In the Latin American country of Chile, a woman has been reunited with her missing twin daughters after more than four decades.


In 1979, 64-year-old María Verónica Soto had her twin daughters taken away from her, and since then she had never been able to see them.


At that time, Chile was under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Nineteen-year-old María Verónica had given birth to twin girls in the coastal town of Hualpén.


When the babies were eight months old, she took them for a routine check-up at a doctor’s office, where she was told that the babies had to stay for further observation.


She was informed that this was necessary to assess the babies’ health and nutritional needs, but soon afterward she was told that a government clinic had taken custody of the girls, claiming that she was not feeding them properly.


When she went to the police, she was directed to the court, where she discovered that her daughters had been adopted by an Italian couple.


Some time later, she learned that the girls’ birth certificates had been altered to erase her identity as their mother.


According to Chilean authorities, between 1973 and 1990, during the military dictatorship, thousands of children were taken away from their mothers and handed over to foreign couples.


The process of María Verónica’s reunion with her daughters began in 2020, when she contacted a local NGO.


This NGO works to help return children who were taken from their parents and given to foreign families.


The NGO collected María Verónica’s DNA and sent it to a U.S. DNA bank.


For five years, she kept inquiring about progress, and the NGO told her they were waiting for DNA samples from either her daughters or her grandchildren.


Earlier this year, that finally happened: in March, one of her daughter’s sons took a DNA test and discovered his grandmother.


That grandson contacted the NGO via Facebook.


According to María Verónica, she never lost hope and always believed that one day she would be reunited with her daughters.


But she had no idea it would take 45 years.


On September 10, her daughters arrived in Chile from Italy.


On the occasion, María Verónica told them: “Your mother has always been looking for you.”


María Verónica does not speak Italian, and her daughters do not know Spanish, but the emotions of the moment needed no translation.


Her daughters had always known that they were adopted from Chile, but they knew nothing about their real parents.


Even the adoptive couple had no idea that the babies had been taken away from their biological mother.