A resident of Figueres has decided to take the case of the alleged robbery of his sister, born in 1963 at the Figueres hospital, to trial. The Girona prosecutor’s office already opened an investigation in 2011, after the ANADIR association included this case in the 300 that it presented to the state prosecutor’s office, with the aim of investigating this widespread practice during the Franco regime and confirmed by the courts. However, the case ended up being shelved for lack of evidence. Now, the brother of the kidnapped girl, Ricardo López, has decided to reopen it through the courts.
The case came to light 12 years ago and, after a long journey, now comes to the Figueres court. In the complaint that has been filed before the court of first instance and instruction 7, it has the support of the International Forum of Victims of Forced Child Disappearances Platform ‘We are looking for you’.
According to the complaint, on April 27, 1963, three days after López’s parents arrived in Vilanant from Malaga, his mother went into labor at night. Around 11:00 p.m. her sister was born in the Figueres hospital and, according to her letter, they put her in a room next to her mother’s.
“She spent the whole night and the next morning there because my mother heard her crying and a nurse came to take care of her and talked to her about the cures,†explains López. Everything took a turn that same afternoon when they told her mother that the girl had died. “Later, a cleaning woman approached her and told her not to believe the nuns, that her daughter was alive,” the complaint states.
When her father came home from work, her mother told him what had happened and together they went to the hospital to ask to see the body. However, “the nuns told them that her daughter was already buried in the hospital courtyard, in a common grave.” “After two days they went to the hospital very angry and since then they have always known that they had a stolen daughter,” she adds.
Years after discovering the facts, Ricardo decided to go to the Civil Registry, where he discovered that his mother’s information was wrong: she was listed as ‘Clara’ instead of ‘Carmen’, but the strangest thing was to see that an abortion cost the six months of gestation.
“My mother’s delivery was a normal delivery, nine months old and, in addition, it stated that death occurred at birth,” López details in the complaint. It was then that he decided to denounce the falsification of the official registration document.
In mid-2011, the Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation and ordered the National Police to investigate the event. An attempt was made to locate the cleaning woman who told her mother that the girl was still alive and the doctor who attended the delivery was questioned. In his statement, the doctor assured that the signature on the document proving the baby’s death was not his and that it had been signed by the funeral home.
The prosecutor’s office closed the case because, despite considering that the facts could constitute a crime of falsifying a public document, there was no avenue of investigation because the funeral home worker in question had died. Besides. the crime would already have prescribed.
Now, taking advantage of the door that the Historical Memory Law has opened, the affected party has decided to take legal action so that the facts are investigated and that, in this way, “the criminal responsibility of those who have had a participation punishableâ€. López wants them to get to the bottom of the matter and, despite the fact that he has no hope of finding his sister, he warns that she will go “to the end.”
