Spain probes 849 cases of alleged baby trafficking
Submitted by Kerry on Sat, 2011-06-18 14:38.
See also:
- Searching For My Daughter, A Human Trafficking Tale
- Families Search for Truth of Spain’s ‘Lost Children’
- Korean-Australian woman finds she was falsely adopted
- Philippines - misc trafficking cases
- Children trapped between supply and demand
- Salvadoran group dogged in search for children missing years ago in civil war
- “The Lost Children of Guatemala,” from Le Temps
- The woman who sold children
- Families fight to find children stolen as infants in Spain
- Spain seeks truth on baby-trafficking claims
By Harold Heckler
June 18, 2011 / sacbee.com
MADRID -- Spanish prosecutors are investigating 849 cases of newborn children stolen from their mothers and sold to other families for profit, the country's attorney general said Friday.
Candido Conde-Pumpido said 162 cases had already been referred for trial and only 38 have been dropped for a lack of evidence.
It is well documented that babies were taken from women who had supported the defeated Republican side after Spain's 1936-39 civil war. However, some of the baby trafficking cases are as recent as the mid-1990s.
"A great many Spaniards" had been affected by the scandal, which took place "over a prolonged period of time," Conde-Pumpido said at a news conference.
His office was alerted to the cases by ANADIR, an association of people searching for lost children or parents.
Enrique Vila, a lawyer representing ANADIR, said what had begun as a politically motivated punishment for Republican sympathizers eventually became a purely moneymaking scheme that persisted illegally well past Spain's return to democracy in 1978.
Investigating magistrate Baltasar Garzon has calculated there could have been 30,000 baby thefts in Spain in the wake of the civil war.
Vila has argued that there was more or less a nationwide network behind it, involving doctors, nurses, midwives, nuns and intermediaries that would find children for couples that wanted them. Mothers were told that their babies were stillborn.
"It is not possible to attribute this to a single organization," said Conde-Pumpido, speaking in the eastern city of Valencia following a meeting with prosecutors general from Spain's 17 autonomous regions.
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The uncivil way to adopt
It's uncanny to me how many times civil war (and its often bloody aftermath) is behind so many infant adoption scams, which include illegal adoptions and adoptions in which the so-called orphan was adopted and later abused or at the very least, treated very badly post-placement, thanks to stigmas against a particular race, ethnicity or religion
Germany 1939-1945.
Greece 1945-1949.
Spain 1936-1939 and the subsequent dictatorship of Francisco Franco 1939-1975.
Argentina 1976-1983.
El Salvador 1980–1992.
Cambodia 1970-1993.
Guatemala 1960-1996.
Ethiopia 1998-2000.
Have foreign adopters at any point ever put war and infant adoption together long enough to realize just how corrupt such ICA programs can be, and why ICA may make matters much worse for the child already touched by corruption and war?
News from the goodness angel
I wonder if the next hype will be an adopted child from Syria or Libya, now that Goodness Angel of the World, Angelina Jolie has landed in the region. A mediterranean child certainly will be fitting decoration for the $11 million mansion where she and hubby, Brad Pitt, seem to be staying at the moment.
Questionable "goodness", through ICA
Yea, I don't understand her role in terms of the UN and Adoptionland -- there sure seems to be a huge conflict of interest, especially when you consider the places where she has adopted from, (Cambodia, Vietnam, Ethiopia) and how war and corruption has affected the women and children living there.
Jolie, ICA celebrity extraordiaire is not the face people need to see when getting a closer look at the lives of those who live in one of the 5 most dangerous countries for women. These countries include Somalia, India, Pakistan, Congo, and Afghanistan.... regions where rape is rife and women have no rights, and very little education.
To give an example of the mixed message she sends, in March of this year, Jolie visited Afghanistan, asking for the rights of indivuduals to be protected.
Poverty, desperation and little education are key ingredients to a variety of child trafficking schemes... including ICA, which has become very vogue in the celebrity community. Note how the USA still has yet to ratify the treaty to the UNCRC.... a fact Jolie tends to leave out, when discussing the rights and plights of individuals in war-torn areas or countries in profound distress.
I think more people, westerners especially, need to take the time to think how ICA does not aid mothers and children in these regions. Unmonitored and unchecked, ICA only enables and encourages forced births and child kidnapping, all so Americans and Europeans can get the infants/young children they truly desire.
Surely those with relative wealth can see how dangerous and harmful it can be for both woman and child if women are forced to have babies and those babies are forced into orphan centers (and used as commodities), all so do-gooders can claim humanitarian efforts are reaching pregnant women ("widows") and "orphans" in war-torn regions of the world.