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MADRID – Nearly 50 years ago, Ines Madrigal was abducted from her parents, involuntarily participating in a ploy to remove children from families who opposed the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.
On Monday, a Spanish court acknowledged that a former gynecologist had played a role in the 1969 abduction of Ms. Madrigal, who was a baby at the time. This was the first case in which a doctor had been the subject of a lawsuit in Spain for what is known as the stolen baby scandal. But Madame Madrigal's victory was, in her words, bittersweet.
The judges of a provincial court in Madrid concluded that there was irrefutable evidence showing that Eduardo Vela, aged 85, was involved in the abduction of Ms. Madrigal. But they said that the charges against him were within a statute of limitations, which required that the charges be laid within ten years of Ms. Madrigal's becoming an adult. This meant that Dr. Vela could not be found guilty of any of them.
The issue became a national scandal in 2011, when Spanish justice was forced to action after filing by Anadir, an association representing people looking for missing children or relatives.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who took office in June, is under pressure to obtain more complete accounting and compensation for the victims and their families, as the government has done for other victims of the Franco regime. .
Although several cases of stolen babies have already been closed, either because the crimes were too old or the people involved had died, Madrigal told local journalists that she hoped her example would encourage others.
"I am obviously happy because they recognized that Eduardo Vela had done everything he had done", Ms. Madrigal told reporters outside the courtroom. But, she added, Spanish judges should be prepared to use her case as a "trampoline" and to cancel any existing limitation period in cases like hers.
"There is an international law concerning the enforced disappearance of people – and Spain has adhered to this international law," she added.
She also plans to take her case to the Spanish Supreme Court.
The origins of the scandal are unclear, but the practice of separating the children of political opponents from their parents grew after Franco won the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and sought to adopt the children of his Republican opponents and Far left by married families. Catholicism and the conservative nationalist ideology of his regime.
Prosecutors said the kidnappings were facilitated by representatives of the medical profession and Catholic clergy, at a time when nuns were working in maternity wards and running many Spanish orphanages.
As part of a wider and more thorough investigation into crimes resulting from the civil war, Judge Baltasar Garzón had estimated at 30,000 the number of kidnappings under Franco.
The Franco regime lasted from 1939 until his death in 1975, when political reprisals against left-wing families were apparently transformed into a trafficking enterprise that continued. after the death of the dictator and in which doctors, nurses and nuns came to an agreement with criminal networks. .
María Gómez Valbuena, a nun known as Sister María, was the first person to be indicted in such a case. She was accused in 2012 by a woman, Maria Luisa Torres, of having participated in the kidnapping of her child, born in a Madrid hospital in 1982.
When she turned 18, her mother told Ms. Madrigal that she had been adopted. She eventually accused Dr. Vela of falsifying his birth certificate so that he shows his adoptive mother, who died two years ago, as a biological parent.
Dr. Vela, former director of the San Ramón Clinic in Madrid, has been charged with crimes including the kidnapping and falsification of documents. He was sentenced to a prison term of up to 11 years.
Dr. Vela denied committing a wrongdoing at the end of 2013, when he appeared in court for the first time in connection with the case. When asked why her name was on Ms. Madrigal's fake birth certificate, he told the court that he "signed things without looking at them".
More recently, Dr. Vela's lawyers have stated that his health deteriorated, preventing him from appearing in court and asking that the case be postponed indefinitely. He was not present at the announcement of the decision on Monday.
Since taking office earlier this year, Mr. Sánchez has promised to revive a historic memory law dealing with injustices committed during and after the civil war. The law finances the identification of thousands of victims of the civil war who were thrown into mass graves, renaming streets and squares that still honor the dictatorship participants, as well as other similar measures.
Last month, Mr Sánchez also obtained Parliament's support for his exhume the remains of Franco from the gigantic underground basilica built by the dictator after his victory in the war.
Antonio Barroso, president of Anadir, said Monday in an interview that Mr Sánchez and his new socialist government should open an in-depth investigation into the missing children and treat them "just like any other victim of Franco deserves to be treated. " he said, should include financial compensation.
The Vela case only confirms what has been known for a long time: "Many people have stolen a lot of babies," said Barroso, himself a victim of this scheme.
He founded Anadir in 2010 after discovering himself that he had been adopted. Mr. Barroso took DNA samples from the woman that he had always known as his mother and confronted her after tests showed that the samples did not match. She admitted to having paid a nun for a baby and misled her son about his birth for decades.
"We spent years talking with government officials and judges who spared no effort to ensure that nothing came out of this scandal," said Barroso. "It is now more than time to change that."
