Daily Black Immigrant News
The exhumation of what would have been his twin has removed the last doubts. The DNAs did not match, and Maria José Picó Robles then becomes certain that this sister, whom she is still searching for, is one of the many “stolen babies” under Franco’s regime in Spain.
“It was there,” says the 60-year-old paramedic, teary-eyed and throat lumpy, pointing to the mass grave in the Alicante (southeast) cemetery where her sister is believed to have been officially buried.
“My mother was told that my sister had died two days after birth (in 1962). She wasn’t allowed to see the body and we didn’t let her attend the funeral,” Maria José told AFP.
About ten years ago, when the first cases of “stolen babies” broke out in the country, Maria José and her parents, gripped by “suspicion” and “anxiety”, wondered if they too were victims of this scandal.
They then begin gathering documents, tainted with irregularities, before taking legal action that will order the exhumation of the remains in 2013.
Since then, the sexagenarian, who heads an association dedicated to stolen babies, has tirelessly pursued her search.
She left her DNA in several gene banks and hopes that her sister, gripped by doubts about her origins, might have done the same. “DNA is our hope,” she explains, praying that “one day we’ll get a call” from a lab.
– “The Genius of Marxism” –
Finally approved on Wednesday by the Senate, a key text of the leftist government recognizes for the first time as victims of Francoism babies taken from their families during the Civil War (1936-1939) and the dictatorship (1939-1975).
During the repression that followed the conflict, this institutionalized theft aimed to remove children from republican women accused of passing on to them the “gene” of Marxism.
But then it affected, since the 1950s, children born out of wedlock or in poor or large families.
Often, thanks to the cooperation of the church, they were declared dead after birth, without giving evidence to their parents, then adopted by couples unable to bear children and generally close to the “national.-Catholic” regime of Franco.
After Franco’s death in 1975, the trafficking of babies continued, mainly for financial reasons, until 1987 and the passing of a law that strengthened the control of adoption.
Similar thefts also occurred under the military dictatorship in Argentina or under that of Pinochet in Chile. In Argentina, the Plaza de Mayo Grandmothers organization estimates that just under 500 babies were born in captivity and illegally given to other people.
In Spain, there is no official estimate of the number of stolen babies, but victims’ associations speak of several thousand children involved.
Justice had estimated in 2008 that more than 30,000 children of republicans who died or were captured during the Civil War, some of whom may have been “stolen”, were taken into care by the Francoist state between 1944 and 1954 alone.
– For sale: 725 euros –
2,136 complaints on this subject were registered in Spain between 2011 and 2019, but none were successful, mainly due to the description of the facts.
If justice has fallen, some rare Spaniards, like Mario Vidal, have miraculously still managed to find traces of their loved ones.
“My adoptive father told me that they had paid 125,000 pesetas (725 euros) to adopt me,” explains this 57-year-old architect-technician living in Denia (southeast), who began in 2011 the search for his biological parents. .
He then immersed himself for three years in the archives of the region of Madrid, where he was born, and managed to identify his mother… who had died 16 years earlier.
“It was one of the hardest days of my life,” he says, saying he was torn between the “joy” of knowing his origins and the “crushing blow” of learning of his death.
Coming from a very conservative family, his mother left him out of wedlock at the age of 23. If an official document mentions an abandonment, a relative will tell her that she had tried several times to reclaim him from the orphanage, but had been prevented from doing so and had even been imprisoned for it.
Mario will then manage to find his half-brother, who will die three years later, but remains without knowing who his biological father is. “We are children of an era in which those who held power exercised it as they saw fit,” he says.
NewsAmericasNow.com
