Spain Pledges to Investigate Illegal Adoptions

By Sinikka Tarvainen
Bellingham Herald
January 24, 2013

http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2013/01/24/2851177/spain-pledges-to-investigate-illegal.html

Spain will do "whatever it can" to help the judiciary investigate cases of stolen babies and illegal adoptions stretching back for decades, Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz said Thursday, after one of the key suspects died.

As many as 300,000 children may have been stolen from their mothers by independently operated rings comprised of doctors, nurses, midwives, officials, cemetery workers and intermediaries between the 1940s and 1990s, according to victims' representatives.

The government has already adopted measures such as arranging for free DNA tests for some of those affected.

One of the best-known suspects - Maria Gomez Valbuena, a nun - died Tuesday at the age of 87 in Madrid, her religious order said.

Known as Sister Maria, she was one of the first official suspects in the affair and the first ordained member of the Catholic Church to be investigated by the judiciary.

She declined to attend a court hearing earlier this month, citing health reasons.

Gomez Valbuena already appeared in court in April, refusing to answer questions. She told the press she was innocent.

Nuns and priests are believed to have played an important role in the racket, which first took off after Spain's 1936-39 Civil War.

After right-wing general Francisco Franco won the war against the leftist republican government and took power, an estimated 30,000 babies or small children were taken away from republican women, especially jailed ones.

They were given out for adoption or placed in orphanages and other institutions in order to "purify" them from their "red" heritage and be raised as conservative Catholics, according to historians.

The practice later developed into a commercial racket, which continued all the way into the 1990s, according to victims' representatives.

The two cases in which Gomez Valbuena was accused will now be shelved, prosecutors said.

Victims' representatives called for urgent trials given that many of the suspects were elderly.

"There are more nuns and also doctors involved. They need to be investigated, interrogated and that is not being done," said Antonio Barroso from the victims' association Anadir.

Courts have received thousands of complaints, but many of them have been shelved, according to victims' representatives.