Twentieth Century Forcible Child Transfers by Amir Ruth;

Author:Amir, Ruth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 5

Forcible Transfers of Republican Children in Spain

It is only in recent years that Spanish historians have begun to address the full scale of the atrocities of the Civil War and Francoism. Until then, the Pacto del Olvido(the Pact of Oblivion)—a political agreement between the left- and right-wing parties—was Spain’s way of coping with its troubled past. The victimization of children during the Civil War and its aftermath infiltrated into public discourse. Forcible child transfers, forced migration and repatriation of children of Republican families, murdered or imprisoned by the Francoists’ dictatorship, and the kidnapping and trafficking of children, were the subject of public campaigns from the late twentieth century onward. Furthermore, according to the Pact, Francoist public memorials, monuments, and statues would be disused for official occasions, or transformed.1 The Pact of Oblivion was a way of facilitating a smooth transition to democracy by avoiding prosecutions of crimes committed during the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. The 1977 law that granted amnesty for perpetrators of human rights violations during Franco’s dictatorship, was part of this pact.2

This silence about past repression was part of Spain’s sense of insecurity as well as the brittleness of its post-transition democracy. Yet, with the consolidation of democracy and the coming of age of a generation unscathed by the fear generated by Francoism began to come to terms with the past not by oblivion but, rather, by dealing with the past to its fullness. In the last two decades, the campaign launched by the Associacion para la Recuperacion de la Memoria Historica (Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory) and the victims’ families have begun mapping of hidden landscapes of repression, identifying sites of mass graves, and conducted exhumations of the bodies they contained. In 2006, with the 70th anniversary of the Civil War, growing demands for the recovery of republican have joined together with a struggle for legal recognition and reparations for victims of the dictatorship. Finally, the government passed Ley de Memoria Historica (Law of Historical Memory) that offered the victims meager reparation.3

In 2014, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of non-Recurrence, by Pablo de Greiff, criticized Spain’s meager transitional justice measures, and argued that the effects of the law are incompatible with international treaties signed by Spain.4 De Greiff suggested that “the efforts to cope with the legacies of the Civil War and dictatorship in practically all the spheres of the mandate have been mostly fragmented. The measures adopted have not corresponded to a consistent, comprehensive and overall state policy in favour of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence.”5 In June 2018, Dr. Eduardo Vela was the first person to stand trial in Madrid, over Spain’s stolen children (los niños robados), abducted from their mothers. This practice lost its initial ideological cause in the 1950s. It targeted children of poor or “illegitimate families” who were deemed as economically or morally deficient. The abductions continued until 1987, following new legislation that regulated adoptions.

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