The State Prosecutor's Office admits to processing a complaint for 58 possible cases of theft of babies

The State Attorney General's Office has sent a letter to María Mercedes Bueno Morales, coordinator of the international forum platform for victims of enforced disappearances of children, in which she undertakes to analyze the 58 cases reported "to determine the criminal scope" of the events.

The complaint, filed last November, with the advice of the Baltasar Garzón International Foundation, represents 56 people —mothers looking for their children, children looking for their mothers and brothers looking for their siblings, born between 1954 and 1994 in centers in the Canary Islands, Navarra, the Community of Madrid, Galicia, La Rioja, the Basque Country, Catalonia and Andalusia.

The complaint calls for an investigation into the disappearances for possible continuing crimes of documentary falsification, assumption of childbirth, the crime of altering parentage, and gender violence, understanding that "the violence suffered by the mothers at the time of their delivery was part of the subordination to which they were subjected in a daily and normalized way in all the structures of the society of the Franco regime, the late Franco regime and the transition ”.

The plaintiffs also argue that the facts denounced constitute both international crimes of forced disappearance of children and crimes against humanity and that, therefore, they do not prescribe.

In his letter to the spokesperson for the complainants, the chief prosecutor of the technical secretariat of the State Attorney General's Office, Álvaro García Ortiz, assures that “the Prosecutor's Office has assumed with special commitment the obligation to respond to all those mothers, children and families who suspect they have been victims of an alleged abduction of newborn minors, despite the obvious difficulties that the investigations present, and a complete, effective and efficient investigation must be carried out in each case ”.

The Prosecutor's Office recalls that some of the cases now denounced were previously filed, but insists that it will analyze "individually" the proceedings carried out "without prejudice to the possibility of reopening in case of contribution or discovery of new evidence."

Likewise, the chief prosecutor points out that the complaint reveals “the possible existence of elements of connection between the different assumptions due to the coincidence, in some cases, of the hospitals where the births took place, the medical personnel who attended the delivery or signed the death certificate and the religious orders linked to the management of the hospital ”, although until now it has not been possible to prove the existence of a joint plot, so he proposes the individualized investigation of the reported cases.

The Office of the Prosecutor has initiated a coordination file for the centralized monitoring of all the actions carried out and the joint analysis of the information to determine the criminal scope of the denounced events.