“I knew she would find me,” says Edita Bisama, 64, from her home in the Chilean coastal town of San Antonio, after she was finally reunited with her daughter nearly 40 years after she was taken from her during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Adamari Garcia was separated from her mother a few days after her birth and sent abroad for adoption. She is one of up to 20,000 children who authorities estimate were forcibly removed from their parents by the junta, which saw international adoptions as a means to reduce child poverty.

“There was a social worker who was persistent, very persistent,” Bishama said. It was 1984 and Bishama, who already had two young children, had talked during her pregnancy about the possibility of giving the infant up for adoption. But then she had second thoughts.

“But the social worker said, how are you going to raise three kids? You don’t have a job, you don’t have a home, you don’t have any stability.” After her daughter was born, Bishama stayed with her for five days, caring for and feeding her. Then she was taken to an office a few hours away, forced to give up the baby and sent back to her hometown by bus.

The woman kept it a secret from most of her family members for decades. She had no name or any way to find her daughter.

Thousands of miles away, Andamari Garcia, who grew up in Florida and now lives in Puerto Rico, knew she was adopted but had no information about the circumstances of her adoption. A friend told her about Tyler Graff, a Texas firefighter who learned he had been snatched as a baby during the dictatorship in Chile, and founded a nongovernmental organization, Connecting Roots, to reunite adopted children with their birth families.

The organization connected Garcia to Bishama’s family through her sister’s birth certificate. DNA testing subsequently confirmed that Edita and Andamari were mother and daughter.

Garcia, who is now 41, looks like her biological mother and both sisters. Like her older sister, she loves dogs – the two women, separately, have rescued dozens of dogs. But her Puerto Rican accent makes her stand out from the rest of the family, who speak Chilean Spanish.

“We looked at each other and didn’t talk much,” Garcia said, recalling the first time she saw her mother through the Zoom platform. “I was looking at her eyes and thinking, she’s the one who brought me to life and, my God, how much I look like her.”

Last week, the family met in person.

Garcia is one of five adopted children that the Connecting Roots brought back to Chile this year. Graff said the government supports the organization’s efforts, noting that its goal is not political but simply to reunite families “before it’s too late.

“The mothers are aging, some have died. So we’re racing against time,” she explained.

Usually, the parents who adopted the babies had no idea of the circumstances of their “snatching”. Garcia said her adoptive parents were very supportive when she decided to find her birth family. Now, she is taking intensive classes in Chilean … cuisine, music and culture and plans to take a trip to Patagonia with her sisters.