‘I Memorized Your Face’: Chilean Adoptee Stolen as a Baby Reunites with Her Birth Mother

Cara Miranda was adopted as a baby in Pennsylvania in 1988. According to her parents, the adoption was processed legally through the adoption agency Pat Zuvich. Now in her mid-thirties, she’s a social worker who supports the elderly and says she has had a happy and fulfilling life.

Cara as a baby

When she had a child of her own, she started becoming curious about her origins: “Becoming a mother has really shaped me and made me think a lot about my roots and my adoption, which is what led me to this search.”

The TikTok video that changed everything

She happened to see a video on social media about a girl adopted from Chile who discovered that she had actually been stolen from her birth parents. Cara was intrigued by her story and reached out to her. She soon learned that as many as 50,000 babies were stolen from their parents in Chile between 1960 and the 1990s in a massive child trafficking operation under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. And the adoption agency in this girl’s story was Pat Zuvich — the same agency that processed Cara’s.

What if her birth mother hadn’t actually placed her for adoption?

What if she didn’t even know that Cara was alive?

Cara reached out to Nos Buscamos, an organization that helps Chilean families affected by coerced adoption. MyHeritage is proud to partner with Nos Buscamos by providing free DNA kits to their beneficiaries. They were able to track down her birth mother, and a MyHeritage DNA test confirmed the match.

‘She remembered me all these years’

It turned out that Cara’s mother already had 4 children when she got pregnant with Cara, and she saw an ad offering support for mothers who wanted to place babies for adoption. She went to the center advertised, gave birth, and took care of her baby there for 3 months. However, she changed her mind about placing her for adoption and wanted to keep her child. Lawyers stepped in, claiming it was too late, and Cara was taken away. Cara’s mother was never compensated and was left heartbroken.

“She said, ‘I memorized your face, and you look exactly the same,” says Cara, her voice strained with emotion. “So she remembered me all these years.”

Cara and her mother meet for the first time

The pair stayed in touch for about a year, and then, this spring, Cara’s mother flew to the U.S. to reunite with her daughter. In the video below she shares her story just before meeting her mother for the first time:

And here is the long-awaited moment:

“As soon as I saw her, I just felt so much love and it just felt like family,” Cara told 11 News. “It just feels like home… like family and a sense of belonging. That we are the same.”

Cara with her mother and a friend’s dog

Cara doesn’t speak much Spanish and her mother doesn’t speak much English, and they used their phones as interpreters. But sometimes, no words are necessary.

Cara and her mother

Cara’s is just one of thousands of stories of babies stolen from their families in Chile. Nos Buscamos is currently working on around 5,000 cases — a daunting task, since many of the people involved in the scandal are no longer around. As the mothers of these babies age, the imperative to restore justice and reunite them with the children that were taken from them grows more urgent.

Learn more about Nos Buscamos’s work on their website, and please consider supporting them. If you or anyone you know may benefit from their assistance, please reach out to them!