When 43-year-old Christina Plisco grew up as an only adopted child in the Bronx, she always had a clear idea of where she was coming from.
"There wasn't a day that she didn't think about where she was born and how her story began," she told The Post EXCLUSIVELY. told to
A story about her origins, long accepted by Prisco and her adoptive parents, was that she was born to a poor woman in Chile. Her birth mother couldn't afford to raise the baby on her own, so she left Christina in a Catholic orphanage.
Prisco's adoptive father, Benito Zagaria, traveled in the spring of 1980 using an Italian passport to enter Chile under the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.
In May 1980, he took her baby to New York City during her 11-hour flight from Chile to New York City, which her adoptive mother Anne Her Marie Her Zagaria anxiously awaited. took home. Little did the newly formed family know that their baby was a victim of child trafficking.
In his April of this year, Prisco happened to show "Good Morning America" on TV. switched to This was a show she didn't usually watch.TylerHearing her graphgave her chills.
Graf was raised in Minnesota after his family adopted him. His birth mother put him up for adoption due to financial instability. However, when Graff tracked down his mother in adulthood, he learned that she was said to have died as a baby and was forbidden to see his body. 21}
He was caught as part of a complex international human trafficking network organized around the world and involving medical professionals, the Chilean government and the Catholic Church."Good Morning America" Reported by .
Between 8,000 and nearly 12,000 children were estimated to have been illegally or forcibly adopted in Chile during the 1970s and '80s during Pinochet's reign, said Graff's attorney Anthony Clarke. Song told the KPRC in Houston,forced adoptions took place before Pinochet came to power, but increased significantly under his administration. Dictators viewed adoption as a brutal means of ending poverty and controlling population growth. Many of those who had their babies taken were poor Indigenous women living in rural areas.
After watching the "GMA" segment, Prisco immediately called her adoptive mother and contacted Graff's nonprofit Connecting Her Roots. their own reunion.
Laura Rosa Fuentes Cáceres, 63, of Tarca was listed as the biological mother in Prisco's adoption documents. By combining her information with a personal identification number that resembles a social security number, Prisco was able to track down her biological family.
Incredibly, she was on a video call with her birth mother and her eight siblings, and she heard Graf talk and connected with him. I noticed it a few days later. She was devastated when she met her family for the first time. She was immediately struck by their unmistakable resemblance and choked with emotion.
"It's quite amazing that [my family] has been found for so long. Look no further," Plisco said. However, "there were so many of them that it was a little overwhelming."
She and her siblings all have nearly identical facial features. Some have the same seasonal allergies and one of her siblings had the same ear surgery at the same age.
In July, Prisco and her adoptive mother flew to Chile to meet her biological family. Excitedly waiting for her to arrive at the airport with a colorful handmade sign ("Bienvenida a casa hermana"), Christina quickly ran into her mother's arms and gave her a long hug.
Cáceres told her long-lost daughter about the tragic circumstances surrounding her birth and forced adoption.
When Cáceres, who lived in extreme poverty, gave birth to Prisco, she was told that her baby had jaundice and that she needed to stay at Talca Regional Hospital. . Her poor mother couldn't afford another night in the hospital, so she took the bus home without her baby girl.
The next day Cáceres returned to breastfeed her newborn, but her baby was nowhere to be found. She became hysterical and rushed to one of the receptionists who told her that the discharge papers she had signed on the day of Prisco's birth were actually to put the baby up for adoption. 73} She was evacuated from the hospital by security and received no clear answer from hospital workers. Her distraught mother was shocked, but she was too poor to afford to follow the baby. For decades she kept the story a secret from all but her eldest daughter.
Plisco lived a good life with her adoptive family, but she said of the "horrible tragedy" experienced by her birth mother that she " I am sad and angry.”
"I was a little shocked to find out how I did it, but now I'm happy to know the real story. I'm a little upset about everything my mom went through." He was a bad guy and took my family away from me," she said.
Her mother got together to love her daughter and now talks all the time. Zagaria, 73, is honing her Spanish to get to know her new family.
"We are just one of hers in a big happy family now," Zagaglia told her The Post.
But Caceres always knew that Prisco's adoption was more important than the complicated paperwork. Because she wasn't the first baby who didn't make it home from the hospital.
Several years earlier in her September 1975, Cáceres had given birth to another baby girl at her home. She named her Marcella. When the infant became ill, she took her to the hospital and was told the baby would need to be hospitalized.
After several weeks of minimal updates, her partner returned to the hospital and was told that the baby had died and that the body had been donated to medical research. Caceres never felt right about the situation, but she noted that her daughter was born at her home so she didn't have her ID number to track. I had minimal hopes.
Plisco's reunion with her biological family rekindled the family's hopes of reuniting her with Marcella.
Prisco, of Westchester, worked as a database administrator in the Greenburgh Central School District and recently joined Graf's team at Connecting Roots as a board member and administrative assistant. .
"I feel blessed. I feel I need to do everything I can to help others," Plisco said. She is looking forward to her youngest brother Manuel visiting her family in Westchester for Christmas and one day introducing her biological mother to her husband and her two children. I'm looking forward to it.
she said.