Thousands of Spanish children were taken from hospitals and sold to wealthy Catholic families. This is Ana Belén Pintado’s story.
This article from The NY Times Magazine is an account of one person’s discovery about the true story of her childhood, and the people she thought were her parents. Nicholas Casey relates the story of Ana Belén Pintado and a chapter in Spanish history with which the country is still coming to grips.
(The link should allow entry through the Times pay wall — it’s also available in audio form — about 55 minutes.)
Some background:
...Pintado took a closer look at the birth certificate. She could see that someone had torn off the top third of the paper, leaving a jagged edge behind. Her birth certificate had been tampered with; there had been something here that someone wanted to hide. “I knew this couldn’t be my mother,” she told me. “And that’s when I thought, I might be a stolen baby.”
Pintado had long known about the phenomenon of babies stolen from hospitals in Spain. The thefts happened during the end of the regime of Francisco Franco, the right-wing dictator who ruled the country until 1975, and even today the disappearances remain a subject of mystery and debate among scholars. According to the birth mothers, nuns who worked in maternity wards took the infants shortly after they were delivered and told the women, who were often unwed or poor, that their children were stillborn. But the babies were not dead: They had been sold, discreetly, to well-off Catholic parents, many of whom could not have families of their own. Under a pile of forged papers, the adoptive families buried the secret of the crime they committed. The children who were taken were known in Spain simply as the “stolen babies.” No one knows exactly how many were kidnapped, but estimates suggest tens of thousands.
The stolen-baby phenomenon was just one part of a national nightmare that began in Spain with Franco’s rise to power. A right-wing army commander, Franco was among a group of military officers who plotted to overthrow Spain’s government in a 1936 army rebellion, triggering the Spanish Civil War. Overnight, Spain went from an elected democracy to a country in which death squads rounded up and executed leftists and intellectuals. When Franco’s Nationalists could not subdue the Basque Country, they called on warplanes from Nazi Germany that flattened the town of Guernica, inspiring the famed painting by Pablo Picasso that bears its name. The ruthlessness was typical of a new brand of authoritarianism that began toppling democracies one by one in Europe in the 1930s. But unlike Adolf Hitler, Franco survived World War II. Spain’s regime lived on as an enduring fascist state in the heart of modern Europe.
The story tells of Pintado’s realization that there are things the people she thought were her parents had never told her, and it was not until after they had died that she began to suspect what turned out to be the truth.
Along the way the story tells of cooperation between the Catholic Church and the government in a scheme that had as a nominal justification, the idea of children of ‘leftist’ parents could be raised as ‘proper’ citizens if raised by the kind of people who fit the mythos Fascism in Spain was promoting:
As Spain’s supreme leader, Franco took the title Caudillo, or “strongman,” and soon began stripping away social freedoms within the country. Up to the early 1930s, Spain had been among Europe’s most progressive countries, allowing for married couples to divorce and women to seek abortions. Under Franco, those rights were swiftly rescinded. Contraception was outlawed, adultery was criminalized and women lost the right to vote. Newspapers were censored, and many books were banned altogether, including those of Federico García Lorca, Spain’s most renowned poet and playwright. (Lorca had already been murdered by Nationalists during the civil war.) Franco’s political movement, the Falange, once even published a schedule for housewives outlining times to take children to school, bleach clothes and prepare dinners.
If any of the above seems to resemble what certain groups and individuals think is needed to “take back America”, well….
But one of the most lasting abuses of the era was borne by children. In the late 1930s and 1940s, Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, a leading psychiatrist in the regime who was trained in Nazi Germany, promoted the idea of a Marxist “red gene” carried by the children of Franco’s left-wing opponents. The gene, he said, might be suppressed by removing children from their mothers and placing them with conservative families. Franco’s men soon began the abductions on a large scale. They targeted children orphaned by Franco’s firing squads and took newborns belonging to women who had given birth in jail as political prisoners. All were sent to be raised by regime loyalists. The era of the “stolen babies” had begun.
The Franco government found a willing partner: the Catholic Church:
Franco’s rule also marked a dramatic turn for the Catholic Church, which allowed its nuns and priests to become partners of the right-wing regime. They commanded the education system, where children were to be instructed in Catholic values, learning to read using the Bible. Franco also ceded oversight of parts of the state-run hospital system to the clergy. Nuns often sat alongside top management at hospitals, helping to select staff and overseeing the budget. But their influence was perhaps strongest in the hospitals’ charity floors that took in the poor. There, the nuns were often deployed to encourage single mothers to give their babies up for adoption to married couples.
We tend to forget that Fascism was alive and well in Spain long after it was overthrown in Germany and Italy. While Franco maintained relations with the Axis powers, he never quite entered into a formal alliance with them. Spain did not actively participate in the Holocaust — but that doesn’t mean Jews found Spain to be a sanctuary. As with the stolen babies, there is a problem with reconciling what happened with what people are willing to acknowledge.
Eventually, Spain began to change. By the 1960s the country began to be more open and liberal; it was possible for a single mother to raise children rather than having them taken away. But, the continuing demand for babies led to a black market where babies were actually stolen from their mothers who were told they had died at birth or shortly thereafter. Nuns, doctors, midwives, nurses collaborated in the scheme for profit as well as ‘values’; money changed hands from people desperate to adopt.
The story relates that something similar happened in Argentina under the military junta that ruled from 1976 to 1983. Unlike Spain however, Argentina eventually developed a truth and reconciliation program to attempt to reconcile what had happened. Spain chose official amnesia about the whole scheme — along with other atrocities that took place under Franco — although that is beginning to break down.
Pintado began a quest to find her birth mother, as have thousands of other stolen children. Women who were told their babies had died during that time are also beginning to challenge what they were told. Many of the original perpetrators are now elderly or have died. Official records were never kept; putting what information is available together is sketchy at best. Judges deferred and delayed cases. Pintado eventually beat the odds, despite resistance from friends and family who were uncomfortable with her efforts.
When religion and right wing government mix, the results can be more of the Devil than God. The death toll in Ireland of children born of unwed mothers and the abuse their mothers experienced is horrendous. The Pope has apologized for what happened to indigenous children in Catholic schools in Canada — along with financial settlements. In both cases government funding was supporting those institutions — but without the accountability secular institutions might have expected.
It’s quite possible to have a government that incorporates religion into its structure — but it won’t be a democracy. When authority is based on God’s Will (in practice whatever those in charge say is God’s Will), it’s not possible to challenge it, take it to court, or vote it out of office.
The Dobbs Decision from a Supreme Court now dominated by conservatives has raised the specter of what other rulings might be imposed on the country according to the religious lights of the justices. Talking Points Memo has an explainer by Sarah Posner on the rise of Christian Nationalism and its embrace by the Republican Party. It discusses various aspects of Christian Nationalism, with the last section looking at how Republican leaders are using the movement:
The Bible is just a prop for Donald Trump, and, like autocrats throughout history, he uses religion and religious leaders to consolidate the support of enraptured followers. It doesn’t really matter whether Trump himself is a Christian nationalist, since he is a salvific figure to Christian nationalists, one who can achieve their long-sought goals by crushing the “godless left” and giving them more power. One of the leading contenders to be Trump’s successor, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, is abusing his current office to engage in fascistic crackdowns on migrants, public education, and LGBTQ kids while making direct Christian nationalist appeals. In recent political speeches, DeSantis has been using a verse from Ephesians 6 (“Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes”), but with a notable substitution: instead of “the devil’s,” he has said “the left’s.” The meaning is not lost on evangelical audiences, who are well familiar with the actual words of the verse.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the 2024 GOP presidential primary will be a competition to choose not just the party’s standard bearer, but its Christian nationalist battle commander as well.