The Swedes searching for their Colombian mothers 40 years after their adoptions: ‘They stole my identity’

When he was eight years old, Markus Lidman realized he was different from the other children in Pitea, a town in northern Sweden. They had all inherited the same pale skin tone as their parents. He, on the other hand, was dark-skinned. “I decided to ask them if they were really my parents, and they told me they had adopted me in Colombia in 1982. They sat with me and showed me a video of the orphanage,” he recalls. He had been born Luis Alberto Sánchez in Cali, a hot city 7,000 mile away. Like 4,500 other Swedes born between 1970 and 2000, his Colombian parents had abandoned him. Or at least that’s what the adoption papers said, without providing any details.

From that moment on, Markus began to feel a void that he still feels at age 43. “Questions started popping up for my biological mother: ‘Why did you abandon me? Wasn’t I lovable enough? Did you have a drug addiction and couldn’t take care of me?’” he says via video call after finishing his shift as a waiter at a pub. He believes the lack of answers has affected him at different times. “I panicked about women leaving me. I did everything to avoid it. And when my girlfriends dumped me, I attempted suicide,” he says before saying that he now is married and has a daughter. “Years later, I did drugs and stupid things. When you have a hole, you fill it with shit.”

Markus decided to look for his mother. The problem was that he only had the scant information from his documents. “All they say is her name, and I think it’s made up. When I Google it, all that comes up is an inventor from the 1900s with a mustache,” he explains. He asked for help in Facebook groups and that’s where, a year and a half ago, he met Mikael Kjelleros. He’s something of a celebrity among Swedish adoptees: he found his Colombian mother in 2024 and now helps others. He recommended that Markus take a DNA test on MyHeritage, a platform that has genetic data on some 10 million people worldwide. That didn’t work either.

However, meeting Mikael was a turning point for Markus. Both are children of single mothers, born in Cali in the 1980s, and both lived in the same orphanage, with adoptive parents who stayed at the same hotel when they came to pick them up. The difference is that Mikael has found his mother, and she has told him that she didn’t abandon him: on the eighth day after he was born, she went to the hospital to see him in the incubator, and the nurses told her that he was no longer there, that some relatives had already taken him. Markus hopes to find a similar answer. “I think that, just like in Mikael’s case, something bad happened to me and my mother,” he says.

A Swedish government report, published in June 2025, gives weight to these suspicions. “Sweden cooperated with countries where structural risks existed and accepted procedures that would not have been acceptable within the national system,” the text states. Thousands of women in the Global South, from Colombia to India, were deceived or coerced into signing documents consenting to the adoption of their children. There were children declared orphans when they were not, exorbitant payments to intermediaries, and documents containing false information. Sixty thousand adoptions were registered between 1969 and 2022, of which 5,698 originated in Colombia. The peak was in the 1980s, when private adoptions were still permitted, with lawyers processing the paperwork without oversight from the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF).

Tobias Hübinette, a professor of Intercultural Studies at Karlstad University, who was adopted in South Korea, explains in a video call that the Swedish state had two main motivations for joining the wave of international adoptions promoted by the United States after the Korean War (1950–1953). On the one hand, to provide children for Swedish couples who could not have them for medical reasons. On the other, because of the belief that in this way it could “help what they called ‘the Third World,’ which they considered to be overpopulated.” “The state didn’t care that these were corrupt adoptions because they thought it was for the greater good. They believed that the children would be better off here than in countries with wars and poverty,” he explains.

A baby carrier

Helena Wager, born in Medellín in 1973, says time and again that she has a happy life. “I have three children, a husband of 28 years, and a granddaughter. I’m a yoga teacher; I give classes. I’m a very happy woman. With a wonderful family, with wonderful friends. I have nothing to complain about,” she says in a video call from her car, bundled up against the Stockholm winter chill. She adds that her adoptive parents have supported her in everything. But something has weighed heavily on her since she was a teenager and intensified when she had children: “The only pain I feel is the disconnection from my history. There’s something in my heart, like a feeling of loneliness, something genetic. I need to know what happened to me and to my Colombian parents.”

She gives a quick summary of her story. “I was taken from my mother as soon as I was born because, apparently, she couldn’t take care of me. I was taken to a convent, and then a ‘baby carrier’ for European families came for me. She brought me to Sweden, and my adoptive parents picked me up at the airport. The most disturbing thing is that a few years ago I had a DNA test, and it turned out I’m a second cousin of a friend she also brought over,” she says. That’s all she knows. The woman who took her to Sweden could have helped her, but she didn’t. “Now she’s 85 and has dementia. But when I was a teenager, I wrote her some very harsh letters. ‘I know you know, you must have met my mother, you must know everything.’ She never said a word to me.”

Wager has had some bad experiences in her search. “There are so many scams, people who tell you they’re going to help you, ask for money, and then disappear. I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” she says. Then, she met Mikael in a Facebook group and decided to trust him. “I didn’t expect him to contact me, but he did without asking for anything in return,” Helena says. Although her chances of success are slim — she doesn’t have a single name to look for — she remains optimistic. “I trust in God. He decides whether finding my parents is my destiny or not,” she says.

Unlike Markus, Helena has learned Spanish and feels a stronger connection to her birth country. “I identify as Colombian and Latina. I don’t connect with Swedes. Whereas, as soon as I see or hear a Latino in a shop, I get excited and feel at home,” she says. “Now I know how to navigate Swedish social norms better than when I was a child: I try to be normal, not draw attention to myself, I even turn pale in the winter. But with my close friends, I’m Latina. I’m like the sun here, spreading my tentacles of light and warmth.” She has been to Bolivia and Costa Rica, but doesn’t want to visit Colombia until she finds some relatives. “It would be like returning to an empty house,” she says.

The Colombian flag

Marisol Cortés, a caregiver for people with disabilities, strongly connects to her Colombian identity. “When I was a teenager, I always received racist comments about my hair. I didn’t feel a connection with Swedes. So something told me I had to connect with my people, with Latinos,” she says in a video call. She confronted her adoptive mother about learning Spanish. “She got very angry. ‘Why would you do that? You shouldn’t,’ she told me. I replied that I didn’t care and went to the library to find books. I put up a whiteboard with words in my room and learned,” she recalls. She shows the Colombian flag she has in her room. “Of all the things I have, it’s the one I’m most proud of. It reminds me of my past. It’s something no one can take away from me.”

All she knows about her story is that a police officer found her in a garbage container in Bogotá 43 years ago, on May 15, 1982, and that she inherited his last name. She was adopted by a construction worker and a bank employee. “I ask them for more information, but they don’t help me. ‘We’ve already talked about this, you have all the documents,’ is all they say. I don’t believe them. I feel like they’re hiding something from me,” she says. Like Helena, she has had bad experiences while searching for her mother: a woman from southwestern Colombia contacted her years ago and then stopped responding. “Maybe I got too excited and scared her. I wrote to her again, and she blocked me.”

Marisol has prepared herself to be rejected from her Colombian family. “If they don’t want me, that’s fine. But at least I need to find my papers, to know the truth. I feel that this way I can put all the pieces back together and finally feel peace,” she says. Her goal, now that her children have moved out, is to buy a house in Colombia and live six months in each country. “It might seem strange, and maybe I wouldn’t belong there either, but something tells me I’ll feel better than here,” she says. “It’s my life, and I don’t care what they say. I was born in Colombia, and I’m going to die there.”

A country of origin

Susan Branco, an expert on transnational adoptions at Palo Alto University in the United States, who was adopted from Colombia, explains in a video call that several factors led the South American country to begin placing children with foreign couples in the late 1960s. “The Catholic Church, which held significant influence, felt it had to do something about the large number of children living on the streets. And so they began promoting international adoptions, which they saw as a better option than encouraging family planning,” she explains. According to Branco, there was growing support for a narrative that portrayed European or North American couples as “responsible,” and people with limited economic resources in Colombia as “irresponsible.”

The system quickly became corrupt. Helí Abel Torrado, a lawyer specializing in family law, recounts over the phone how he used to criticize several of his colleagues. “They were always hunting for unborn children. They would take a peasant woman, a domestic worker, and give her protection until the birth so she would sign the authorizations,” he says. As early as 1981, The New York Times reported on “a multimillion dollar international ring in which hundreds of poor Andean children were kidnapped or bought from their mothers and sold under forged birth certificates and adoption papers to childless couples from the United States and Europe.” The then-director of the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF), Juan Jacobo Muñoz, acknowledged the problems: “The lawyers prefer to give a child to a European couple who is willing to spend $10,000 rather than to a Colombian who offers much less and pays in pesos.”

Colombia started taking action in the late 1980s: it approved a new Children’s Code in 1989, which centralized the authority to authorize adoptions in the ICBF, and ratified the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption in 1998. Then, in 2012, an investigative report by Caracol Television revealed that the ICBF was still carrying out practices such as prematurely declaring that a child had been abandoned. “I hate the Family Welfare Institute for denying me a second chance to prove that I could raise my son,” said a woman in the report. The agency rejected the accusations and stated that there were protocols in place to determine whether biological parents showed they were committed. The following year, it ended all international adoptions of children under six years of age who did not have a disability.

Lawyer Torrado says that many parents did abandon their children and would likely never admit it. “They would leave children wrapped in newspaper on any street corner. What was better then? Leaving them in an ICBF orphanage with a very long waiting list for domestic adoptions, or giving them to foreign couples?” he asks. Torrado also argues that today there are procedures that guarantee informed consent and that parents are given a period in which they can change their minds about the adoption.

Swedish expert Hübinette questions international adoptions, even legal ones. “They only consider the economic perspective, and that’s very naive. There are psychological aspects, such as racism,” he says.

Branco adds that knowing one’s identity “is a human right that was taken away from many people without their consent.” “Denying it causes mental health problems throughout life,” she stresses.

The ICBF declined to comment for this report and noted that these are cases that happened decades ago.

Mikael and Diana reunite

Diana Muñoz had her first child on December 31, 1984, in Cali. She was 18 years old, worked in a restaurant, and the child’s father had abandoned his responsibilities. “They discharged me from the hospital, but they left the baby in an incubator, and I had to go see him every day. On the eighth day, I went, and he was gone. They told me the mother had taken him. How could that be? I was the mother,” she recounts over the phone. All she could do was file a report that just gathered dust. “It wasn’t like it is now, where you can go to many institutions for help. Forty years ago, you went to the police, and that was what they could do,” she says. “I didn’t even get to name him. How can you find someone without a name?”

She heard from her son again four decades later, in September 2024, when she was living in Spain with her two grown daughters. She read a message on Facebook from Mikael Kjelleros, a Swedish man who was looking for a Diana Muñoz who would have been 32 years old when she gave birth to him on December 31, 1984. The age didn’t match, but they decided to have a video call, and within seconds she knew who he was. “I think you’re my son because you look a lot like my father,” she told him. He was hesitant, fearing a scam. They took a DNA test that confirmed they were mother and son, and they reunited in Madrid a few weeks later.

They are both happy, but admit that establishing a relationship hasn’t been easy. “He still doesn’t trust me enough for many things. When I was in Sweden, I realized that people there are very reserved, used to being self-absorbed. It takes time,” Diana explains from Valencia. Mikael says something similar from Stockholm: “I speak Spanish, but she speaks very fast, and sometimes we don’t understand each other.” “When we see each other, I feel like we have to make the most of a very limited amount of time. That’s stressful,” he adds.

Mikael is angry with the Swedish government, the Colombian government, and the orphanage. “They stole 40 years of my mother’s life from me. Even though we’re together again, our relationship isn’t the same as the one she has with my sisters, and it never will be. People don’t understand that my identity, with my language and my culture, was lost,” he explains. In his case, it’s even more frustrating to have had a bad relationship with his adoptive mother. “She brought me from the other side of the world and immediately lost interest,” he says. He doesn’t understand how, for so many years, people he knew told him to be grateful to be in a rich country like Sweden, since in Colombia “I would have been on the streets.” “That wasn’t true: my mother and my sisters have had a good life,” he points out.

He works as a municipal employee in Stockholm and has little free time, but he has decided to help some of the people who contact him. “I can’t promise them anything, but I listen to them: it’s important for them to see that someone who has been in the same situation understands them,” he says. He has also managed to get in touch with Colombian mothers searching for their children. He wants Colombia to open an investigation like Sweden did, apologize to the adopted children, and provide more support to those searching for their families — he says that, in his case, the ICBF took more than a year to respond and did nothing. And, above all, he wants Sweden to comply with the recommendations made in last year’s government report. “They need to end all international adoptions. They can’t guarantee that children will arrive here without irregularities.”

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