Seeking the stolen children of Spain's Franco regime (Feature)

By Hubert Kahl Jan 2, 2011, 2:06 GMT

Madrid - It's no secret that Spain's Franco dictatorship killed more than 100,000 of its opponents shortly after the country's 1936-39 civil war.

A lesser known crime of that dictatorship, however, is the organized kidnapping of children. Even today, Spain is still dealing with the aftershocks of that horror.

'He was a beautiful and strong baby,' says Maria Jose Estevez, remembering wistfully the September 1965 birth of her so in Cadiz. The native of the region of Andalucia got to see her son for a moment and then never again.

'The nurses took the boy into a side room and then told me he was dead,' Estevez, now 66, recently told the El Pais newspaper. 'But even then, I could clearly hear crying from the next room.'

Estevez is certain that her son did not die shortly after his birth in the southern Spanish harbour city. Instead, she believes that her son was a victim of one of the darkest crimes of the Franco regime, a series of atrocities made all the worse because they only recently came to light.

Franco's government, which ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975, partook in systematic kidnapping. The crimes were only uncovered by a documentary on a Catalan television broadcaster and investigations by Judge Baltasar Garzon, who has made a name for himself prosecuting Franco-era crimes.

According to those reports, children were routinely taken from their parents directly after birth. They were then given false identities and given up for adoption to supporters of the government.

The kidnappings were apparently not limited to clinics, but also in bunkers in France where Spanish Leftists and their families had fled after the end of the civil war.

A report by Garzon released in 2008 set the number of cases at around 30,000.

A psychiatrist named Antonio Vallejo Najera, who died in 1960 after working for the Franco regime, provided the justification for the kidnappings.

According to Najera's arguments, Marxism - as practiced by opponents of Franco - was a form of mental illness from which the children of affected parents had to be rescued. Thus would the 'Spanish race' be regenerated.

Financial motives soon joined the dogmatic ones. It is assumed doctors who helped steal the children were financially compensated.

'How is it possible that a drama of these dimensions could be hidden from the public eye for so long,' asked author Benjamin Prado.

Courts since Franco's time have had a hard time coming to grips with the dictatorship. No politician or military official was ever brought to justice for the regime's crimes. Garzon tried to change that, but found himself in trouble when his investigations exceeded his mandate. He has since been suspended.

Picking up from that point, there is now a movement among the relatives of the kidnapped to have the truth out. They have started by filing complaints, a trend that is turning into a wave of lawsuits.

But state's attorney Javier Zaragoza says there is little chance of ever clearing up the cases. Many of the kidnappings happened years ago. Statutes of limitations might have expired in many cases.

Estevez, however, has not given up hope of finding her son 45 years after his birth.

'I won't be able to act as a mother to him any more, but I want to at least be able to tell him that I didn't give him away, but rather, that he was stolen from me.'

Read more about Crime

Read more about Society

Read more about Spain History