Leadership1 distinct publisher3 min readPublished
Chile's national police now put the number of children taken illegally under Pinochet at 65,000, six and a half times their first estimate, and Constanza del Rio says the biological mothers will not outlive the court timetable.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
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The arithmetic of the revision deserves more attention than the current figure. The count moved from 10,000 to 25,000 to 65,000, raised twice, both times upward, as the national police kept investigating [4]. The present number is 6.5 times the first [1], and the 55,000 children added between them [4] were never in dispute. They sat outside whatever method produced the earlier figures. Set against Chile's 18 million people [5], 65,000 is about one person in 277 [2], which is a marker of scale rather than a rate, since today's population is not the population of the dictatorship years.
The instrument that made the count movable did not exist when the searching started. Del Rio says DNA testing is the most crucial tool in the work and was unavailable 15 years ago when she began [11]. Nos Buscamos spent its early years without the one thing that could settle an individual case, working against an archive built to make the adoptions look lawful: del Rio says 90 percent of the children left Chile with official documentation including passports, and adoptive parents believed the process was legal [9]. Cheap consumer genotyping moved the proof out of an institution's custody and into a household's cheek swab.
Distribution is what turns a tool into a register. The organization partnered with MyHeritage's DNA bank to supply free tests to Chilean mothers [12], and runs volunteers in Chile, Europe, the United States, Australia and more than 20 other countries [10]. That geography follows the caseload. If 90 percent of 65,000 children went abroad, roughly 58,500 potential matches [3] sit in other jurisdictions, which is why the searchable pool has to be a consumer database rather than a Chilean one. The nine-step protocol published for Chilean-born adoptees [14] does similar work by a different route, lowering the cost of a first inquiry to something a stranger can complete alone.
The police raised the number, not the organization, and the record supports that. Del Rio credits the rising estimate to the national police investigating further [4], and the interview does not say which evidence came from whom. What the account supports is narrower and still worth holding: an outside operator with a verification method can make individual cases legible, and individual cases are what a state count eventually has to absorb. Del Rio describes connecting a mother in Temuco with her 35-year-old daughter in France, who had been searching for ten years, after the mother had spent decades believing she lost a baby boy [15].
The tradeoff she names is between remedy now and remedy on the record. She says justice moves slowly in Chile and that cases could take 20 years to resolve, by which time many biological mothers will have died [13], so the capacity goes to reunifications rather than to waiting on courts. The legislative track runs behind that: two laws are close, the important one making the sale of children for adoption a felony, which del Rio says Chilean law still does not provide [16]. That statute governs the next case. For the mothers now alive, the DNA match is the only remedy that arrives inside their lifetimes, and the sequencing choice has already been made.
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
Constanza del Rio is the founder of Nos Buscamos, an organization working to reconnect families separated by illegal adoptions during Chile's Pinochet dictatorship.
Del Rio says she discovered as an adult that she was one of the children taken from their biological families and placed into adoption under fraudulent circumstances, which led her to set up Nos Buscamos.
Nos Buscamos means 'We are looking for each other', and was set up to reunite families and push for reforms.
Del Rio describes Chile as a small country of just 18 million people.
Nos Buscamos tracks people using DNA, an online database, and volunteers across Chile, Europe, the United States, Australia and more than 20 other countries.
Del Rio says DNA testing is the organization's most crucial tool and was unavailable 15 years ago when she began this work.
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forbes.com
1 article · August 28, 2026
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One voice, no paper trail
Every number that carries weight here — 10,000 rising to 65,000, ninety percent adopted abroad, twenty years to a ruling, no statute as of 2026 — comes from one person in one sitting. Forbes published the transcript and set no police statement, court record, statute citation or second account beside it. Del Río is a credible first-hand witness to her own organisation's methods; on a national police estimate she is relaying someone else's count, and this reporting never closes that distance.
Specifics without totals
The machinery is real enough to be described in parts: donated MyHeritage kits aimed at mothers, volunteers in twenty-plus countries, a nine-step protocol anyone can start from, and one dated reunion — Temuco to France, the Saturday before publication. What is absent is any denominator. No cumulative reunification count, no active caseload, no number of mothers tested. An operation that has clearly matched families is described in a way that makes it impossible to say how many.
Claim outruns the count
The framing — matching families faster than the courts can rule — is supported by exactly one reunion and an unsourced twenty-year estimate for judicial resolution. Both halves of the comparison are unmeasured. Nor is the escalation to 65,000 held at arm's length: it is relayed as a police finding while carrying none of a police finding's traceability. The overstatement lies in the certainty of the figures, not in the existence of the work.
Interviewer has a stake
The questions were not asked by a reporter. Marie Ringler works for Ashoka, an organisation whose purpose is elevating social entrepreneurs, and the interview runs on Forbes' contributor channel under Ashoka's banner. That format explains the absence of any challenge to a figure, and it explains why MyHeritage's donation is mentioned without a follow-up about data. None of this suggests the account is untrue; it does mean nobody involved in producing it was there to test it.
Clear provenance, unclear facts
Reading what this story is made of takes no effort: one interview, one speaker, one publication date, affiliation stated up front. So the judgement about which claims stand on their own and which are being passed along second-hand is a firm one — even though the passed-along claims, including the central 65,000, remain unresolved here and would need Chilean police or judicial records to settle.