spanned a broader period (1950–2000), confirmed that “the participation of state agents has been confirmed at different stages of the illegal transfer of children” (Chamber of Deputies of Chile, 2019, p. 136), and formally characterized these acts as crimes against humanity in the form of enforced disappearance -explicitly acknowledging the direct responsibility of the Chilean state. Yet the report’s impact was severely constrained by its non-binding nature. Despite recommending the creation of a National Commission on Truth and Reparation for Irregular Adoptions, the strengthening of the Origins Search Programme, and the establishment of a DNA database within the National Medical Legal Service, the vast majority of these proposals were never implemented. The social uprising of 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic further disrupted political momentum, exposing the fragility of institutional commitments.

In the judicial sphere, the investigation has been a slow and complex process, reflecting both the structural challenges of investigating crimes committed decades ago and the broader difficulties of confronting state responsibility for systematic human rights violations. In 2017, the appointment of Judge Mario Carroza as ministro en visita formally opened the judicial inquiry, which came to include more than 500 cases, some of them linked to the Swedish Adoption Centre and confirmed crimes such as false birth registration, civil status substitution, and falsification of documents. Between 2019 and 2024, Judge Jaime Balmaceda replaced Judge Carroza and continued the investigation as ministro en visita extraordinario, with exclusive responsibility for these same cases. In parallel, in 2019 the National Human Rights Institute (INDH) filed one of the first criminal complaints for the enforced disappearance of minors in public hospitals, a step that reframed these practices within the language of international human rights law. The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances expressed concern that Chilean legislation lacked specific provisions criminalising all acts related to the appropriation of children. Yet despite the identification and formal charging of several individuals involved in child trafficking networks, no one was ultimately prosecuted for these crimes during this period.

A decisive turning point came in July 2024, when Judge Alejandro Aguilar Brevis replaced Judge Balmaceda as ministro en visita with exclusive responsibility for these cases. In early 2025, his first rulings established that many so-called “irregular adoptions” in fact constituted the crime of child abduction, a landmark legal recognition after more than a decade of judicial proceedings. In early 2025, his first rulings determined that many so-called ‘irregular adoptions’ in fact constituted the crime of child abduction. The ruling of 2 June 2025 went further still, formally establishing for the first time the existence of an organised trafficking network that operated during the dictatorship, composed of lawyers, Catholic priests, social workers, healthcare officials, and a sitting judge. Among those charged was Ivonne Gutiérrez Pávez, a former juvenile court judge currently residing in Israel, who personally drafted documents falsely recording mothers’ voluntary renunciation of their parental rights. By rejecting statutes of limitation arguments and classifying these acts as imprescriptible crimes against humanity, Judge Aguilar Brevis sent an unambiguous message: these were not administrative irregularities, but grave violations of human rights for which accountability cannot be foreclosed by the passage of time. The subsequent extradition request for Gutiérrez Pávez underscores that this accountability extends beyond Chile’s borders.

The year 2023 marked a significant phase of institutional reactivation, with several important analytical contributions from official bodies signaling a growing recognition of the issue. A major step in this process was the publication in October 2023 of the Consular Assistance Protocol on Forced or Irregular Adoptions (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Exempt Resolution No. 2.272/2023). The protocol established a formal framework for consular staff to support victims, particularly those searching for their origins from abroad, and its implementation was reinforced in 2024 through training across the entire consular network. Its significance is both practical and political. Practically, it provides an institutional route of support for people affected outside Chile. Politically, it acknowledges that the consequences of forced and irregular adoptions are transnational and that state responsibilities extend beyond national borders. In doing so, it reflects a broader shift in institutional awareness: these adoptions can no longer be treated as isolated events of the past, but as an issue requiring coordinated and sustained interinstitutional action. This recognition would later become central to the creation of the Interinstitutional Roundtable.

Another important development came from official human rights and child protection bodies. The Office of the Children’s Ombudsperson (Defensoría de la Niñez) published the report Truth, Justice and Reparation Commission. Children and Adolescents in Care: Institutional Abuse and Human Rights Violations in State and Institutional Care Settings: Background and Recommendations (Defensoría de la Niñez, 2023), which identified irregular adoptions as a serious violation of the right to identity. The report argued that this issue requires a gender-sensitive, intergenerational, and historically grounded response, framing it not as an isolated child welfare matter but as a structural human rights violation with specific gendered dimensions.

For the first time in its history, the INDH dedicated a full chapter of its Annual Report to enforced disappearances and irregular adoptions (INDH, 2023). Drawing on the recommendations of the UN Special Rapporteur on truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-repetition, this marked an important step in consolidating a human rights framework for addressing the issue at the national level. That same year, UNICEF Chile and the National Service for Specialized Protection of Children and Adolescents commissioned a study explicitly focused on violations of the right to identity in past adoptions, which resulted in the report Past, Present and Future of Adoption in Chile: Towards a Child Rights-Centred Approach. Taken together, these contributions helped consolidate an emerging normative consensus on the need for a comprehensive, rights-based policy response, laying important groundwork for the more concrete institutional steps that followed.

A New Holistic Approach: The Interinstitutional Roundtable and Its Recommendations

 In March 2024, the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights established the first Interinstitutional Roundtable on Forced or Irregular Adoptions (Exempt Resolution 720/2024). The Roundtable brought together public institutions, civil society organisations, academia, and international actors, with strong support from the judiciary, particularly Judges Carroza and Aguilar Brevis, whose investigative work had laid essential groundwork for this institutional response. Its creation represented a qualitative shift in the state’s approach. For the first time, Chile was attempting to move beyond fragmented institutional responses and develop a coordinated multi actor framework capable of addressing the full complexity of the problem.

In this sense, the Roundtable represents an attempt to articulate a more coherent state response to practices that for decades remained largely unacknowledged. This shift became particularly visible on 18 February 2026, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights publicly presented the Report of Recommendations of the Roundtable, consolidating nearly two years of collaborative work. The report constitutes a formal public acknowledgement by the Chilean state that forced and irregular adoptions represent a systematic violation of fundamental rights affecting not only children but also parents, and particularly mothers, whose experiences require an explicitly gender sensitive analytical perspective. The report proposes five key measures: public recognition of state responsibility, the creation of a Unit for the Search for Origins within the Undersecretariat for Human Rights, the establishment of a national Genetic Fingerprint Database, the strengthening of institutional budgets, and the creation of a mechanism to recognise violations of fundamental rights. Taken together, these proposals signal an attempt to move beyond ad hoc responses and build a more durable institutional framework capable of guaranteeing victims’ rights to identity, truth, and reparation. Whether these recommendations translate into sustained political commitment and effective implementation will be the true test of Chile’s accountability process in the years ahead.

The Adoption Law 21, 760: Safeguards for the Present and the Future

Irregular or forced adoptions must not be understood solely as practices of the past. After almost twelve years of parliamentary debate (2013–2025), on 31 July 2025, Adoption Law 21,760 was enacted, replacing Law 19.620 (1999), which had revealed critical shortcomings over time and proved insufficient to respond to the evolving challenges of adoption policy in Chile. Among its key advances, the new legislation places the best interests of the child and the right to family life at the centre of adoption processes, reinforces the subsidiary nature of adoptability declarations, and strengthens children’s procedural rights, including the right to be heard, the right to legal representation, and the right to know their origins. Notably, it removes the minimum age requirement for initiating a search for origins. Other significant advance is the introduction of post-adoption contact with birth families, recognising that identity formation and wellbeing often depend on maintaining meaningful connections with one’s origins.

At the same time, the law strengthens accountability mechanisms. Articles 68 to 71 significantly expand the scope of prohibitions and criminal offences in both domestic and intercountry adoption, establishing prison sentences and disqualification from public office for those involved in irregular practices, and introducing aggravating circumstances when economic gain has been obtained or when a child has been taken out of the country. Despite these advances, an important gap remains: the law does not establish a statutory obligation for the state to provide reparation to victims of past forced adoptions, leaving a longstanding historical debt still unresolved.

These reforms position Chile as an emerging regional reference in rights-based adoption policy. By strengthening children’s rights, criminalising abusive practices, and requiring all relevant state institutions to preserve information essential to the right to origins, the law offers a model for countries that have yet to confront the legacy of irregular adoptions or to update their legal frameworks in line with contemporary human rights standards.

Conclusions

The trajectory traced here reflects a gradual but significant transformation in Chile’s approach to forced and irregular adoptions. Progress has been driven largely by the persistent advocacy of civil society organisations, often in the face of institutional inertia and prolonged state silence. Key milestones, including the judicial recognition of organised trafficking networks and the adoption of a new legal framework with strengthened safeguards, represent important achievements. At the same time, the history of this process, marked by cycles of momentum and stagnation, reveals the fragility of commitments that lack legislative backing, dedicated resources, and long term institutional continuity.

The Chilean case offers several lessons for the international debate on illegal intercountry adoptions. First, it demonstrates the crucial role that victims’ organisations and academic research can play as engines of accountability, particularly where the state has been responsible for or complicit in past violations. Second, it highlights the need for comprehensive policy frameworks capable of articulating truth, justice, and reparation, moving beyond fragmented or ad hoc responses. Third, it underscores the transnational nature of this phenomenon. The consequences of forced adoptions cross borders, and state responses must therefore incorporate mechanisms of international cooperation, as illustrated by the extradition request in the Gutiérrez Pávez case.

The Chilean experience also highlights the importance of linking historical memory with contemporary policy action. Institutional transparency, the preservation of archives, access to DNA testing, and the creation of genetic databases are not merely technical tools. They are essential conditions for guaranteeing the right to identity and enabling meaningful reparation. Chile stands today at a critical juncture. While the advances achieved are significant, their sustainability will depend on political will, the allocation of resources, and sustained institutional commitment. The challenge now lies with present and future governments to ensure that these commitments are translated into concrete policies and durable institutions. Only through sustained state action will it be possible to guarantee truth, justice, and reparation for those affected and to build child protection systems that genuinely uphold human rights.