On the wooden table there are two things that Isidora Salazar places before greeting: a photograph and a carefully folded document. The photograph shows a baby held in the arms of a man who is not his father. The baby looks nowhere with squinted eyes, blinded by the flash light. Below, a name in English: John Erwin. The document is a yellowed Chilean birth certificate, where another name is read: Aquiles Manuel Salinas. They are the same child. They are two lives that for years did not know about each other.
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“The catalog,” says Isidora, and in that word fits all the indignation. Because that was it: a catalog. A kind of magazine where babies appeared offered as merchandise, with English names and studio portrait-type photographs, ready to be chosen by wealthy North American families eager to buy a child. Her brother John was one of those babies.
Isidora is 22 years old and studies Industrial Civil Engineering at Diego Portales University (UDP). She is slim, with dark hair and a direct gaze, with that slow way of speaking of someone who has told this story several times but still does not lose its weight. She speaks with her hands still on the table, except when she names her grandfather: then her fingers tense and her voice lowers a tone; the anger seems harder to hold than the pain.
The interview takes place at the Starbucks in the Nicanor Parra Library. It is Monday morning and there is background noise, students with headphones, the intermittent sound of the coffee machine. Isidora does not seem uncomfortable with the environment. She arrived on time, with the documents already ready, with the decision already made to show them.
She has three siblings who grew up with her: Camila (38), Jaime (32), and Florencia (21). But since January 2019 she knows she also has John, 41 years old, a physical therapist in Texas, son of her mother Paola Salinas when she was 15 years old and who was sold at birth by Paola’s own father, Jorge Salinas, who worked in an ambulance at Paula Jaraquemada Hospital, one of the establishments listed in the records of illegal adoptions during Pinochet’s dictatorship.
The story ended up finding the family through a chain of coincidences difficult to imagine: Nicolás Díaz, a journalist who turned out to be a distant fifth cousin of Paola, appeared in the 23andMe genetic database because John—raised in the United States and always feeling different from his adoptive family—had taken a DNA test at 13 years old looking for answers. Twenty years later, the DNA found him. And Nicolás, almost unaware that this kinship existed, ended up becoming the link that joined the two worlds.
Isidora opens the birth certificate carefully, with an almost ritual delicacy, although it is noticeable that she has done it many times. Sitting in this university café, she talks about illegal adoptions, DNA tests, and family silences while a few meters away other students talk about exams, group work, or review notes on their computers. The scene is strange: a 22-year-old young woman trying to project her future while at the same time organizing a family story marked by one of the most brutal and silent chapters of the dictatorship.
At times, while speaking, she seems to forget that she is telling something extraordinary. She pauses to drink coffee, looks at her cell phone when it vibrates, and arranges the papers on the table like any university student preparing a presentation. But then she names John or her grandfather again, and the conversation suddenly returns to a story impossible to become ordinary.
—What was that moment like when you found out you had an older brother?
—I was just coming back from vacation and I already suspected something was going on because my mom and older siblings told us they wanted to talk as soon as we arrived. We all gathered at the house: Camila, Jaime, Florencia, me, and my mom. That’s when they told us there was another brother. At that moment, I thought my mom was pregnant. But they started telling us that she got pregnant at 15, that she had John on June 9, 1985, and that my grandfather decided to sell him to an American family. It was a shock of emotions for which there were no words.
—What exactly happened at the hospital the day John was born?
—My mom was able to be with him for four days. Then they told her they were going to take him for a checkup, separated her, and when she returned, her father told her: “Your son is going to have a better life.” And that was all. Three months later, John was in the United States. My mom didn’t know anything else. She didn’t have the adoptive parents’ names, didn’t know exactly where they had taken him. Only rumors in the neighborhood that maybe he was in the United States.
—Knowing that it was your own grandfather who sold John, how did you process that?
—It was the hardest. With a stranger, maybe it would have been easier in some sense because he is a stranger. But your grandfather is family. And besides, he was a grandfather who was never present in our lives because my mom distanced herself from him without us really knowing why. Now we understand. There is a very big anger. When John arrived in Chile and asked about him, he only wanted to see a photo. He didn’t want any more relationship. And I understand that perfectly.
—Looking back, do you recognize signs in your mom of that pain she carried in silence for decades?
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—Yes, many. She was very overprotective with us, didn’t want anyone to touch us or give us hugs. When Jaime was born, since he was a boy, she was even more overprotective and didn’t want the same thing to happen. We also understood why in certain months—April, May, or June—she disappeared, appeared weaker, or cried silently. Now she has apologized for those attitudes, but I told her there is nothing to forgive.
—What was the physical reunion like when John arrived in Chile in August 2022?
—I thought my mom was going to have a heart attack, she was very euphoric. We all went to the airport, with Luis too, John’s biological father, because my mom never lost contact with him. The first hug was very long and tight. At that moment you realize that blood really pulls.
For weeks, Paola Salinas prepared John’s arrival as if trying to recover forty years in a single visit. She organized old photographs, thought about what Chilean foods she could cook for him, and planned activities for each day of that week. She wanted to show him Viña del Mar, the vineyards, the Yeso reservoir, and also the family that stayed in Chile waiting to meet him. There was anxiety, but also a silent need to make up for lost time. “It was like trying to fit forty years into seven days,” says Isidora.
—What does it mean to you personally to be linked to a story that is part of the systematic theft of babies during Pinochet’s dictatorship?
—It changed my role. Now I feel I have a responsibility to make this visible because it is very silenced. Through the agency Nos Buscamos, which groups many families who are in the same situation, my mom participates a lot in marches and is always looking for state funding for these searches. There are families from the south, from rural areas, who have had more difficulties. There are people whose children appeared in Norway or Switzerland. And there are others who found out their children died. Not everyone has the same ending that we had, and that weighs.
—At 22 years old, what has this story left you in your way of understanding family and trust?
—It taught me that a family wound can hurt for years, even in silence. And it also taught me to work on the male figure that wasn’t my brother Jaime, because in our family the man has been a gap: my own issues with my dad since my parents are separated and the problems with my grandfather. For me, it has been learning to relate to that figure, to trust. That is what has cost me the most and what has given me the most to reflect on.
Isidora folds the birth certificate with the same care with which she opened it and keeps it next to the catalog photograph. They are the only documents that connect Aquiles Manuel Salinas with John Erwin.
Outside the library, the street continues its Monday rhythm. Isidora slings her bag over her shoulder. She has classes later. She says her mom is raising money to travel to Texas in August, or maybe John will come earlier. “For now WhatsApp,” she says, and in that phrase fits the distance of forty years reduced to a screen.
The story of her family does not end here. Nor does it end well entirely, because there is a grandmother who went to the grave without telling her daughter where her son was, a grandfather who is still alive and with whom no one wants to have a relationship, and a state that has not yet systematically judged what happened in hospitals like Paula Jaraquemada during the dictatorship.
But there is also a mother who started learning salsa because John dances salsa. Over time, John stopped feeling like a distant story or the lost brother everyone spoke about carefully. He began to occupy an everyday place within the family. Today they share video calls, WhatsApp groups, and links to the weightlifting competitions he participates in from the United States. There are five siblings who already count as five. And there is a catalog photograph on a Starbucks table that no longer belongs to anonymity.
