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Summary: Countless babies were taken from mothers who fell afoul of the Franco regime, and many women have died without learning their children's fate. Now activists are stepping up pressure on Spain's justice system to ease their search for answers.
[MADRID, 7 January 2011] - Emilia Giron never forgot her second son. She wanted to name him Jesus, but he was taken from her in the hospital to be baptized and was never returned.
He was stolen while she was imprisoned by Gen. Francisco Franco's regime, in the early 1940s, after the country's bitter civil war.
"I felt that anguish all my life," Giron told a historian 60 years later. "I carried him for nine months and I never got to know him. Pain like that does not go away. I will take it with me into the next life."
Giron died at 95 in 2007, five years after telling her story to historian Ricard Vinyes, who was also jailed by the Franco dictatorship. She never found out what happened to Jesus.
Her baby boy was one of thousands of children who were reportedly separated from their parents in the 1940s during a little-known chapter of the repression that followed the 1936-'39 Spanish Civil War, a practice that would have a terrible echo decades later in Argentina's "dirty war."
Giron's ordeal and that of other parents were immortalized by the 2002 documentary "The Lost Children of Franco," which Vinyes helped make. And now activists are stepping up pressure on Spain's justice system to ease their search for the victims of the sinister campaign.
Under Franco's far-right regime, she was considered morally unfit to raise a child because she was the sister of an outlawed guerrilla leader.
Military psychologist Antonio Vallejo-Nagera built the ideological framework for the practice of taking children from their parents. He saw Marxism as a form of mental illness that was polluting the Hispanic race and advocated that children of leftists be removed and re-educated, a process he termed "separating the wheat from the chaff."
An unknown number of infants were taken from women's prisons. In addition, some Republican child evacuees were repatriated without their parents' consent and interned in Social Aid homes for schooling in religious and nationalist ideology. Many were adopted by right-wing families.
A law passed in 1941 allowed the state to change the surnames of children in their care. Original records were tampered with, destroyed or simply closed to information seekers, and the victims' past became virtually untraceable.
When Franco died in 1975, the abuses of his regime were swept under the carpet in the interest of a smooth transition to democracy. In a country still littered with unmarked mass graves, the past has remained untouchable and hugely contentious.
Further Information:
- More on child rights in Spain
Owner: Hazel Healypdf: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/07/world/la-fg-spain-franco-20110107