This legal-technical report, authored by Andrea Maldonado Leguizamón, documents how Colombia’s child protection system facilitated unlawful adoptions during the armed conflict (1985–2001). It reveals that children, particularly from vulnerable families or disaster-affected regions like Armero, were institutionalized and adopted without due legal safeguards. Through a critical legal lens, the report shows how the misuse of the abandonment construct and collaboration with private entities led to systemic family separations. It calls for the recognition of adoptees as victims, proposes their inclusion in Colombia’s Victims Registry, and urges state accountability, reparations, and non-repetition guarantees under national and international law.
by Andrea Maldonado Leguizamon, adopted from Colombia to Spain
In December 2020, I found my father’s family. They confirmed what I had always known but was never sure about: how he was killed, and how that truth connected to our right to protection under the Victims’ Law. My aunt, my father’s sister, had already tried to seek that recognition back in 2013. In 2021, I filed my own request, taking up that path again with a mixture of pain and expectation.
Since then, my life has completely changed. Finding my own story and, shortly after, the community of people displaced through adoption was like turning on a light in the middle of a long darkness. I am not the same person I was before that discovery: I met other voices that echoed mine, other experiences that helped me name and make sense of what I had lived. In 2022, I returned to Colombia for the first time since I was uprooted in 1995. That trip was a turning point: I met my mother, with whom I had lived for five years and whose face I could not remember. Seeing her again was like recovering a piece of myself that had been frozen in time. I also came to know my father through my paternal family—putting a face to him, recognizing myself in his features. As my relatives told me, we are two drops of water. That recognition allowed me to step out of the internalized story of being “the bio-child of other people” and embrace what I had always known in silence: that I am my parents’ child.
This process also meant reclaiming my identity as Andrea Maldonado Leguizamon, surnames I have been using for the past ten years, which bring me relief every time I hear them spoken. It is a reaffirmation of an identity that adoption had stripped from me—something that surprises many, but which, in truth, is the norm in adoption: losing our names, our story, our culture. Recovering them has been, for me, an act of reparation.
Now, in 2025, I present this technical report to the Unit for the Assistance and Reparation of Victims (UARIV). I do so in a new context, marked by the reports of the Truth Commission (CEV), the National Center for Historical Memory (CNMH), and the advances that came with the 2022 Peace Accords. All of this has enabled me to rebuild my story and, at the same time, to understand that it is not mine alone: it reflects a collective pattern of adoptions carried out without sufficient guarantees in the framework of the armed conflict.
This report is an individual petition, but with a collective purpose. It aims to contribute legal and testimonial elements that support the recognition of these practices as a form of victimization, and in doing so, open pathways to truth, memory, and reparation for all of us who share this experience.
When I was a child playing hide-and-seek, there was a phrase we would call out that now takes on a new meaning: “for me and for all my mates.” It was not just about saving myself but about freeing the others too. With that same spirit, I present this report: I do it for me, but also for all my fellow adoptees who are still waiting to be recognized.
The right to identity is intrinsic and does not depend on external recognition. I know who I am, and I will hold on to that truth always—for me and for all my fellow adoptees. This document is, at once, an act of memory, of dignity, and of hope.
Click on each image to access the document in English and Spanish.
Resources
Adopted to Spain (by Andrea Maldonado Leguizamon)
Searching for my family in Colombia
Reunification with my Colombian family