The archives have helped to discover a reality that was devalued as a myth or summarized in one case or another. Over the last few years, some of these children have returned to the Azores, as adults, to learn about their origins.
Six years later, Delivered to Luck, the Great Report, returns with Um Regresso.
Twice as many children
Anyone who was an adult in the 80s/90s and paid some attention to the news remembers the rumor about mothers giving their children to the “Americans” at the Lajes base, on Terceira Island. Sometimes, the verb to sell or exchange a child for a necessary good was circulated.
In 1999, SIC even interviewed one of these mothers, Ana Paula Maneta, who gave birth to five children and who has since died.
He told journalist Dulce Salzedas at the time: “I never sold my children, I never killed my children, threw them in trash cans, I simply fought to give them bread. I have great faith that one day, later, they will come looking for me and forgive me for what I did.”
Because it was a unique case, because the local authorities turned a blind eye to the misery that raged in the vicinity of the military base and because the courts never delved deeply into this territory, the matter fell into oblivion and became an island myth, that of children being sold, given away or exchanged.
It was Paulo Ormonde’s curiosity and Tânia Mendes’ research work that brought this oral narrative to life in names and numbers. For 25 years, the Praia da Vitória police officer, for leisure, has been putting together loose ends, responding to requests for help that have appeared on the internet from those in the United States of America looking for their relatives, parents or siblings, who remained on the island.
More recently, Social Sciences researcher Tânia Mendes studied the archives of the Municipal Council of Praia da Vitória and the extinct Civil Government of the Autonomous District of Angra do Heroísmo. There he found bundles of papers, organized by year, with the identification and photograph of each child who had been granted authorization to travel alone in the company of North American couples staying at the military base.
Authorizations that were drawn up on 25-line sheets, recognized by the Registry Office, in the presence of two witnesses and signed by the biological parents (when they knew how to write). Sometimes they were signed by just one of them. The figure of the unknown father was common in identifying the paternity of children.
Many children were even seen by the Medical Assistance Services for Emigrants, to certify that they met the necessary conditions to embark. The solution was opaque and not even after adoption was legally provided for in the Portuguese Civil Code, which only happened in 1967, did it become more transparent.
“How did they take it? Good God! It was the easiest thing in the world. That was up to them, our authorities wouldn’t notice anything”, laughed lawyer Álvaro Monjardino, responsible for more than 40 legal adoptions between the end of the 60s and 70s of the last century and with whom Grande Reportagem recorded in 2019.
“It’s not an exemplary story, no. They were generally babies. Some were already contracted when the mother hadn’t had them yet.”
In 2018, in connection with the master’s thesis she was working on, Tânia Mendes reached the number of 97 children taken between 1946 and 1974. The time frame defines the 28 years between the US military stay on the island of Terceira, after the Second World War, and the end of the dictatorship.
The thesis was completed, but the heritage archeology where Tânia Mendes continues to excavate revealed that, during this period, 182 children left. Almost double the number initially reached.
Marco Paulo Mendes was one of these children. Born in 1971, he would leave the island as a baby, with no memory of his biological mother, Maria de Lurdes da Ponte, born on the island of São Miguel, in 1947, and also no memory of his sister, six years older. But what he didn’t remember, she had never forgotten.
Ana and Marco
Ana da Ponte had been looking for her younger brother for 47 years. Marco Paulo Moreira Mendes, born in 1971, in Conceição, Terceira island, was 9 months old when his biological mother gave him to an American couple from the Lajes base. The sister, then six years old, never forgot the baby she helped with feeding and changing diapers.
Ana, born in 1966, remembers the day when a couple came to pick him up from the shack, without basic sanitation, made of sheet metal and tar, in the slum that had started to grow in Serra de Santiago.
The locality, adjacent to the base of the “Americans”, where Azoreans from all the islands of the archipelago began to converge in search of work, as Maria de Lurdes also did.
Hospitalized with tuberculosis, at Hospital do Santo Espírito, in Angra do Heroísmo, Maria de Lurdes did not attend the delivery of her son Marco Paulo. But the sister, too young to memorize the Americans’ foreign names, reports that she clung in tears to the legs of her brother’s future adoptive mother, begging them not to separate them and to take her too.
She would end up being orphaned by her mother at the age of seven because she had always been a father. He only knew that he was an American, named Frank, and that he never fulfilled what he promised Maria de Lurdes, to return to the island to get married.
Close relatives avoided the ordeal of institutionalization and, at the age of 9, Ana da Ponte was taken by an uncle to the United States of America, where he ended up adopting her. Going to the state of Connecticut revived the hope of finding his brother. It took more than 40 years to achieve this.
As an adult, Ana da Ponte received the nickname Dube from her American husband. Twice he flew to the island of Terceira, in order to discover his family’s past. From the second incursion, in 2010, he confesses that he even tried to bribe the Civil Registry employee with a handful of dollars to reveal the identity of his brother’s adoptive parents, but as it was a full adoption, the data on the birth certificate were not open to public consultation.
Ana had very little to hold on to: a photograph of Marco when he was about two years old, sent to his biological mother by his adoptive parents, the Portuguese name with which he was registered, the year of birth and adoption, as well as the mother’s identity. That was everything he put into the appeal he made in 2018 on the Adopted from Terceira/ Azores Facebook page.
In two days, Paulo Ormonde, the police officer from Terceira, was once again successful in reuniting Maria de Lurdes’ children.
Micky Baker, a soldier in the US Air Force, and his wife Jean already had three children when, in 1972, they decided that a boy would make the group of two girls and one boy more balanced. In the USA, Marco’s name was changed to Marcus and he gained the nickname Baker.
Even today, the Bakers remember the children’s bare feet and torn pants, the houses with dirt floors and no sanitation. Banal needs in the 1970s among the poorest population of the island of Terceira, but which the North American couple associated with the third world.
During that decade, the circuit between adoptive parents and biological parents was cemented by intermediaries who, working at the base or with connections to it, were the glue that united the two sides. It was through a translator that Micky and Jean learned about Maria de Lurdes’ situation.
In 1972, the Civil Code had already undergone changes to allow the legal figure of adoption, which took two forms; restricted adoption, in which adoptive parents committed to maintaining contact with the biological family, and full adoption, which, as the name suggests, represented a break with the family of origin.
Micky and Jean opted for the second option, which made their sister’s lifelong search even more difficult.
In 2019, when the Great Report Delivered to Luck went to meet the children given to North Americans, Ana and Marcus committed to returning to their homeland.
This summer, six years after that meeting, they both landed with their respective families at Lajes Airport, in Terceira. They came to discover what was left behind, to answer the doubts they lived with and the uses and customs of their land. Um Regresso is the last chapter of the Great Report Delivered to Luck.
