THE INVESTIGATION

Only a small fraction of Chilean adoptees have learned the truth about their origin stories—marked by deception, coercion, trauma, profit, and power. 

An even smaller number have been reunited with their biological families.

In 2022, Hola Mamá director and Chilean adoptee, Adrian Reamey, began the search for her birth mother. But what she discovered revealed a hidden system—one that would fundamentally change how she understood adoption and the forces behind it.

Adrian first learned the story of Tyler Graf, a Chilean adoptee who discovered at age 36 that he had been stolen at birth and sent to the United States after his mother was falsely told he had died. 

This was not an isolated case.

It was systemic.

Through firsthand testimony from adoptees and birth mothers, archival records, court files, and interviews with historians, journalists, investigators, and legal experts, Hola Mamá traces how this system functioned and how its consequences continue to shape lives today. 

Under Chile’s military dictatorship, social services, courts, hospitals, and intermediaries operated with little oversight. Adoption was framed as rescue, while families were permanently separated. 

Birth mothers were targeted because they were poor, young, single, or marginalized.

They were labeled “unfit” by people and institutions empowered to decide who deserved to parent and who did not. 

Some were told their babies had died, when in reality their children were transferred into the adoption system.

Others were coerced into relinquishment through deception, judgment, intimidation, and fear—often while still recovering from childbirth. 

Their children were taken.

The mothers were left with nothing—no paperwork, no trace, no explanations—only silence and unresolved grief.

The children grew up in adoptive families across the world—France, Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Belgium, and the United States, the largest receiving country of international adoptees. 

Most adoptive families had no knowledge of the corruption and coercion surrounding the adoptions. They believed the narratives they were given. 

Decades later, the children, now adults, are searching for the truth.

What they are discovering is how difficult accountability becomes when records are missing, responsibility is lacking, and time has passed. 

Destroyed evidence. Falsified paperwork. Hidden records. Forced silence.

And statutes of limitation that shield institutions from scrutiny. Together, these barriers have made truth difficult to uncover and justice difficult to pursue, despite the scale of the crime.