More than two hundred people turned up on Thursday at the State Attorney General’s Office to request the opening of a criminal investigation into the so-called ‘stolen babies’, denouncing the existence of some 300,000 such cases in Spain.
The plaintiffs, from all parts of the country, belong to the National Association of People Affected by Irregular Adoption (ADD) and are represented by the lawyer Enrique Vila.
They believe that around 300,000 babies were ‘stolen’ in the period from 1940 to 1990. Adoptive parents were told one of three stories: the baby’s parents had died in a car accident, the baby was the child of a prostitute who did not want it or taht the parents were drug addicts.
Allegedly involved in the kidnappings were doctors, nurses, priests, nuns, civil registrars and even cemetery staff.
So far, only the Public Prosecutors in Cádiz and Sevilla have opened investigations into disappearances during the last years of the Franco regime. In Cádiz, there have been at least 80 complaints by people whose babies were apparently kidnapped and given to other families.
In most of these cases, there were no death certificates and no bodies in coffins, and most of the women never even saw their offspring.
The legacy of the Franco regime lives on.