Weightlifting Coach Stolen as an Infant Returns to Chile to Meet Family

Kyle Adler always knew he was adopted, but it wasn’t until his adoptive parents passed away that he decided to look into his birth family. At 28 years old, he found that he was stolen as an infant under the Pinochet regime in Chile, and trafficked to the United States as an adoptee. This year, the owner of Colorado Weightlifting Club traveled with Connecting Roots, a nonprofit led primarily by Chilean adoptees, to meet his biological mother for the first time.

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Adler grew up with his adoptive family in Barrington, Illinois, a small suburb of Chicago. He was a decorated swimmer throughout his childhood and into college at California Baptist University, winning the Arizona state high school championships and becoming an NAIA All American in the 500 free. While in college, he was also in airborne school as an active member of the ROTC officer program, and selected to be cadre for the Leadership Development and Assessment Course. After graduating in 2011, Adler worked in the corporate world for several years and eventually landed in Denver, Colorado.

“A few years after I got to Denver, I ended up looking for my birth mom and realized that there's other groups out there of American citizens born in Chile,” Adler said. “I just found some Facebook group and a woman was using her connections with the Chilean Police Department to see if she could find any sort of record of who the person was and if they can be reunited. I was like her fifth case of human trafficking, and now she's had several hundred. It's now known that thousands of kids were just straight-up stolen. Either the doctors told their parents that they had died and they didn't, or my situation where I was taken from a daycare that was either bribed or part of a bigger ring.”

Chilean American stolen as a baby reunites with his mom and gets a second chance at family

As he was going through the process of finding his biological family, Adler began to transition from the corporate world to the fitness world. With a degree in health science pre-physical therapy and a passion for coaching, he earned his USA Weightlifting Level 1 Coach Certification in 2017 and his Level 2 in 2018. A few years into his weightlifting journey, he bought a gym and began Colorado Weightlifting Club, which now sits in downtown Denver.

In 2018, he was connected to his birth mother, Ana Navarette, and learned that he was taken from her and illegally trafficked to the United States when she was just 15. Two years later, he was set to travel to Chile and reunite with his biological family but those plans were canceled due to the COVID pandemic. In the years since then, Adler has dealt with the mental trauma of learning about his birth family and the circumstances around his illegal adoption, as well as the loss of both of his adopted parents within six months in 2022. Adler credits the sport of weightlifting with helping him through years of mental struggles, dysmorphia, and questions about his purpose, and now he uses the fortitude he’s built to coach others through their best and worst sessions.

“The one thing I found with weightlifting is you can have a bad day or a good day, and with proper coaching and guidance, we can guarantee you're going to have the best result out of either,” Adler said. “You can use that anger if you're mad or use that sadness to produce a bit more anger at the barbell. It works with almost every emotion where you can take it and put it into a positive result. And the positive result doesn't always have to be a world record; it could just be you picking something up and doing something hard. Weightlifting has changed me. It's just been healing. It's been something that created a little bit more peace and purpose.”

With his focus on his athletes and his gym, another opportunity didn’t arise for a reunion until this year. Adler made the quick decision to join a 10-day trip to Chile with Connecting Roots on just a few weeks of notice. He has been working on his Spanish since his first video call with his mother where they weren’t able to communicate with each other. He had been filled with emotions since 2018, and looked forward to finally meeting his family in Chile.

“It was definitely overwhelming,” Adler said on finding out the facts about his trafficking. “I've done lots of therapy throughout my life to work on a lot of these issues once I realized the facts of my trafficking. That's definitely helped how I can handle something like meeting my biological family. A lot of it is just being able to live in the moment and take it day by day until that day comes, and being open to what comes out in the moment. This is something that my brain can't process. I was raised by a family, even though I knew my mother was out there. I think the common story that they give is like, ‘Oh, your mom was homeless.’ Most people didn't ask questions in third-world country adoptions because most people just got sold the story that it was a homeless person that couldn't afford it and we were saving lives. But it's something that I've been knowing – that there's this hole or something that's been missing in me when it comes to relationships. After all the overwhelming stuff calmed down, it was just peace knowing that I have a family.”

Adler departed for Santiago, Chile, from Miami, FL, on February 13 for a ten-day trip to meet his biological mother, his half-sister, and several close friends of the family.

“There was a big group of people waiting at the airport to meet me. Obviously, it was a big deal because it was the first time I'd ever been reunited with my mom and family since I was taken. We spent a lot of time at the airport starting the journey of getting to know each other,” Adler said. “A lot of this throughout my life has made me more of an even-keeled person and that was one of the traits that I took to the army and to school. So, it was more towards the end of the trip that I felt like I was going to really miss them and the time we spent together. We really developed something that I didn't have before. At the end of the week and a half, it was definitely emotional. We were crying and I left clothes there so that they kept pieces of me. We had the shoes that I was stolen in. We went to the house I was taken from. I'm really good at keeping my emotions separate, but on this trip I was able to open up. Just being with my family, going to the beach, having the days together… we had a lot of opportunities to grow and begin to form bonds that I didn't have before.”

On top of the close bonds that he was able to form throughout ten days in his native country, Adler was able to explore the strength training situation in his hometown and even meet with the Chilean Weightlifting team. Now, he has new goals for Colorado Weightlifting that stretch far beyond state borders.

“The biggest thing for me is the participation of youth in strength training,” Adler said. “Kids in Chile really need a place where they can go. My goal is to bring more weightlifting awareness to that community. I walked around my hometown and there were a few gyms, but there's not really anything that has to do with what we do. So, it gave me a lot more passion to use what I've learned from USA Weightlifting and what I've done in Colorado to help grow and give back to the community that I came from.”