'I never thought this moment would come,' mother tells the LI daughter taken from her at birth in Chile

Tears streamed down Kaitlin Saar’s face as she stood in her Smithtown driveway on Wednesday afternoon before dashing onto her lawn and hugging her mother for the very first time.

Saar’s biological mother, María Paulina González Seguel, flew into Kennedy Airport from Chile on Wednesday morning following a decades-long effort to find the daughter who was taken from her at birth. While Saar knew she was adopted from a young age, she never knew she was one of thousands of Chilean babies taken from their mothers without their consent or knowledge and adopted by families from the United States and other countries. Until a few months ago, she never knew whether the woman who birthed her was even alive, let alone longing for their first embrace.

"I never thought this moment would come, never," González said to her daughter in Spanish as they held one another for five minutes. "I thought that I would pass away before I could find you ... But God had other things prepared for us."

Since the 1960s, around 20,000 children in Chile were illegally stripped from their birth mothers and adopted by foreign families, according to The Associated Press. The practice took place mostly under the reign of dictator Augusto Pinochet from 1973 through 1990.

Saar had never heard these tragedies until her family visited Chile in February 2024, when a tour guide asked if she was "a stolen baby," her husband, Bill Saar, recalled Wednesday.

Just before the summer, a friend of Saar’s mother messaged her on Facebook, informing her that González was hoping to find her.

"I didn’t think it was real," Saar, 41, said.

After a human rights attorney González retained in Chile found her daughter’s birth certificate and her Facebook profile, González messaged her daughter herself. Though she was skeptical at first, Saar said the information González, 60, shared in messages "was lining up" with her own adoption paperwork. She reached out to Connecting Roots, a nonprofit dedicated to reuniting illegally adopted Chilean children with their birth mothers, for help coordinating a DNA test and reunification

"It was a 100% match," Saar’s husband said.

It was only a decade ago that the government-sanctioned "plot" that relied on the cooperation of "the Catholic Church, doctors, lawyers [and] social workers" came to light, said Tyler Graf, the founder, president and CEO of Connecting Roots. Around 5% of those who were illegally adopted have reunited with their families, according to the AP.

"My mother gave birth to me in the government hospital in Temuco, Chile, and she was told that I had died after birth," Graf said on Wednesday at Saar’s home. "She asked to see the body, like many other mothers. They said they had already cremated my body and that she needed to leave the hospital. This is a very common theme. There’s little variations here and there of the parents' stories of how their child was taken."

When González became pregnant with Saar as a teenager, her parents sent her to a local covenant.

"The church came to her family and said, ‘We’re going to take her and we’re going to care for her until she gives birth to the baby,’ " Saar said of her mother, about 20 minutes before meeting her face-to-face. "She was drugged the entire time, so she couldn’t escape I guess, or call for help. She doesn’t remember giving birth to me because she was sedated the entire time."

After delivering her daughter, González was "hospitalized," suffering confusion and memory loss, she said, according to Cristina Prisco, who interpreted González’s Spanish to both her daughter — who is not fluent in Spanish — and to reporters Wednesday.

"When she came out of it ... and got some of her memory back, she ended up starting to search for her," Prisco, who was also taken from her Chilean birth mother and who serves as Connecting Root’s vice president, said of González.

While González spent decades hoping to see her daughter, Saar said she "didn’t have an interest in finding my birth mom," believing her adoption was "a positive thing," she said.

"She was poor, she couldn't afford a life with me and she wanted me to have a better life," Saar said of the "lie" her parents were told upon her adoption. "That was the story, and that’s what it says in the paperwork."

One of Saar’s official signed and stamped adoption papers, which lay spread across her dining room table on Wednesday afternoon, states her mother "had taken the free, firm and irrevocable decision of giving up her daughter to an adoptive home" and that she "has come to accept ... the guardianship, estimating this will be the most beneficial for the future life of her daughter since she’s in no condition to support her."

"If I did search for her, I was terrified that it could go horribly wrong ... if she said, ‘No, I gave you up for adoption, I don’t want anything to do with you,’ " Saar said. "Or if she passed away, I didn’t want to know. ... I had the story in my head and I wanted to keep it that way." 

Saar’s mother is staying in her home until Oct. 18, when she flies home to Chile where, Saar's husband said, they are considering moving to after retirement. The couple’s 11-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son "are so excited," Saar said. Her daughter has been saying "I have a new grandmama" and referring to her as "my abuela."

Saar said she typed up several words she hoped to say to her mother on Wednesday and translated them into Spanish "so she can hear my words in her native language."

"I just want to tell her that I’m OK, that we’re OK, that we’re going to grow from this, and there’s no more pain," Saar said. "The next chapter just flipped, we’re in it. Now we get to spend the rest of our lives together. ... We’re going to be meeting the rest of our family and growing old together."