HAUNTING BBC DOCUMENTARY EXPOSES
50-YEAR
SCANDAL OF BABY TRAFFICKING
BY THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN SPAIN
Identity crisis: Randy
Ryder as a baby being cradled
in a Malaga hospital in 1971 by the woman who
bought him
By Polly Dunbar
October 16, 2011
Up to 300,000 Spanish
babies were stolen from their parents and sold for adoption over a period of
five decades, a new investigation reveals.
The children were
trafficked by a secret network of doctors, nurses, priests and nuns in a
widespread practice that began during General Franco’s dictatorship and
continued until the early Nineties.
Hundreds of families who
had babies taken from Spanish hospitals are now battling for an official
government investigation into the scandal.
Several mothers say they
were told their first-born children had died during or soon after they gave
birth.
But the women, often
young and unmarried, were told they could not see the body of the infant or
attend their burial.
In reality, the babies
were sold to childless couples whose devout beliefs and financial security
meant that they were seen as more appropriate parents.
More...
Official documents were
forged so the adoptive parents’ names were on the infants’ birth certificates.
In many cases it is
believed they were unaware that the child they received had been stolen, as
they were usually told the birth mother had given them up.
Journalist Katya Adler,
who has investigated the scandal, says: ‘The situation is incredibly sad for thousands
of people.
‘There are men and women
across Spain whose lives have been turned upside-down by discovering the people
they thought were their parents actually bought them for cash.
There are also many
mothers who have maintained for years that their babies did not die ~ and were labeled
“hysterical” ~ but are now discovering that their child has probably been alive
and brought up by somebody else all this time.’
Reunited: Randy Ryder
with Manoli Pagador, who believes she may be his real mother
Experts believe the cases
may account for up to 15 per cent of the total adoptions that took place in
Spain between 1960 and 1989.
It began as a system for
taking children away from families deemed politically dangerous to the regime
of General Franco, which began in 1939. The system continued after the
dictator’s death in 1975 as the Catholic Church continued to retain a powerful
influence on public life, particularly in social services.
It was not until 1987
that the Spanish government, instead of hospitals, began to regulate adoptions.
The scandal came to light
after two men, Antonio Barroso and Juan Luis Moreno, discovered they had been
stolen as babies.
Mr. Moreno’s ‘father’
confessed on his deathbed to having bought him as a baby from a priest in
Zaragoza in northern Spain. He told his son he had been accompanied on the trip
by Mr. Barroso’s parents, who bought Antonio at the same time for 200,000
pesetas ~ a huge sum at the time.
‘That was the price of an
apartment back then,’ Mr. Barroso said. ‘My parents paid it in installments
over the course of ten years because they did not have enough money.’
Bought for cash:
Journalist Katya Adler with Juan Luis Moreno, who was sold as a baby
DNA tests have proved
that the couple who brought up Mr. Barroso were not his biological parents and
the nun who sold him has admitted to doing so.
When the pair made their
case public, it prompted mothers all over the country to come forward with
their own experiences of being told their babies had died, but never believing
it. One such woman was Manoli Pagador, who has begun searching for her son.
A BBC documentary, This
World: Spain’s Stolen Babies, follows her efforts to discover if he is Randy
Ryder, a stolen baby who was brought up in Texas and is now aged 40.
In some cases, babies’
graves have been exhumed, revealing bones that belong to adults or animals.
Some of the graves contained nothing at all.
The BBC documentary
features an interview with an 89-year-old woman named Ines Perez, who admitted
that a priest encouraged her to fake a pregnancy so she could be given a baby
girl due to be born at Madrid’s San Ramon clinic in 1969. ‘The priest gave me
padding to wear on my stomach,’ she says.
It is claimed that the
San Ramon clinic was one of the major centres for the practice.
Many mothers who gave
birth there claim that when they asked to see their child after being told it
had died, they were shown a baby’s corpse that appeared to be freezing cold.
The BBC programme shows
photographs taken in the Eighties of a dead baby kept in a freezer, allegedly
to show grieving mothers.
Despite hundreds of
families of babies who disappeared in Spanish hospitals calling on the
government to open an investigation into the scandal, no nationally
co-ordinated probe has taken place.
As a result of amnesty
laws passed after Franco’s death, crimes that took place during his regime are
usually not examined. Instead, regional prosecutors across the country are
investigating each story on a case-by-case basis, with 900 currently under
review.
But Ms Adler says: ‘There
is very little political will to get to the bottom of the situation.’
There are believed to be
thousands more cases that will never come to light because the stolen children
fear their adoptive parents will be seen as criminals.
Many of the families of
stolen babies have taken DNA tests in the hope of eventually being matched with
their children. Some matches have already been made but, without a nationally
co-ordinated database, reuniting lost relatives will be a very difficult
process.
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