Spain to set up DNA database to track ‘stolen babies’

MADRID—Spain’s government announced Thursday it will set up a DNA database to help track down thousands of babies allegedly stolen by nuns, priests and doctors since the Franco era.

There are no clear numbers of the number of children who were snatched from their mothers during General Francisco Franco’s 1939-75 dictatorship and up to the end of the 1980s.

Estimates range from hundreds to tens of thousands of victims of a practice that began as a policy to remove children whose “moral education” was at risk and allegedly developed into financial trafficking.

“It is a terrible human drama which causes anguish,” Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz Gallardon told a news conference after meeting with organisations that fight for stolen children and their families.

“The state has the obligation to do all it can within the limits of our laws to try to resolve it,” he said.

The minister said the government would establish a DNA database to help the investigations and he promised to instruct prosecutors to give “priority attention” to cases lodged by alleged victims.

“This is going to be a long and complicated process and therefore there are no magic formulas that the government can apply to resolve a problem that has existed for so many years.”

A group called ANADIR that lobbies on behalf of people who suspect they or their children were illegally sold into adoption estimates there could be as many as 300,000 cases of baby snatching.

Under a 1940 decree the state was allowed to take children into custody if their “moral education” was at risk.

The state removed some children of jailed left-wing opponents from their mothers and placed them with religious orders or gave them for adoption to approved families to purge Spain of feared Marxist influence.

Many of the same doctors, nurses and officials who carried out the Franco-era policy are accused of continuing it after Spain’s return to democracy, selling babies to women unable to give birth.

New mothers were often told their babies had died suddenly within hours of birth and the hospital had taken care of their burials when in fact they were given or sold to another family.

More than 1,400 complaints alleging newborn babies were taken from their mothers in hospitals and ended up with other families have been filed with Spain’s public prosecutors.