Spanish Baby-Snatching Victims Seek Answers and Justice

 

Until into the 1990s, doctors and nuns in Spain allegedly stole newborn babies and sold them to couples hoping to adopt. The vast scope of this lucrative baby-snatching network is only now coming to light as courts heed victims’ calls for investigations and possible trials.

 

Gunnar Knechtel / DER SPIEGEL

 

By Helene Zuber in Madrid
Der Spiegel
19.07.12

 

It’s been a year since María Luisa Torres was reunited with her daughter. She gave birth to the girl in a Madrid hospital, but then the baby was taken away from her.

“For almost 30 years, I saw my child in the faces of people on the street,” says Torres in a gravelly voice. But on a summer day last month, it is indeed the face of her daughter Pilar that emerges from a stream of pedestrians on the main shopping street in San Fernando de Henares, a town near Madrid. She has big, brown eyes and a pale complexion, and her face is framed by perfectly trimmed bangs and long hair dyed a mix of black, violet and red.

Torres calls her 30-year-old daughter, who works as a nurse’s assistant, “mi reina.” The mother has eyes of the same color and a similarly intense gaze. But the bags under her eyes reveal the toll that the last few months have taken on Torres, who is in her mid-50s. “My queen, you’re so pretty,” she says.

“I’m infinitely happy,” says Torres, a geriatric nurse. In fact, she’s also been very lucky. Not only has she found her middle daughter, whom she had given up for lost, but she has also managed to find documents that she hopes will prove that her baby was stolen and then sold 30 years ago — and prove who did it. She is the first of many mothers of stolen children to have convinced an investigating judge to bring charges for kidnapping and document forgery.

Depriving ‘Reds’ of Offspring

All of these women share a similar fate. From the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, in 1936, until well into the 1990s, more than 300,000 children were reportedly taken from their biological parents and passed on to adoptive parents.

In regions captured by the anti-communist Nationalists during the war, doctors and nuns felt it was their patriotic duty to take newborns from “red parents” and give them to other families. There, they were to be raised in accordance with Nationalist and Catholic beliefs.

After the victory of the rebels under General Francisco Franco over the Republicans, the organized theft of babies became a political tool, a way of depriving leftists of their offspring. In 1941, Franco enacted a law that made it permissible to erase evidence of the ancestry of such children by changing their last names.

Read more: Spanish Baby-Snatching Victims Seek Answers and Justice

 

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