西班牙偷孩子很猖獗

billzhao · 发表于 2018-6-12 11:52

Spain investigates tragedy of 'stolen' newborn babies

Antonio Barroso always suspected that something in his family wasn't quite right. He was 38 when the secret was finally revealed: his parents had bought him as a baby.

"I discovered my whole life was a lie," Antonio said.

The truth came out during the deathbed confession of a family friend. Like Antonio's parents, he and his wife had been unable to conceive. Both couples had bought their babies from a nun, for "more than the price of a flat".

Antonio's mother has since confirmed the story and DNA tests have proved he has no genetic link to the couple who raised him. His birth certificate had been falsified.

'Illicit trade'
"I want to know the truth," Antonio said, flicking through snapshots of his childhood, "To find out who I am and where I come from. I want to know what happened and who was responsible. And if people need to be punished, they should be punished".

Antonio soon discovered other cases similar to his own, and signs of an illicit trade in newborn babies.

At the support group he set up in Vilanova i la Geltru, his home town on the Catalan coast, the phone rarely stops ringing. The desk is piled high with letters from Spaniards who fear they could be victims of a criminal network, thought to have operated until the 1990s.

We were starting to make a family and they destroyed that completely. I have to meet my daughter. I want to tell her, girl, I'm your Dad
Salvador Martin, Father, who believes his daughter was stolen from him
In pictures: Spanish 'baby trade'

For some, that suspicion is strengthened by Spain's history. After the civil war, children were removed from Republican prisoners and given to supporters of General Franco's dictatorship. Historians estimate up to 30,000 children were affected by the 'ideological cleansing'.

'Baby-theft'
"In the 1950s, that practice was converted into mafia business," said Enrique Vila, a lawyer helping Antonio's support group, Anadir. "The goal became money. They took children from anyone, to sell."

The lawyer believes some babies were abandoned by unmarried Catholic girls or prostitutes and others were stolen after doctors told mothers that their newborns had died.

Ana Josefa Escabia died several hours after giving birth in Terrassa in 1975. Her husband clearly remembers seeing his daughter alive.

"I saw her born," Salvador Martin said, his eyes welling with tears, 36 years later. "She was gorgeous, just like her sister."

But doctors later told Salvador his baby had been stillborn. A sealed coffin was delivered to the cemetery.

Salvador is now desperate to know what happened to his daughter. No other baby was buried in Terrassa on that day. He is convinced his child was stolen.

DNA database
"It's not like a bag of oranges that you sell. It's a child," he said, holding a picture of Ana shortly before she became pregnant. "We were starting to make a family and they destroyed that completely. I have to meet my daughter. I want to tell her, girl, I'm your Dad".

Among those queuing nervously was 72-year-old Dolores Diaz Cerpa. She gave birth in 1973 and says when she awoke from surgery she saw 2 cots. A nurse said she'd had twins. But the boy was then removed and when Dolores woke up again she was told she'd had a girl.

"I always believed I'd had two children and they took one off me," Dolores said. "I would dream of him and wake up wondering how he was."

That conviction was compounded in 1995 when she requested her medical records and was sent papers for a baby boy. Dolores is entering her DNA in the database in the hope that the child she's so sure she gave birth to is alive.

"If he knows he's adopted, I just want him to know I didn't abandon him. He was stolen," she says, echoing the view of many mothers here.

Anadir has more than 800 members now. Other groups have more. Most are women who never saw their babies' bodies, never believed they had died and can find no record of their burials at cemeteries.

A former nurse has claimed she witnessed baby-thefts in Madrid. A cemetery worker in Granada told the BBC he had handled child coffins that were suspiciously light, and now Anadir says a woman who was told her child had died has just been reunited with her daughter in Barcelona. The family have not spoken publicly.

Spain's courts are certainly taking the claims seriously.

Anadir delivered details of 261 cases of suspected baby-theft to the state prosecutor in January. Regional prosecutors have been ordered to investigate. Across Spain hundreds of people are now being summoned to make statements. New cases are being reported all the time.

After years of fighting to get the courts to listen, Antonio Barroso has also been called to see the prosecutor. For him this is not only about trying to expose a criminal practice. It is about discovering who he really is.

billzhao · 发表于 2018-6-12 11:54

An elderly Spanish nun was in court today to face charges of stealing babies, after hundreds of women claimed their babies were taken from them at birth and given away in illegal adoptions.

Doctors, nurses and religious workers at several clinics and hospitals in Spain are alleged to have sold babies for adoption over decades after telling new mothers that their infants had died.

Alleged victims say they need help from authorities in unearthing evidence of their claims from graveyards and public registries.

At the hearing at Madrid's Superior Tribunal of Justice, 80-year-old Maria Gomez Valbuena, a Sisters of Charity nun who worked in the Santa Cristina hospital in Madrid, was questioned by a judge but she invoked her right not to testify.

The formal charges against her are illegal detention and falsifying documents in a case dating from the early 1980s.

Many of the mothers have said they believe their babies were taken because they may have seen them as unfit mothers because they were young, poor or unmarried.

Valbuena has been linked to some 3,000 claims of kidnapping by families, with most of the abductions starting during the Franco dictatorship and continuing into the 1990s.

One mother testified in court last week that Gomez Valbuena had told her she could be jailed for adultery. The nun threatened to take her baby away and give it to another family, and later said the baby had died.

The mother, Maria Luisa Torres, has been able to prove through DNA tests the baby she was told had died 30 years ago is alive after being adopted by another family.

An association of parents and families, Anadir, has presented more than 900 lawsuits regarding allegations of child-stealing. Most have been thrown out due to lack of evidence.

Members of Anadir say they were told by health or religious workers their babies had died at birth or shortly after.

Many say they were neither shown a body nor given proper death certificates.

Outside the court people who believe they are victims of the alleged baby-snatching scandal shouted 'shameful' as Sister Maria was escorted to her car.

Maria Paloma Perez Calleja who believes she was taken from her biological parents spoke to the media outside.

She said: 'I don't know who I am. I am registered as their biological daughter, as if I was born in their home. Everything was well planned, through out, and to top it off they are being protected.'

Anadir says the practice began in the 1940s when, in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the fascist government stole babies from political prisoners from the defeated Republican side.

In subsequent decades it became a money-making racket, the victims claim. Parents who wanted to adopt babies were often referred to clinics that were known for finding babies for desperate families, they say.

Coinciding with Sister Maria's court appearance, the Ministry of Justice held a meeting with members of various associations of victims of illegal trafficking of children.

The ministry said it will gather the facts about all of the different claims to be able to investigate them more systematically, and will also handle the results of DNA tests.

Outside the court, Eduardo Rayo Retamero, president of the Association of Stolen Children in Democracy, who is still looking for his daughter, said that if Gomez Valbuena committed the crime she is accused of, she should be excommunicated.

'I have already said it and I'm not ashamed. I'm a practising Catholic but, if this woman has done what she is alleged to have done, then, there should be no Judas in Church, every Judas in the Church should be excommunicated,' he said.

Many families have found it impossible to track down babies they believe would now be adults, since the birth records, death certificates and adoption papers were falsified, according to Anadir and to the Madrid prosecutor.

Isabel Aguera is still looking for her sister.

Her mother, she says, was told the baby had died and had subsequently been buried.

'They never asked permission from my family to carry out this burial so my mum, over the years, starts saying she thinks her baby didn't die, that she is alive.

'Since she repeated it so much I decided to investigate so I went to the cemetery and asked where my sister was buried and I was told she wasn't buried in any cemetery in Malaga,' she said outside the Ministry of Justice.

For Jose Antonio Suarez Martinez, Spain's legal system has given him little hope in finding his child.

'I have very little faith in justice. They have made me lose faith, unfortunately that is the way it is. I can't have more faith,' he said.

billzhao · 发表于 2018-6-12 11:55

An 80-year-old nun has become the first person to be accused of baby snatching in the scandal over the trafficking of newborns in Spanish hospitals.

Sister María Gómez has been formally named as a suspect in the investigation into one of more than 1,500 cases of suspected illegal trafficking of babies who were stolen, sold or given away by adoption over four decades until the 1980s.

Although the nun's name appears in many of the complaints made by those seeking lost children, the accusation centres on a single case involving María Luisa Torres and her 29-year-old daughter, Pilar. They were reunited eight months ago after families affected by the trafficking began campaigning for the truth.

Gómez has reportedly refused to give investigators her version of how Pilar was adopted in 1982.

Torres told the magistrate she had contacted Gómez after separating from her husband and becoming pregnant by another man. The nun, who worked with two Madrid clinics in the 1970s and 80s, had placed ads in local newspapers offering to help single mothers. Torres said Gómez promised to put the baby in an orphanage where she could visit her until she was able to look after the child herself. But after the birth Gómez told her the baby had been given to another family.

When Torres complained, the nun allegedly threatened to denounce her for the crime of infidelity and have her other daughter, born to her first husband, taken away.

"Her words were: 'I'm taking this one away and I can take the other one too. And then you'll go to jail,'" Torres told Antena 3 television.

Pilar's adopted parents took her to see Gómez when she began to ask after her birth mother. The nun allegedly told them Pilar's mother had been a prostitute.

Last year, as hundreds of alleged cases of baby snatching began to emerge, Torres's other two daughters set out to find their lost sister. In July a TV programme put the families in contact and paid for DNA tests.

"Finding my daughter means I can finally rest in peace," Torres said.

Both the justice ministry and the attorney general's office have said that resolving the stolen babies scandal is a priority, but victims complain most cases are eventually shelved. In at least three cases that remain open, graves have been opened and found to be empty.

Torres told El País newspaper that her case had only been resolved "because I was able to go to the prosecutor's office hand-in-hand with my daughter".

Campaigners are demanding a government inquiry into the scandal. They claim that networks of doctors, nurses and nuns who stole and sometimes sold babies were allowed to operate freely in many parts of Spain up until the early 1980s.

A campaign that started with an alleged 261 victims in January 2011 has since seen more than 1,500 complaints lodged at court houses around the country.

It appears that what began as a system for removing babies from families deemed politically dangerous by the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco allegedly evolved into an illicit business that targeted single mothers and the poor.

In one Madrid clinic where Gómez worked it is alleged that doctors kept a baby's corpse to show to mothers as proof that their child had died.

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西班牙偷孩子很猖獗

Elderly nun accused of baby snatching