“The majority of cases of stolen babies are filed or left forgotten and uninvestigated. It is the path that Justice has taken.” The complaint is made by María José Picó, president of the Alicante Stolen Children Victims Association. He explains that the entity or the adopted children themselves who want to find their biological parents file a complaint with the Juvenile Prosecutor's Office but, when they want to investigate and the documents are requested, either “they have been lost in floods or fires” or “they simply do not There is evidence” of them. No papers appear in the civil registry or in the cemeteries where the bodies were supposedly buried.
And María José knows it well. Her case, her struggle to find her twin sister, who supposedly died shortly after birth, is told in the documentary La Caja Vacía, by Javier Falcó, which was screened this Friday in the series of cultural events organized by the Museum of Prehistory. de València and L'ETNO within the project 'The graves of Francoism. Archaeology, Anthropology and Memory'. An activity that concluded with an interesting debate in which, among others, the director himself, María José, as well as the historian, archaeologist and former representative of Esquerra Unida in Les Corts, Esther López Barceló, participated.
In conversation with La Vanguardia, María José highlights that since she began her career in the association in 2012, more than a hundred cases have been examined. Some parents have continued searching for their children, others have died, but in none of the cases have they achieved a positive sentence.
He says that in the case of Alicante, the majority of reported cases are limited to the Alicante General Hospital. “The documentation is lost or there is no documentation that the mothers gave birth there.”
In her case, she explains, it was difficult to deny, since the most obvious proof that her mother, Francisca Robles, had given birth in the Alicante hospital on March 30, 1962, was herself, although there was no record in the general's records. .
María José says that if the minor died before 24 hours, it was recorded in the so-called “abortion file.” However, she denounces, all abortion records prior to 1978 were lost in the move from one building to another.
The president of the association points out that the theft of babies was done "mainly in cases of multiple births", such as that of their mother, as if this gave the perpetrators "a lesser burden of conscience" thinking that the biological parents had the “consolation” of being left with at least one other child.
María José began investigating in 2011, when the cases of stolen babies came to light. “In my family they always talked about my twin sister. “My father always stressed that they didn't let him see her before burying her.”
She tells how she and her twin sister, newborns, were not in contact with the mother – the babies were cared for in a room called “the nest” – and that they were only taken to the mother to breastfeed. Shortly after birth they reported that one of the two, precisely the one born with the heaviest weight, had died; María José survived despite being born weighing 1.2 kilos. “They call my father and ask him to go quickly to a grocery store near the hospital and quickly buy a little wooden box that the cemetery is going to close.” “In the year 62, how are you going to doubt the word of a doctor?” she asks herself even today.
She also tells how they were forced to bury her in the Alicante cemetery in a common grave (when the family intended to bury her in her native Elx) and, above all, how her father said that they returned the box, a box to store canned goods that he had bought, closed and nailed, and they urged him to go to the cemetery where “the gravedigger was already waiting for him.” Among the irregularities found in her subsequent investigation, it stands out that, instead of the name of the doctor who was supposed to sign the death of her sister, they put that of her father.
Their fight and their complaint were heard and María José achieved the first exhumation of a stolen baby in Spain. Esther López Barceló, former deputy in Les Corts Valencianes for Esquerra Unida (2011) was present. Their battles – personally and politically – had brought them together, and the Picó family asked him to accompany her and her father. “They needed to have someone they trusted close to them in a very painful process for them,” López Barceló tells this newspaper, while she remembers that her mother preferred not to attend.
“The father knew exactly the quadrant where the little box had been buried, although it was complicated because the area was now covered with earth. However, he remembered the quadrant and the corner where the box should be.” The former deputy says that “the father's mental map did not fail: he had not forgotten that traumatic event.” After being clear about where to look, the time came. The cemetery workers were preparing to dig in, when López Barceló raised the alarm and warned the prosecutor that without an archaeologist an exhumation could not be carried out in a grave of newborns, as remains and evidence could be destroyed.
It was the first time that such a process had been carried out and such a need had not been contemplated. The prosecutor asked the archaeologist to do it herself, but López Barceló refused. It was then that María José took her to a place further away from her and asked her to do so since she believed that, if she did not do so, she would “lose her only opportunity” to discover if her sister was really there. buried Finally, she agreed and the work began.
The wood had decomposed, the archaeologist recalls, but in the exact place where the father had said there was the color of the orange box and four nails: “There was nothing else.” They continued descending before possible earth movements and found the bones of a baby. More than a year later, these remains were proven to have nothing to do with the DNA of María José's parents.
After the failed verification, the prosecutor decided to carry out a second exhumation in an adjacent grave in the cemetery, even though the father – already more cognitively impaired – only kept repeating that that was not the place. They did not find the body. Finally, “and with the excuse that the gravedigger was no longer alive and the circumstances of the burial could not be known, it was decided to file the case,” explains the affected person.
This whole story is collected in the documentary The Empty Box by director Javier Falcó. This photographer and audiovisual creator points out that the case of María José is paradigmatic. “To tell her story is to tell the apathy of the Administration that filed her case without providing Justice.” “What happened to María José fits a common scenario: mothers without resources, whose parents were neither engineers nor lawyers.” Falcó explains that it was common to search for twins and the constant rush to bury the bodies. “They never see the creature,” he notes.
Also, Falcó points out that the majority of the cases occurred in the General Hospital of Alicante and that the parents hardly “dare to question the authority of a doctor or a nun.” Another modus operandi that is repeated in the case of María José: “The papers, the medical records are lost or are incoherent or outright false.” And above all the end: the cases end up being archived.
When Falcó was preparing the documentary, he discovered that there were some 2,100 open investigation proceedings, but only 526 have gone to court. That is, the rest have been archived or closed. Of the 526 prosecuted, the majority were in judicial limbo.
The Empty Box received the Best Documentary Award in the first edition of the DOCS Alicante 2022 Contest, from the Alicante Institute of Culture Juan Gil-Albert (Alicante Provincial Council). In addition, it has achieved official selection in up to seven festivals around the world.
The file is the end of most paths taken in search of answers. Unfortunately, neither the documentary nor María José's fight answers the question (also asked by other victims) of where her sister is. “All scenarios are possible. We don't have the slightest idea. She may be alive, she may have died or she may not even know that she is adopted.”
