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Re:Spanish Civil War and Franco's Stolen Babies
Hello, Melissa. I`m a spanish Doctorate student of History, and I'm trying to obtain the B2 English level, so I guess we can help each other in many ways.
Here in Spain, people are a little reluctant to denounce Franco's Dictatorship. On the one hand, opposite other european peoples, in Spain the most of the right wing parties were born from the Franco's Cortes (Manuel Fraga, one of the founders of Popular Party, was a Minister of Franco!). On the other hand, these claims are accused of "opening wounds of the past", "being political tactics from left parties to discredit the rival", "denying the abuses of the republican side", etc. In the Transición (the process from dictatorship to democracy after Franco's death, along the 70's), there was a sort of feeling of collective guilty: "both sides were the same shit","involving oneself in politic matters is a dangerous stuff", you know.
That topic had been silenced, except academic media, until some journalists made public that the robbery and sale of babies had been continuing until the 80's, in democracy years! Usually, lonely and poor girls gave birth on discret hospitals managed by nuns; after a while, they were told their babies had dead, and they were shown the corpse of a dead child -always the same child. Actually, the babies were sold to wealthy families, the ones able to pay the high sum that was asked for. Nuns, doctors, householders... had been involved in this network for decades, since the post war years. There are many persons looking for their natural mothers; and they often are only about 30 years old.
In the first years of dictatorship, the children of republican women who had been born in prison received bad treatement. I remember a girl called Libertad (Liberty), daughter of a communist or anarchist prisoner : the baby was ripped out from her mother arms, and smashed against the wall until death... in front of the poor woman! Other children died in poor, dirty and stuffed cells, abandoned to faim and disease. But after some years, some persons thought that, if the children of republican and communist families were educated in a good religious home, they could be recovered for the homeland. There was a psychiatrist, Antonio Vallejo Najera, who was working at some female prisons and centers of forced job, and tried to justify this measure in a "scientific approach". According Vallejo Najera, left or socializing theories are typical of inferior individuals, unable to make a life by their own skills. Cause of this, they claim for a State that provides them livelihoods, protecting them from the concurrence against stronger individuals. Furthermore, marxism and anarchism were materialist and economicist theories, that denied the spiritual values of Human being, values that had shaped the "Eternal Spain" in its Grandeur Age -Quixote against Sancho Panza. Nevertheless, Spanish race needed to be regenerated educating its children in spiritual, religious and patriot values...
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Language pair: English; Spanish
This is a reply to message # 197913
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