Parents call for probe into Spain's 'stolen babies'

Joaquin Saez Naranjo and his wife Manuela Sanchez Cintado lost two babies in suspicious circumstances. Photo: New York Times

Truths are emerging about hundreds of missing infants.
PRODDED by grieving parents, Spanish judges are investigating hundreds of cases of infants abducted and sold for adoption over a 40-year period. What may have begun as political retaliation on leftist families during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco appears to have mutated into a trafficking business in which doctors, nurses and even nuns colluded with criminal networks.
The cases, which could eventually run into the thousands, are jolting a country still shaken by the spoken and unspoken terrors of Spain's 1936-39 Civil War and Franco's rule.
Last week, 78-year-old Concepcion Rodrigo Romero joined the rapidly growing ranks of Spanish parents who are turning to the courts to uncover the fates of their babies.

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Mrs Rodrigo Romero, a former seamstress, gave birth, prematurely, in 1971. A doctor in a Seville hospital told her that she had had a son, who was small but ''fine and capable of getting a lot bigger'', she recalled in an interview.
The doctor never reappeared, and she never saw her baby again. Two days later, another doctor at the hospital told her husband that the baby had been sent to another hospital for further checks, but had died there.
''Deep inside, I've always known that my son was stolen from me,'' Mrs Rodrigo Romero said.
Spain's judiciary was forced into action after Anadir, an association formed to represent people searching for missing children or parents, filed its first complaints in late January.
Attorney-General Candido Conde-Pumpido announced on June 18 that 849 cases were being examined, adding that 162 already could be classified as criminal proceedings because of evidence pointing to abductions.
The cases stretch from 1950 to 1990. Some historians and judges say that the Franco government removed babies from families that had backed its opponents in the civil war.
But the practice continued well after Franco's death in 1975; it is not known whether government officials played any role.
Mr Conde-Pumpido, who said it was impossible to estimate how many more cases would surface, also suggested for the first time that organised crime ''networks'' had been involved.
Antonio Barroso, 42, the president of Anadir, said he believed that Spain became a hub for gangs operating an international trade, with many newborns sold into adoption overseas.
Some couples, such as Joaquin Saez Naranjo and Manuela Sanchez Cintado of Seville, are pursuing multiple lawsuits. They lost two babies in suspicious circumstances, in 1972 and then in 1985.
In the 1985 case, Ms Sanchez Cintado said doctors carried out a sonogram, and she was congratulated for carrying a boy. After giving birth, she was told the newborn had been immediately sent to a special ward to deal with ''a small problem''. Her husband was separately told that his baby daughter had died.
''I was going to have a boy and somebody switched him for a dead daughter,'' a visibly shaken Ms Sanchez Cintado recalled.
''This was as ridiculous a story as if the doctor had told me that I had broken my elbow and then started operating on my wrist.''
A Madrid-based company, Genomica, has built up a DNA data bank from about 700 people since January.
Yet even with DNA testing, prosecutors face an uphill struggle to search common graves for the remains of babies supposedly buried there. Medical records often prove to be incomplete or contradictory.
NEW YORK TIMES


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