Francisco Franco

Franco's Spain abducted the children of political opponents. The government of the Madrid region will start an investigation by checking healthcare archives.

The inquiry will concern the children believed dead between 1961 and 1971 but whose custody was actually granted to families sympathizing with the regime. The investigation was opened by judge Baltazar Garzon after collecting a series of pieces of testimony. According to the judge and two historians, in the years following the civil war those children were abducted from their mothers and granted in custody to pro-regime families or they died in jail, for malnutrition and poor hygienic conditions.

In the first years of the dictatorship there was the habit of handing the children of jailed or executed women to other families. Garzon though believes that between 1937 and 1950 there was a true systematic plan to abduct the children of jailed woman, similar to what the Argentinian generals would carry out ten years later in the Latin American country.

The plan of abduction and handing to clergy or pro-Franco families was the application or the theories of Antonio Vallejo Naiera, a military psychiatricist in whose opinion marxist were "madmen to be isolated from the rest of society since their birth". According to estimates and testimony, the phenomenon concerned at least 30,000 children.