At two months old, Maria Diemar was flown to Sweden to be adopted. Years later, she tracked down her birth mother, who said her baby had been taken against her will. Now investigations are showing that she was one of thousands stolen from their parents
For as long as she can remember, Maria Diemar has known she was adopted. Her Swedish parents were always open about her Chilean heritage, and growing up in Stockholm in the 1970s and 80s with brown skin and dark hair, it was impossible not to notice she was different.
When she was 11, Diemar’s parents showed her the papers that arrived with her in Sweden as a two-month-old baby in 1975. The file on her parentage offered a brief, unflattering portrait of a teenage mother who sent her newborn girl to be raised by strangers on the other side of the world. “They said she was a live-in maid, that she had a son who lived with her parents, and that she was poor,” recalled Diemar.
