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SPANISH HISTORY

‘Sold for €725’: What happened to Spain’s stolen babies?

When the bones of her twin sister who died at birth were exhumed, María José Robles's worst fears were confirmed: their DNA didn't match, suggesting she was one of the newborns snatched during the Franco dictatorship.

'Sold for €725': What happened to Spain's stolen babies?
María José Pico Robles, who's looking to find out what happened to her sister, holds an old photograph of her parents as she poses in a cemetery in Alicante, on August 19th 2022. Almost five decades after the death of Francisco Franco, Spanish lawmakers voted through a flagship law on October 5, 2022 seeking to honour the victims of the 1936-1939 civil war and the ensuing dictatorship. (Photo by Jose Jordan / AFP)

Over the course of five decades, hundreds, possibly thousands, of babies were taken from their mothers, who were told their child hadn’t survived — with the infants given to others to adopt.

“It was here,” says Robles, fighting back tears as she points at the place where she thought her sister was buried in a cemetery in the southeastern Spanish city of Alicante.

“My twin sister was just two days old when she died, that’s what they told my mother in hospital,” she told AFP, referring to events that happened in 1962, her voice breaking.

“But they never let her see the body, nor did they let her take the baby home to bury her in Elche where we’re from,” says this 60-year-old who works in a chiropody clinic.

When the news first broke about the “stolen babies” scandal some 10 years ago, there were some uncanny similarities with her twin’s death which left Robles and her parents with “doubts” and a sense of “anguish”, she says.

They began gathering paperwork and found it was full of inconsistencies, prompting them to approach the courts which in 2013 ordered the exhumation of her sister’s remains.

Since then, Robles – who runs an organisation dedicated to finding stolen babies — has been tirelessly searching for her sister.

Her DNA is registered with several databases and she is hoping her sister has done the same.

“It’s the DNA which is our hope,” she told AFP, saying she dreams of the day when one of the laboratories contacts her to say they’ve found her sister.

Known as “stolen babies”, these trafficked infants would have been too young to know of their fate, with estimates suggesting there could be many thousands of victims.

Trafficked infants were too young to realise they were taken from their real parents, with estimates suggesting there could be thousands of victims. (Photo by Jose Jordan / AFP)

‘The Marxist gene’

Spain’s Senate on Wednesday passed a law honouring victims of the Francisco Franco era and recognising for the first time that the “stolen babies” were also victims of his dictatorship.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War won by Franco’s Nationalists, babies were initially taken from left-wing Republican opponents of the regime to prevent them from passing on the Marxist “gene” to their children.

But from the 1950s onwards, the scheme was expanded to include children born out of wedlock or into large or poor families.

Doctors played a key role, with women told their babies had died shortly after delivery but never given any proof.

Then the newborns were passed on to couples unable to have children, many of them close to Franco’s National Catholic regime.

The Catholic Church was often complicit in the scheme which aimed to ensure the children would be raised by affluent, conservative and devout Roman Catholic families.

This trafficking occurred throughout the dictatorship and even beyond Franco’s death in 1975, largely for financial reasons, until a new law strengthening adoption laws was passed in 1987.

Similar thefts also took place under the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) as well as under the regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

Argentinian rights organisation the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo believes some 400 babies were born in captivity and illegally handed over to other people.

In Spain, there is no official estimate of the number of babies that were seized but victims’ associations believe there may have been several thousands.

In 2008, the Spanish courts estimated that more than 30,000 children were taken from Republican families or jailed left-wing opponents and taken into state custody between 1944 and 1954 alone.

Some died while others may have been passed on to “approved” families.

Mario Vidal holds up a photo of his ‘stolen’ brother, whom he found alive. (Photo by Jose Jordan / AFP)

Sold for €725 

Between 2011 and 2019, prosecutors across Spain opened 2,136 “stolen baby” cases but none have been successfully resolved, the latest justice ministry figures show.

But if answers through the justice system are rare, a handful of Spaniards have somehow managed to do it, such as Mario Vidal, a 57-year-old architect from the southeastern town of Denia.

“It was my adoptive father who told me they had paid 125,000 pesetas to adopt me,” he told AFP, referring to a sum that would amount to €725 ($715) in today’s money.

He started looking for his biological parents in 2011.

After three years of hunting through archives in the Madrid region where he was born, Vidal was able to identify his mother — only to realise she had died 16 years earlier.

“That was one of the hardest days of my life,” he admitted, saying he was torn between “the sense of excitement” of realising where he was from, and the shock of learning of her death.

When she had him, she was an unmarried 23-year-old from a very conservative family.

Although an official document stated she had abandoned him, she tried several times to get him out of an orphanage before he was adopted, a relative told him, saying she was even arrested for doing so.

He later found his half-brother, who died three years later, but still hasn’t discovered who his biological father is.

“We are children of an era in which those in power did whatever they wanted,” said Vidal, who has two children of his own.

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WORKING IN SPAIN

Right to disconnect: Is it legal for Spanish bosses to contact workers out-of-hours?

The increasingly online world means that we can work remotely and call colleagues from across the globe, but it can also make us constantly contactable. So can bosses in Spain contact you out of hours?

Right to disconnect: Is it legal for Spanish bosses to contact workers out-of-hours?

In the increasingly online world of teletrabajo and remote working in 2024, technology means that we can work with colleagues on the other side of the world and hold online meetings across the continents.

However, there are also some downsides. Things like burnout, screen fatigue and generally just being constantly contactable are new workplace issues that many countries are trying to come to terms with.

In Spain el derecho a la desconexión digital (the right to digital disconnection) is an idea that’s been gaining ground among trade unions and the more left-wing members of Spain’s coalition government.

This comes amid wider efforts to improve workplace rights such as reducing the working week to 37.5 hours. 

READ ALSO: Spain set to slash work week to 37.5 hours

At a recent press conference, the Secretary of State for Employment, Joaquín Pérez Rey, stressed the importance of digital disconnection. “There’s no point in reducing the working day if your boss can call you at midnight or send you an email at 5 a.m,’ he said. 

For the reduction of the working week to be effective, he added, it must respect set working hours and ensure that employees are not bothered outside their working hours.

Is it illegal for Spanish bosses to contact workers out-of-hours?

Generally speaking, yes. Or it is in theory, at least. Though there’s not a specific digital disconnection law yet, the right to digital disconnection is already regulated in Spain via various pieces of pre-existing law on workplace rights and data protection.

Article 20 of the Workers’ Statute and Article 88 of Organic Law 3/2018 on Data Protection and Guarantees of Digital Rights both establish legal guarantees that workers can disconnect outside the legally or habitually established working time, protecting their rest time, leave, holidays and personal privacy.

In theory, companies are obliged to create an internal policy defining how this right will be exercised and to train staff on the reasonable use of technology (more on that below).

This is key: companies should come up with a policy or set of rules regarding digital disconnection and out of hours contact. They may also be defined in your sectoral collective bargaining agreement, depending on your type of work.

If there aren’t defined standards, bosses may be able to skirt around the rules.

Whether or not the pushier bosses and high-stress industries respect these rules anyway, however, even if they did exist, is another matter altogether. That’s why, despite the existing regulation, trade unions have reported numerous breaches of labour regulations based on digital issues and called for the legislation to go further. 

READ ALSO: What are my rights if I work extra hours in Spain?

The UGT, one of Spain’s major unions, wants stricter fines and punishments for companies that don’t respect their employees’ right to digital disconnection, as well as it to be included in the Law on the Prevention of Occupational Risks, something that would bring the online workplace into line with pre-existing legislation.

Spain’s Ministry of Labour has proposed increasing penalties, with fines ranging from €1,000 to €10,000 depending on the seriousness of the offence. 

It’s also proposed modifying pre-existing rules to create offences related to disrupting the enjoyment of minimum daily and weekly rest periods, annual leave, maximum working hours, breaks during the working day, as well as the regulation of night work and shift work.

The law

So, what does the law actually say? This new right is most specifically outlined Article 88 of the Organic Law on Personal Data Protection and Guarantee of Digital Rights:

Article 88.1: Public workers and employees shall have the right to digital disconnection in order to guarantee, outside the legally or conventionally established working time, respect for their rest time, leave and holidays, as well as their personal and family privacy.

This includes the broad right to digital disconnection, but also the right to privacy and use of digital devices in the workplace; the right to privacy from the use of video surveillance and sound recording devices in the workplace; the right to privacy from the use of geolocation systems; and, finally, employees have the right not to answer calls or emails about work-related issues outside working hours.

Article 88.3 states that employers should create internal policies to ensure this happens: 

“The employer, after hearing the workers’ representatives, shall draw up an internal policy for workers, including those in managerial positions, defining the procedures for exercising the right to disconnection and training and awareness-raising measures for staff on the reasonable use of technological tools in order to avoid the risk of computer fatigue.”

So, legally speaking, it is illegal for Spanish bosses to contact workers out-of-hours if it breaks the legislation, sectoral collective bargaining agreements, or private arrangements made on a company level.

Whether or not most bosses respect this, however, is an entirely different matter. 

READ ALSO: Spain’s Valencia begins four-day work week trial

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