NB: This story is heartbreaking as well as wondrous, it leaves me speechless. Nothing can be said aside from wonderment at the joy and tragedy of human life. God bless you María Angélica, God bless you Jimmy Lippert Thyden, enjoy the miracle of finding each other after four decades. We all love you too. DS
As Thyden walked up to González outside her home in Valdivia, Chile, the heartbroken mother could barely look at her son. Wracked with sobs, González covered her face with her hands as the space between them vanished. Thyden’s voice cracked, “Hola, Mamá. Te amo mucho,” “I love you so much.”
A man who was kidnapped as a newborn in Chile four decades ago and raised in the US by a family who had no idea says he is grappling with a range of emotions after getting to meet his biological mother for the first time.
Photo: USA Today
“Nothing compares – it was a clash of feelings for me,” 42-year-old Jimmy Lippert Thyden told the Guardian after USA Today this week documented his emotional reunion with his birth mom, María Angélica González. “It was a clash of feelings for me – happiness over all of them, [but] I was hurt by the time lost. “It was incredibly painful to think someone would hurt her in such a deep way.”
As he and USA Today tell it, after González gave birth to Thyden, a nurse claimed the baby arrived prematurely and needed to be put in an incubator. The nurse soon shared a heartbreaking update with the new mom: her baby had died.
See video
But that wasn’t true, both Thyden and González have since learned. Actually, a family from Arlington, Virginia, had adopted Thyden without realizing he had been deceptively taken away from his mother.
Thyden was raised as one of three siblings in a loving, two-parent household. Thyden knew he was born in Chile as he grew up to serve with the US marines for 19 years and established himself as a criminal defense attorney. But he and his adopted family believed he had no living relatives left in the South American nation which was ruled by dictator Augusto Pinochet’s brutal regime from 1973 to 1990.
“For 40 years, that was my story,” Thyden wrote on his Facebook page.
Yet that all began to change in April, when he read a USA Today news article about a California man who had learned he was stolen from his mother in Chile and then illicitly adopted out to a US couple.
The outlet reported that human rights groups believe more than 20,000 babies were snatched away from mostly low-income mothers in Chile and then put up to be adopted by people in foreign countries who paid what they believed were legitimate fees – yet who had been lied to about the babies’ circumstances. Midwives, doctors, social workers, nuns, priests and judges all had roles in the plot, which was financially lucrative for its participants as well as Pinochet’s government…
****************************************************
Uki Goñi – A grandmother’s 36-year hunt for the child stolen by the Argentinian junta
Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death
The joint CIA – MI-6 instigated coup in Iran that changed the Middle East, and the cover-up
After the truth-shower 