Trushali
- 29 May 2026
Man Taken from Chile as a Baby Reunites with Biological Mother
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Ana Maria Navarrete said the years after her son was taken were “some of the worst” of her life
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Kyle Adler (right) meets his biological mother, Ana Maria Navarrete, in Chile in February.Credit : AP Photo/Esteban Felix
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NEED TO KNOW
- Kyle Adler, who was adopted by an American family when he was 9 months old, in February met his biological mom for the first time since he was a baby
- The 36-year-old is one of thousands of children stolen from families in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet
- After Adler reunited with Ana Maria Navarrete, they embraced at the airport and Navarrete said her “dream has finally come true”
In February, Kyle Adler traveled to Chile to meet his biological mom for the first time since he was a baby.
The 36-year-old, the owner of Colorado Weightlifting in Denver, was adopted in 1990 when he was 9 months old and raised in a suburb of Chicago, according to the Associated Press, which recounted his reunion.
Adler was one of thousands of children stolen from families in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who led the country from 1973 to 1990, the AP reported.
Many other such cases have been documented in the media over the years.
“They tricked me,” one mom, Sara Jineo, told the BBC in 2019 of losing her then days-old son, Camilo. “They made me go to the hospital and said they were going to do a blood test on my baby.”
Adler, after recently visiting the country and meeting his mom, told the AP that it was “eye-opening to see who my people are … I feel the love, I feel the compassion, the care.”
Though Adler knew he was adopted, it was in adulthood when he first decided to track down his biological family, and in 2017, he discovered the Nos Buscamos organization, which works with the genealogy platform MyHeritage.
But when he found out he was adopted illegally, he struggled with the idea and it took years of therapy for him to feel ready to dive further into his background, according to the AP.
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Kyle Adler and Ana Maria Navarrete embrace after being reunited for the first time, in February. AP Photo/Esteban Felix
Last year, Adler set out again to find out more about his biological family. MyHeritage confirmed a match between him and Ana Maria Navarrete, now 56, and he traveled from Miami to Chile to meet her in February, the AP reported.
When Adler was born, his biological mom was a 19-year-old single parent living in the city of Coronel, over 330 miles south of the capital of Santiago. She named him Marcos Antonio.
Navarrete told the AP that, because she couldn’t afford a room for both of them, she hired a woman to house and care for her son and visited him when she wasn’t working.
She explained that the woman told her one day that her son was taken by an American couple and a police investigator later told her they’d likely absconded with him as part of a counterfeit adoption network.
Navarrete told the AP that the years after her son was taken were “some of the worst” of her life.
After Adler arrived in Chile earlier this year, they embraced at the airport, with Navarrete saying her “dream has finally come true.”
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They visited the beach in Coronel, the hospital where Adler was born and the house he was taken from.
He said he didn’t believe either of his adoptive parents, Mike and Connie, who both died in 2022, were aware of the circumstances around his adoption and, as he told the AP, “didn’t steal me; they didn’t name me Kyle out of malice.”
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