For much of the 20th century, a criminal organization of doctors and nuns stole and sold between 40,000 and 300,000 babies.
In 1939, after a three-year civil war, General Francisco Franco came to power.
Until his death in 1975, Spain was closed from the outside world, and the level of its technological progress left much to be desired. But not so long ago, a scandal broke out that exposed one of the worst crimes of the Franco dictatorship.
BBC investigations
According to a BBC documentary, up to 300,000 children were kidnapped between 1939 and 1989.
A secret organization, which included priests, nuns and doctors, sold babies to childless couples.
Since Franco's rise to power gave the Catholic Church tremendous power, including over hospitals and social services, this was not difficult.
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The representatives of the church recommended to their “customers” to imitate pregnancy, and after the transfer of money they gave them the child and forged documents. As it turned out later, not all parents knew that their children had been abducted.
In fairness, it is worth saying that some of the children of the mother did voluntarily leave in hospitals.
The rest of the mothers were told that their baby died after giving birth and were not even allowed to look at the body. Funeral arrangements were also part of the hospital's responsibilities. When the children's "graves" were subsequently opened, most of them contained stones and animal bones.
According to the records, mostly children were abducted from families of communists and republicans, opposition to the Franco regime.
Court hearings
In 2011, on his deathbed, a Catalan man told his son Juan Luis Moreno that he and his closest friend Antonio Barroso had been bought as babies through a priest in Zaragoza.
Friends talked about this in the Spanish media and it turned out that many adults suspected that they were not living with their biological parents.
The men created an association of victims, through which they tried to match the DNA of children and adults who believe that their children were abducted in infancy. However, they faced a problem - under the law on the protection of personal data, DNA banks do not provide information to anyone other than the applicant.
The men are pushing for an open DNA bank, but to no avail. Moreover, more than 70 years have passed since the transfer of the first babies, so neither many parents nor children are already dead.
The main persons involved in the criminal case also died - nun Maria Gomez and doctor Vela.
