A magistrate investigating the human rights crimes of Francisco Franco has ordered an inquiry into the fate of children kidnapped from left-wing families by the Spanish dictator’s henchmen.
Judge Baltasar Garzon, the controversial national court magistrate, has asked judges to add the missing children to more than 136,000 cases of people who disappeared under the Franco regime.
An unknown number of children were allegedly stolen from “red” families by Franco’s supporters, with details of individual cases being sent recently to courts in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Valencia, Burgos, Malaga and Zaragoza.
Campaigners say thousands of children were taken from their mothers, especially those in jail, and handed to orphanages in the early years of Franco’s 36-year dictatorship. Some had surnames changed and were never seen again.
As the sister of a guerrilla leader, Emilia Giron was deemed unfit to bring up her son, who was taken from her days after his birth 70 years ago.
“He was a boy and I wanted to call him Jesus,” she recalled in a recent documentary, The Missing Children of Francoism. “But they took him away to baptize him and I never saw him again. I don’t know who took him. I suppose it was a couple who were unable to have their own children but they never asked my permission. The anguish will last until I die.”
The investigation adds a new line of attack in Garzon’s attempts to have Franco’s regime and its henchmen formally accused of perpetrating crimes against humanity. It mirrors the investigations into children taken from left-wing captives in Argentina and given to people loyal to the military juntas that ruled there in the 1970s.
Like many of Spain’s stolen children, Uxeno Alvarez, was sent to an orphanage where he was continually punished.
“When the other children went out for a walk they would leave me behind and make me clean 50 pairs of shoes,” he said in the documentary. “It took me time to understand why. They hated me. I was the son of a ‘red.’”
At least 12,000 children whose parents had died during the civil war or had been executed by Franco’s regime were in state or religious orphanages in 1944. Some put the number as high as 30,000.
When Carmen Garcia’s unmarried mother, a former Republican fighter also called Carmen, gave birth to a baby girl at a hospital run by nuns, she was sent home to recover and told to come back for the child later. When she went back, the child had gone.
“The nuns told her she was no longer there, that they had given her away in adoption,” her daughter said.
The family never found the missing the child.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS