"Stolen children" seek their parents in Spain (News Feature)

By Sinikka Tarvainen Feb 1, 2011, 15:43 GMT

Madrid - A few years ago Antonio Barroso received a phone call from a friend, who said he had heard that Barroso's parents had bought him as a baby.

Barroso, then 38, took a cotton swab used by his mother and had a DNA test done without her knowledge. The test confirmed that the couple who had brought him up were not his biological parents.

'Everything (mother) had told me about her pregnancy and my birth was an invention,' Barroso told the daily El Pais.

'Everything about me has been falsified,' he said. 'I don't know who I am. I don't know my name.'

Barroso, who now heads the National Association of People Affected by Irregular Adoptions (Anadir), is not alone.

An estimated 300,000 Spaniards are believed to have been stolen from their mothers. They were handed over to couples who adopted them - usually against payment - between the 1940s and 1990s.

'The stolen children were usually adopted by families living far away from their places of birth,' says Enrique Vila, a lawyer representing Anadir.

'That points to the existence of a nationwide, mafia-like network that trafficked children,' Vila told the German Press Agency dpa.

Attorney General Candido Conde-Pumpido, however, was expected to reject that argument. He will probably not open a nationwide investigation into 261 cases that were brought to him by Anadir, but will advise people seeking such inquiries to turn to regional courts, judicial sources said Tuesday.

The practice of stealing children began after leftist republican troops lost the 1936-39 civil war to Francisco Franco. The rightwing general then ruled Spain until his death in 1975.

In the post-war years, an estimated 30,000 babies or small children were taken away from republican women, especially from mothers in jail.

The children were given out for adoption or placed in orphanages or other institutions in order to 'purify' them of their leftist heritage and to bring them up as conservative Catholics.

Later on, the theft of children became a business with no political motives, according to Anadir. Barroso's adoptive parents, for instance, paid 200,000 pesetas for him - the price of a flat at the time.

Mothers of the newborn babies were told their child had died, and that the body had already been buried, or that it was not in a good enough condition for them to see.

Some women were shown bodies of other babies, wrapped in bandages, according to testimonies collected by Anadir. Empty coffins were sometimes buried in cemeteries.

The adoptive parents registered the stolen children as their own, sometimes after the adoptive mother had pretended to be pregnant. The racket involved doctors, nurses, midwives, officials, cemetery workers and intermediaries.

Priests, as well as nuns working as nurses, played an important role in the trafficking. They participated in it for economic gain, or believing that it was ethical to place children from poor backgrounds in wealthy families, Vila said.

The thefts started coming to light after judge Baltasar Garzon tried to investigate Franco's human rights abuses in 2008. Garzon was forced to drop his inquiry, but non-political cases of illegal adoptions also began to emerge.

People who took part in the trafficking could be charged with abduction and crimes against humanity, offences that do not come under the statute of limitations, Vila said.

Not only did the illegal adoptions endanger the health of the adopted children - who are unable to inform their doctors about hereditary health risks - they also violated their inheritance rights.

Above all, they have placed a huge psychological burden on parents who lost their children, and on people who are discovering that their adoptive parents - whom they may have loved - lied to them.

Barroso's adoptive mother 'bought a child, but without knowing that he had been stolen,' he said. 'My (adoptive) parents are also victims,' he added.

Anadir now wants Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's government to create a DNA data bank to help stolen children and their parents and siblings to find each other.

Even if many of the children cannot trace their parents, they can at least prove with DNA tests that they were adopted illegally, Vila said. 'We are going to see an avalanche of judicial inquiries' on such cases, he said.

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