Spain's Stolen Babies: Doctor Faces Court Over Franco-Era Abductions
Last edited Tue Jun 26, 2018, 02:12 PM - Edit history (1)
It was almost half a century ago that Ines Madrigal was born in Spain and handed to a woman who was not her mother. In all those years, she has seen no trace of her birth mother, nor any evidence that she was willingly given up for adoption. Madrigal suspects she was one of Spain's ninos robados -- stolen babies -- a victim of a sinister political practice that began after the Spanish Civil War and continued as recently as the 1990s.
Eduardo Vela, an 85-year-old obstetrician, faces court in the Spanish capital of Madrid on Tuesday, accused of abducting Madrigal as a newborn back in 1969. Public prosecutors are seeking an 11-year jail term for the illegal detention of a minor and forging a public document.
The woman who adopted Madrigal -- Ines Perez, who died two years ago -- had told CNN in 2012 that Vela gifted her the baby. Vela admits the signature on Madrigal's birth certificate is his, but he denies any involvement in "stealing" Madrigal, and is seeking a full acquittal, court documents show.
Evidence is growing that babies were removed, at first during the Franco era from families seen as Republicans and given to others loyal to the fascist regime. Some are believed to have been sold. The issue only came to light in 2011, when friends Juan Luis Moreno and Antonio Barroso publicly shared their stories, saying their fathers had bought them as children from a priest in the Spanish city of Zaragoza. - Read More...
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/spains-stolen-babies-doctor-faces-court-over-franco-era-abductions/ar-AAzaqRp?ocid=HPCOMMDHP15
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francoist_Spain
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Chato Galante, who was stripped of his youth in the prison cells and torture rooms of Franco’s Spain, likes to joke that he is an “unrepentant optimist”. He has had to be. Almost half a century has passed since he was beaten and jailed for his efforts to fight the dictatorship, but he remains confident that justice will be done, that his torturers will answer publicly for their crimes and that his convictions will be overturned.
Equally optimistic is Paqui Maqueda. Sooner or later, she says, Spain will find the courage to confront the Franco years and their insidious legacy. Perhaps then she will establish what happened to her elder brother, who is thought to have been one of the thousands of children secretly and systematically stolen from their mothers at birth to be placed with less “degenerate” families.
Galante and Maqueda’s stories feature in an award-winning documentary due to be shown at Sheffield Doc/Fest on Saturday that examines the enduring consequences of the amnesty law and the “pact of forgetting” that facilitated Spain’s return to democracy after Franco’s death in 1975. The Silence of Others, directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, chronicles the fight for justice as well as the search for the stolen children and the 100,000 bodies still thought to lie in unmarked civil war graves. Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar are the film’s executive producers.
The idea for the film came to Carracedo and Bahar eight years ago as details of Spain’s “stolen babies” began to emerge – including the revelation that the practice had not died with the dictator but continued into the 1980s...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/08/francos-cruel-legacy-film-wants-stop-spain-forgetting-silence-others
-Guernica, Basque Country, The Town That Became A Symbol for Peace, Picasso, The Guardian, April 5, 2017.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2017/apr/05/guernica-anniversary-basque-country-picasso-painting-peace
'Guernica,' by Picasso, 1937. Spanish painter Pablo Picasso’s anti-war painting of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica is one of the 20th century’s most famous images. A vast canvas in sombre tones of grey & blue it shows in searing detail the suffering of people & animals as bombs fell on their town. It was made for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris & toured around the world to publicise the massacre. Picasso swore that neither he nor this painting would ever visit Spain until democracy was restored. This did not happen until 1978, five years after his death. In 1981 the picture was finally returned to Spain.
