María Angélica González gave birth to a son in a Chilean hospital 42 years ago and, incredibly, was told that her newborn baby had died when this wasn’t the case. What had actually happened was that her son had become part of a massive child trafficking operation that, according to human rights groups, saw the illegal placement of an estimated 20,000-50,000 Chilean babies, stolen from mostly low-income families for adoption abroad. Maria’s son was adopted by American parents who knew nothing of his circumstances and brought up the baby boy in the US with the name Jimmy Lippert Thuden. Although Jimmy knew he had been born in Chile, it was only after more than four decades of life that he heard the story of another Chilean adoptee and began to wonder.
Jimmy and his mother Maria meet for the first time in more than four decades