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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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DRIVING

Do tourists have to pay Spanish traffic fines?

Almost 80 percent of foreign drivers fined for traffic violations in Madrid never pay up. But why is that, what could you be fined for, and how likely are tourists to actually have to pay Spanish traffic fines?

Do tourists have to pay Spanish traffic fines?

In 2015, the European Parliament closed a legal loophole that allowed foreign drivers to easily escape traffic fines while abroad by (in theory) sending the paperwork to their country of origin and improving cross-border information exchange between authorities.

However, it hasn’t entirely worked. In Spain, tourists racking up speeding and parking tickets has long been a problem. According to Spain’s Dirección General de Tráfico (DGT), the French, Portuguese and Germans are the ones who commit the most traffic offences in Spain, usually for speeding. But getting them to actually pay their fines (multas) once they’ve left the country is proving difficult, and EU regulation doesn’t seem to have helped much.

For many years in Spain, foreign drivers simply left the country and prayed that the traffic fine wouldn’t find its way to their home country. If it did, many simply ignored them.

In Madrid for example, estimates suggest that as many as 80 percent of foreigners fined in Madrid never pay their traffic fines. That means tens of thousands of fines go unpaid each year, and that the authorities miss out on several million Euros in extra revenue.

Just 44,935 of the 232,849 total traffic fines have been paid (19.29 percent) — meaning we can say that roughly 8 out of every 10 traffic fines given to foreigners in the capital go unpaid. Though there’s no country-wide data, we can assume that the figure at the national level is somewhat similar, or to give a conservative estimate, at least above 50 percent.

Madrid’s city council has since brought in a payment collection service in view of trying to recoup the high level of non-payment from abroad, and the EU regulation to try and shore up this problem was consolidated in Spanish law in 2015, through Royal Legislative Decree 6/2015, which updated Spain’s Traffic Law.

So, the bureaucratic framework to chase fines is there, at least, but practically speaking, it doesn’t seem to happen much. That begs the question, do tourists have to pay Spanish traffic fines? Which fines can’t foreign drivers escape, and how do they pay?

READ ALSO:

Traffic fines in Spain

The Club Europeo de Automovilistas (CEA), regulates the cross-border exchange of traffic information, and it establishes eight main types of driving and traffic offences which will be communicated across borders, regardless of the European country where the offence is committed. These offences are:

  • Speeding
  • Failure to wear a seat belt or other approved restraint system.
  • Running a traffic light, stop sign or yield sign.
  • Driving with alcohol levels higher than those established by regulations.
  • Driving under the influence of narcotics, psychotropic drugs, stimulants and any other substance with similar effects.
  • Not wearing a helmet when riding a motorbike.
  • Driving in a forbidden lane, improper circulation on the hard shoulder or in a lane reserved for certain users.
  • Using a mobile phone or other communication device while driving.

READ ALSO: What are the drink driving limits and penalties in Spain?

Rental cars

For readers who’ve been fined while driving a rental car in Spain and wondering (hoping) if they can get away with it, know that the authorities can still identify you.

The EU Directive on cross-border exchange of information applies to all vehicles, whether private or rental. If a rental car picks up a traffic violation and is fined in Spain, the company will communicate the offender’s details to the competent authorities in order to process the fine. In fact, it may actually be more likely that you’ll have to pay it off this way, because rental companies require identification and address details.

In addition to the fine, you usually have to pay an additional surcharge for an administrative fee for “fine Management” charged by the rental company. In the event that your infraction leads to a traffic accident with damage to the vehicle, the damages will be excluded from the insurance liability limitation, and you’ll have to pay an additional surcharge on top of it.

What to do if you get a traffic fine in Spain?

So you got caught speeding in Spain and actually received a traffic fine at your home address. What happens now? You generally have three options: firstly, pay up (with a possible discount); secondly, appeal the fine; and thirdly, if you weren’t driving, prove you weren’t the driver.

Pay fine

The DGT handles all traffic fine payments in Spain. If you’re abroad, the easiest way to pay will be online, which you can do here, but you can also pay via phone, app, or in person if you wish.

If you pay within 20 days, you usually receive a 50 percent discount on the total amount.

Appeal fine

If you do not agree with the fine, you can appeal by submitting a plea or appeal with the evidence you consider appropriate.

You can do all this via the DGT website.

Not the driver?

If you receive a traffic fine from Spain and you weren’t the driver (whether someone else was driving your car or there was a mix up with dates and drivers at the rental company) you can challenge it. As per the DGT website: “If you were not the one driving the vehicle at the time of the offence, you can identify the driver within 20 days of receiving notification of the fine.”

In the case of minor offences identifying the driver is voluntary and if you pay the fine it will be understood that you were the driver. In the case of serious or very serious offences identifying the driver is compulsory. You have to identify the driver even if you are the driver. In these cases, if you do not identify the driver it will be considered a very serious offence, which may result in a large fine, and you will not be able to benefit from the 50 percent discount for paying off the fine within the voluntary period.

All the information on how to identify and report the driver is available here via the DGT. 

Do tourists have to pay Spanish traffic fines?

In conclusion, it seems that many foreigners fined for traffic offences in Spain never pay it off. However, the legal and bureaucratic and frameworks to chase offenders across borders (or send their fine to their home address, at the very least) do exist, and if the authorities in Madrid are taking further steps to chase up foreign drivers escaping justice, it seems like a crackdown could be beginning.

If you do speed or jump a red light in Spain, you’ll have to see if the bureaucratic machine kicks into gear and gets your fine to your home country. Of course, one way that you’ll definitely have to pay the fine is if you are caught red handed by a police officer.

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