It’s been over 30 years since Chile was under the brutal reign of General Augusto Pinochet, but the echoes of the dictatorship’s human rights violations still reverberate today…even in America.
For decades, thousands of Chilean children were disappearing—taken from their birth mothers and adopted out to American families. Adoption records told tales of abandonment and poverty. But beneath the surface, something far more sinister was at play. Perhaps one of the most overlooked illegal-adoption schemes of the 20th century.
Told through gripping accounts from adoptees and birth mothers, with chilling revelations from investigators and experts, Hola Mamá is a three-part limited series exposing a calculated, transnational scheme that preyed on vulnerable women, shattered families, and turned babies into international commodities. What unfolds is a vast web of corruption: judges, doctors, social workers, religious leaders, orphanages, and even foreign agencies each playing a role— many complicit, all silent.
How could something this widespread go undetected for so long? And worse—how do you expose a crime protected by policy?
The human toll is also entrenched in the haunting journey of our adoptees—now adults—who have spent their lives
chasing fragments of truth and living with lies. As they dig through falsified documents and buried secrets, each inch closer to the mothers they never knew. Their stories of longing, identity, and resilience reveal the lasting scars of a system built to erase them—and the strength it takes to reclaim what was stolen.
The series goes beyond criminal activity to illuminate the human toll and profound loss suffered by the young, poor, unwed mothers—each one bearing the unimaginable loss of a beloved child for decades and now sharing their anguish and personal circumstances that made them prime targets to be preyed upon.
Threaded through each episode is a team of experts and government officials who help provide critical, historical context and official record exposing and connecting the complexity of the crime. Their testimonies—grounded in classified and declassified documentation, official investigative reports, and years of buried knowledge—unfold each layer of the crime hidden in plain sight and that unraveled over decades
JUAN GABRIEL VALDÉS
Ambassador of Chile to the U.S.
JAIME RASKIN
U.S. House of Representatives
TIM KAINE
U.S. Senator
PETER KORNBLUH
Director of the Chile and Cuba Documentation Projects,
Senior Analyst at the National Security Archive
DR. KAREN ALFARO MONSALVE
Professor, Academic of Austral University of Chile, Valdivia | Instituto de Historia y Ciencias Sociales
DR. ANDRÉS SOLIMANO
Economics (MIT),
Regional Advisor at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean
OLIVIER DE FROUVILLE
President of the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances
JACK DEVINE
Intelligence Agenc & Former Deputy Director of Operations, CIA
PATRICIO NAVIA
Clinical Professor, Liberal Studies, New York University
BRANISLAV MARELIC ROKOV
Partner at Valor Sostenible Consultores,
Human Rights and Business Consultant