POST
PRODUCTION
SCRIPT
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
INTERNATIONAL EDITION
2011
Spanish Babies
25 min 8 secs
©2010
ABC Ultimo Centre
700 Harris Street Ultimo
NSW 2007 Australia
GPO Box 9994
Sydney
NSW 2001 Australia
Phone: 61 2 8333 4383
Fax: 61 2 8333 4859
E-mail
Publicity:
It began as a cruel and calculated program under Spain’s dictator Franco. Babies were taken at birth from regime opponents and given to so-called respectable families who supported the general.
But long after Spain’s civil war ended and World War 2 faded it seems that this sinister program infected practice in hospitals and maternity clinics across the country.
What started as a heartless and ruthless episode of political and social engineering metastasised into a money maker for opportunist doctors and maternity staff.
‘How could you imagine that somebody could do something like that?’ BRAULIA BANDERAS FRANCO – Mother
As this scandal erupts and spreads, Foreign Correspondent investigates a number of harrowing cases involving mothers who claim they were duped and who are now desperately searching for their adult sons and daughters, another woman who is sure the dead sister in a commemorative tomb is no such person, a guilt-stricken father who bought a son and a man who grew up American utterly unaware of his heritage and who’s arrived in Spain looking for answers and his birth mother.
‘The main roadblock is that there is no identifying information. It has just vanished. Everything has vanished. The hospital has vanished, the records have vanished, the birth records are falsified. Everything is just either falsified or it’s gone, magically just disappeared.’ RANDY RYDER – stolen & sold at birth
Europe Correspondent Philip Williams explores a landscape of broken hearts and bitterness punctuated for some with renewed hope that their children may have survived.
‘I am at the border of a miracle, I am by the doors of the mystery. It is like life is giving me a second opportunity. It was very unfair that they took my children and I know that it is very difficult to find them. Now I have a motive to continue living.’ VICEN BONO Mother
Philip takes us to one of many gatherings involving scores of parents swept up in the mystery, subjecting themselves to swabs for a DNA database and the hope that science may be able to bring them answers. The breadth and scale of the trade appears huge but it will be almost impossible to accurately define it.
‘One of the really frustrating parts of telling this story is the lack of documentary evidence. While there are nearly a thousand investigations already underway, no-one - doctors included - has been charged.’ PHILIP WILLIAMS
music
00:00
WILLIAMS: The rhythm of life plays out in a busy Madrid maternity hospital. In one room a mum dotes over her newborn as she prepares to take the baby home. Nearby, in a delivery ward, another baby is about to arrive, a mother in the final stages of labour, an expectant father proudly looking on.
00:21
Hospital
photos
In Spain around half a million new babies arrive kicking and screaming every year, but for generations in this country that most natural and joyful event has become a horror story. For countless thousands of parents, this is a scenario denied and in its place, grief, anger and an aching sense of loss.
We’re about to meet just a few of them, each with a very different version of the same story – of little lives stolen and sold.
00:56
Randy Ryder standing outside a building
RANDY RYDER: “This is the place where forty years ago somebody walked through these gates and went inside there and had a baby”.
01:50
WILLIAMS: There’s the son trying to find his birth mother.
01:58
Nuria Pellicer Creus and reporter
NURIA PELLICER CREUS: “We’ve always thought the coffin was empty”.
02:02
WILLIAMS: A woman looking for her sister, trying to unlock the truth hidden in a little white box.
02:05
Manual Espi
MANUAL ESPI: “We didn’t deserve him…”.
02:11
WILLIAMS: The desperate father who bought a son.
02:15
Braulia Banderas Franco & friend
BRAULIA BANDERAS FRANCO: “I am stunned. I can’t believe what is happening”.
02:18
black & white civil war archive
WILLIAMS: And the two friends trying to find out what happened to their children.
The scandal now gripping Spain had its roots in a distant, and very callous time in the nation’s history. During and after the civil war in the 1930s and 40s, General Franco’s dictatorship devised a plan to weaken their enemies - take babies from their republican parents and give them to ‘respectable’ families who supported the regime.
02:23
02:36
(to next page)
It appears that set the moral compass for what was to follow – doctors and nurses in public and church run clinics involved in the theft and in many cases, the sale of babies born to poor, powerless mothers. Told their child had died at birth, their babies were then adopted out.
03:09
driving
BRAULIA BANDERAS FRANCO: “They were falsified signatures.
I was told my child was not born”.
03:33
friends in cab
WILLIAMS: In Valencia two friends share a cab ride to town and hopefully some answers.
03:39
BRAULIA BANDERAS FRANCO: “In those days you’d never imagine anyone doing that to you”.
03:45
Amidst Valencia’s astounding modern architecture is the building many see as their only hope of recovering a stolen past.
03:49
Vicen Bono & Braulia Banderas Franco
Vicen Bono on the left said she was told two of her babies died at birth and her friend and neighbour, Braulia Banderas Franco was also told her had baby died. Now she believes that is a lie.
04:00
WILLIAMS: “Do you believe that your son is out there somewhere, twenty-eight, twenty-nine years old now?
04:15
BRAULIA BANDERAS FRANCO: “Of course he is. In the beginning it was difficult to understand what was happening, but now I walk along the street watching. If this has happened, why shouldn’t I be able to find him if he’s alive?”
04:23
women walking
papers
WILLIAMS: Both these women suspect their children were stolen by hospital staff and sold. Vicen has come to the Valencia courthouse to start a legal process her friend Braulia has already begun, gathering documents to push for exhumation. Braulia’s search has already uncovered a trail of dodgy paperwork, starting with the birth certificate.
04:39
BRAULIA BANDERAS FRANCO: “My husband’s signature is forged. That’s not his signature. The clinic where I gave birth is false. The doctors are false. Everything is forged. It says that he died at midday, and that’s not true. Everything is a lie”.
05:03
WILLIAMS: “What does that tell you about what happened?”
05:30
certificate
Braulia Banderas Franco
BRAULIA BANDERAS FRANCO: “That there’s something strange going on that is not normal. If that document was genuine my doctor would be on there, and the name of the clinic – and my husband’s signature would not be forged”.
05:32
leaving courthouse
WILLIAMS: Emerging from the courthouse armed with a new file of medical records, the two friends are heading home to pour through the evidence.
05:49
women at door
WILLIAMS: “It’s a long time ago, but are those feelings still strong, are they still raw?”
05:59
women
VICEN BONO: “At the moment no, it is the opposite. I am like at the border of a miracle. I’m by the doors of a mystery. It’s like life is giving me a second opportunity. It was very unfair that they took my children and I know that it is very difficult to find them. Now I have a reason to continue living”.
06:05
and son
WILLIAMS: Vicen Bono did go on to raise another son. He’s fully behind his mother’s quest to discover the truth about his missing siblings.
06:44
Vicen Bono
VICEN BONO: “Now I want to be in peace. Now I can’t be in peace. I want the court to order the exhumation of both babies and to examine my DNA with their DNA. Only then could I be in peace. The only way to know is with the exhumation of the bodies”.
06:58
meeting
WILLIAMS: What started as a single story in a newspaper late last year has triggered hundreds of legal claims and thousands of questions. This is a meeting in Valencia of ANADIR a new organisation dedicated to reuniting families and getting justice for them. Here mothers line up to give DNA swabs with birth records falsified, missing or incomplete, this new DNA database may be their only hope.
07:31
Super: Amaya Gorostiza
DNA technician
AMAYA GOROSTIZA: “We can’t solve everything because the tool has limits of course as any other tool, but yes, it’s a solution for a lot of things”.
08:00
WILLIAMS: No one really knows the full extent of what went on, but lawyers involved in cases estimate around three hundred thousand illegal adoptions took place and around fifty thousand of them were outright thefts …where poor young mothers were told their babies had died at birth, only to be given to another family considered more suitable. A transaction often greased with cash.
08:12
Enrique Vila
ENRIQUE VILA: “It was very easy for a doctor to deceive the biological mother and tell her that her child had died – and then hand it to the family he chose. There was no control on behalf of the administration. There were many doctors who became very wealthy doing this”.
08:42
photos & documents
WILLIAMS: It’s claimed doctors, nuns and others conspired to deceive not just the mothers but the children themselves whom it appears were given new identities, birth certificates stating their adoptive parents are their biological mothers and fathers creating a virtually untraceable lie that only DNA tests can expose.
09:09
Enrique Vila
ENRIQUE VILA: “If the parents who bought them do not come forward there isn’t much the judge can do. If they don’t know in which hospital he was born, we can’t get hold of the records. What’s more important is the creation of the DNA databases. The more people register, the more likelihood of there being a match”.
09:34
WILLIAMS: For Valencia based lawyer Enrique Vila, this is both a professional and personal quest. While he represents some of those demanding prosecutions, he says he too was adopted illegally and can’t trace his birth mother.
10:01
WILLIAMS: “From what you understand now, should some of those doctors be in gaol?”
10:18
Enrique Vila
ENRIQUE VILA: “Without a doubt. Some of those doctors are still alive and practising and there is enough evidence to convict them”.
10:23
(see next page)
Rural
Espi
WILLIAMS: But for there to be a market for this blackest of trades, there needed to be buyers.
Amidst the rural tranquillity of Ontinyent near Valencia lives a man tormented by what he did thirty years ago. Manuel Espi always knew it was illegal but unable to have their own children, back in 1982 he and his wife bought a baby boy from a clinic in nearby Valencia. They named him Lucas.
10:35
Photo of Lucas
Manuel Espi
MANUEL ESPI: “He was beautiful. And there was something different about him – peculiar. Although small, he was already well-liked by people. He pulled faces and facial expressions, and charmed people”.
11:16
photo of boy on tractor
family photo with child
WILLIAMS: But this was no simple transaction. Over the coming months there were demands for more and more money. Essentially an extortion racket with menaces – pay up or lose your child.
11:34
Manuel Espi
MANUEL ESPI: “When I told them that I was going to report this they asked me whether I wanted to go to gaol. They told me “you must pay!”
11:47
close up of document
WILLIAMS: Eventually after paying the equivalent of four years wages the paperwork stating Lucas was their natural born son was provided, but even then it was unsigned and of course a fraud.
12:04
document
Manuel Espi
photo Lucas
Manuel Espi
MANUEL ESPI: “But I always felt remorse.
I have carried this burden for these last 21 years. Finally I can let go of it.
When Lucas died my wife said, “we only had 18 years to enjoy him” but I said “no, we enjoyed him for 18 years” which is not the same”.
12:22
WILLIAMS: Lucas Espi and his girlfriend were just 18 when both were killed in a terrible accident when a gas tank exploded.
12:55
Manuel Espi
MANUEL ESPI: “We were always grateful to Lucas. I always loved him – still love him and will always love him. Lucas was a precocious, peculiar and unique boy who left his mark – not just with me, but with people. He was a unique person. That’s why I even thought that we lost Lucas because we were being punished for being selfish. We didn’t deserve him… we didn’t deserve him”.
13:07
Barcelona
vaults
WILLIAMS: Certainly the breadth and scale of the baby trade appears huge but precisely how big may be impossible to measure. In the Catalan City of Barcelona, tourists and locals alike are drawn to Gaudi landmarks like this extraordinary church.
But there is another city on a Barcelona hill the tourists don’t visit, housing the departed in multi-story vaults where evidence of a dark past is literally buried.
13:56
steps
But for increasing numbers not for long because in these valleys of the dead in Barcelona and beyond, there are answers set to be exhumed.
14:37
Philip Williams to camera
WILLIAMS: One of the really sad consequences of this whole story is that as it gathers momentum, people who had accepted the fact that their baby had died are left wondering now was my child trafficked? Were they actually brought up by another family under another name? And some are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to answer that question.
14:47
Nuria & Philip walking
Officially Nuria Pellicer Creus’s sister was still born. Her little body placed in a white coffin in the family vault. Nuria doesn’t believe it and wants the coffin opened and any remains DNA tested.
15:08
WILLIAMS: “If you get permission to open that box, what do you think is inside?”
15:23
Nuria Pellicer Creus
NURIA PELLICER CREUS: “A doll, wrapped in bandages. My parents always said that – and I think so too. That box remains the same after 36 years”.
15:28
WILLIAMS: “Is it possible that the horrible reality is that your sister did die just exactly as the doctor said?”
15:45
Nuria Pellicer Creus
NURIA PELLICER CREUS: “No. The baby was not dead. They weighed her, washed her, cut her umbilical cord. That’s the first thing I found. The second is on the certificate – my father’s signature. It’s not his. My sister is not in that box. My sister was sold”.
15:53
WILLIAMS: Already coffins in other cases have been opened. In one instance the skeleton found inside was not a baby girl as it should have been, but a boy - and of course the DNA didn’t match. Nuria Pellicer Creus is heading to the courts to demand her sister’s coffin be opened and the prosecution of those she blames for the theft of a sister she’s never known.
16:20
b&w photos
Williams to camera
While there are nearly a thousand investigations already underway, no one doctors included, has yet been charged and many of the private clinics where it’s alleged these crimes took place, have like the paper trail, disappeared. The nuns and doctors who once ran this private Madrid clinic have long gone. It’s now an old people’s home but questions remain about the fate of some of the babies born in this place.
WILLIAMS: One of the really frustrating parts of telling this story is the lack of documentary evidence and perhaps that’s for very good reason. The people that used to work here are hardly making themselves available to tell their side of the story, but there is one man with some very chilling evidence of what was going on here at least thirty years ago.
16:58
Germán Gallego is a semi retired photographer who three decades ago was tipped off about the clinic by a staff member. He’s about to show me the pictures he took there late at night for an exposé published in a magazine and a warning, these are disturbing images.
17:56
Germán Gallego with Philip Williams at table
photo baby
GERMÁN GALLEGO: “I arrived, it was winter, very cold… they opened a gate and I entered a room that was very small… and there were freezers. The person took out a child – it was a girl – and put it there and I took a photo”.
18:15
WILLIAMS: “What was your understanding the baby was there for, what was the purpose?”
18:33
photo baby
at table
GERMÁN GALLEGO: “I knew why it was there – they had it to show the mothers who wanted to see their dead child. They were told their child was dead, although it wasn’t but they showed them the dead child that was kept in the freezer”.
18:38
WILLIAMS: Germán Gallego says there were other babies in the freezer to mix and match according to need.
18:56
GERMÁN GALLEGO: “I had worked in current affairs magazines when I was young but it still affects me. These children were bought and sold as if you were buying an apartment. It was crazy. I don’t know how it happened”.
19:03
Train
Randy Ryder
WILLIAMS: But what of the children who were switched in this macabre deception, sold sometimes overseas and who grew up utterly unaware of their true heritage.
Shuttling into this murky saga is a man who was raised American and comes from Texas. It wasn’t until he was a father himself, showing off his baby son at a family gathering that the truth came out.
19:26
Randy Ryder
RANDY RYDER: “At some point during our conversation my grandmother looked at me and said well you know you don’t carry my blood – and that’s how I found out”.
19:55
photos
WILLIAMS: When confronted, his father admitted that he’d paid five thousand dollars to buy Randy as a newborn.
20:11
RANDY RYDER: “It floored me. I mean at the age of twenty-eight to find out that the people you thought were your parents are not your parents and the style of.... the way I found out... it was just really incredible”.
20:18
WILLIAMS: With both his adoptive parents now dead, Randy Ryder has come to Malaga, the place he thinks he was born and sold but tracking down his past is no easy task.
20:34
map of building
externals
Super: Randy Ryder
RANDY RYDER: “There is no identifying information, it just seems to have vanished, everything has vanished. The hospital has vanished, the records have vanished,
the birth records are falsified – everything is just either falsified or it’s gone, magically just disappeared”.
20:46
20:56
records
WILLIAMS: Sure enough his birth records falsely state his adopted parents were his biological mother and father, both of whom are no longer alive. Randy has one strong lead, Dr Manuel Munoz Nieto, the doctor who forty years earlier delivered him and signed the birth certificate. When they met Randy had a catalogue of questions.
21:12
Randy Ryder
RANDY RYDER: “How it’s possible that he was able to sign his name to a document, a legal national Spanish document verifying and certifying that this woman gave birth to me without any sort of identity checks, without….. I just can’t imagine that any reputable doctor would do such a thing”.
21:37
Dr Nieto seated
WILLIAMS: With the controversy about black market babies growing, Dr Nieto couldn’t satisfactorily answer all of Randy Ryder’s questions.
22:03
RANDY RYDER: “He was not nervous at all. Confident in his answers, but I also felt that definitely very concerned with proving his innocence with the answers”.
22:11
walking
WILLIAMS: As he wanders the streets and sights of Malaga he could be any other tourist, but Randy’s not looking at the buildings or monuments but rather searching for one special person, the woman who gave birth to him forty years and one day ago.
22:30
Randy Ryder
RANDY RYDER: “There are these occasional moments where you wonder, okay this could have been the street where you know somebody from my past was walking along or maybe somebody worked over here… so there’s that sort of, you know strange connection that you have. You think about those kind of things.
The day that I wonder mostly those kind of things is whenever my birthday rolls around I always think about that because I know that if she’s alive and that is indeed my birthday, I know we’re thinking about the same thing at that moment”.
22:49
22:05
WILLIAMS: Another solid piece of evidence is still standing, although they’re now commercial offices, this once was a private maternity clinic, the place he was born.
23:22
RANDY RYDER: [standing outside of building] “I’m just thinking about you know this is the place where forty years ago roughly somebody walked through these gates and went inside there and had a baby”.
23:33
WILLIAMS: “Wow it’s quite amazing architecture here”.
23:48
Randy & Philip enter
corridors
RANDY RYDER: “A beautiful building.
One of these rooms could’ve been the room where I was born, where my biological mother had me and then somewhere along here, somewhere in this process that hand off was made to the adoptive parents. I will walk out of this building today by my own choice and freewill. I wasn’t able to do that the first time”.
23:52
WILLIAMS: Spanish prosecutors are already investigating nearly nine hundred cases. There could be thousands more to come. It may have happened decades ago, but the effects for all are raw and very much in the present.
24:24
Randy Ryder walking
WILLIAMS: “When you dream of your perfect ending to this story, how does it go?”
24:43
Randy Ryder walking
Randy Ryder
RANDY RYDER: “It’s really simple, it’s just being able to piece the puzzle together. I mean a lot of this I was doing for myself,
but a lot of it I was doing to sort of put together a picture for my son, for the next generation also you know? It would be nice to be able to explain to your offspring where you come from and who you are and who they are”.
24:48
music
25:08
Credits
Reporter: Phil Williams
Editor: Garth Thomas
Producer: Bronwen Reed
Camera: Cameron Bauer
Research: Giles Leclair
PRODUCTION
SCRIPT
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
INTERNATIONAL EDITION
2011
Spanish Babies
25 min 8 secs
©2010
ABC Ultimo Centre
700 Harris Street Ultimo
NSW 2007 Australia
GPO Box 9994
Sydney
NSW 2001 Australia
Phone: 61 2 8333 4383
Fax: 61 2 8333 4859
Publicity:
It began as a cruel and calculated program under Spain’s dictator Franco. Babies were taken at birth from regime opponents and given to so-called respectable families who supported the general.
But long after Spain’s civil war ended and World War 2 faded it seems that this sinister program infected practice in hospitals and maternity clinics across the country.
What started as a heartless and ruthless episode of political and social engineering metastasised into a money maker for opportunist doctors and maternity staff.
‘How could you imagine that somebody could do something like that?’ BRAULIA BANDERAS FRANCO – Mother
As this scandal erupts and spreads, Foreign Correspondent investigates a number of harrowing cases involving mothers who claim they were duped and who are now desperately searching for their adult sons and daughters, another woman who is sure the dead sister in a commemorative tomb is no such person, a guilt-stricken father who bought a son and a man who grew up American utterly unaware of his heritage and who’s arrived in Spain looking for answers and his birth mother.
‘The main roadblock is that there is no identifying information. It has just vanished. Everything has vanished. The hospital has vanished, the records have vanished, the birth records are falsified. Everything is just either falsified or it’s gone, magically just disappeared.’ RANDY RYDER – stolen & sold at birth
Europe Correspondent Philip Williams explores a landscape of broken hearts and bitterness punctuated for some with renewed hope that their children may have survived.
‘I am at the border of a miracle, I am by the doors of the mystery. It is like life is giving me a second opportunity. It was very unfair that they took my children and I know that it is very difficult to find them. Now I have a motive to continue living.’ VICEN BONO Mother
Philip takes us to one of many gatherings involving scores of parents swept up in the mystery, subjecting themselves to swabs for a DNA database and the hope that science may be able to bring them answers. The breadth and scale of the trade appears huge but it will be almost impossible to accurately define it.
‘One of the really frustrating parts of telling this story is the lack of documentary evidence. While there are nearly a thousand investigations already underway, no-one - doctors included - has been charged.’ PHILIP WILLIAMS
music
00:00
WILLIAMS: The rhythm of life plays out in a busy Madrid maternity hospital. In one room a mum dotes over her newborn as she prepares to take the baby home. Nearby, in a delivery ward, another baby is about to arrive, a mother in the final stages of labour, an expectant father proudly looking on.
00:21
Hospital
photos
In Spain around half a million new babies arrive kicking and screaming every year, but for generations in this country that most natural and joyful event has become a horror story. For countless thousands of parents, this is a scenario denied and in its place, grief, anger and an aching sense of loss.
We’re about to meet just a few of them, each with a very different version of the same story – of little lives stolen and sold.
00:56
Randy Ryder standing outside a building
RANDY RYDER: “This is the place where forty years ago somebody walked through these gates and went inside there and had a baby”.
01:50
WILLIAMS: There’s the son trying to find his birth mother.
01:58
Nuria Pellicer Creus and reporter
NURIA PELLICER CREUS: “We’ve always thought the coffin was empty”.
02:02
WILLIAMS: A woman looking for her sister, trying to unlock the truth hidden in a little white box.
02:05
Manual Espi
MANUAL ESPI: “We didn’t deserve him…”.
02:11
WILLIAMS: The desperate father who bought a son.
02:15
Braulia Banderas Franco & friend
BRAULIA BANDERAS FRANCO: “I am stunned. I can’t believe what is happening”.
02:18
black & white civil war archive
WILLIAMS: And the two friends trying to find out what happened to their children.
The scandal now gripping Spain had its roots in a distant, and very callous time in the nation’s history. During and after the civil war in the 1930s and 40s, General Franco’s dictatorship devised a plan to weaken their enemies - take babies from their republican parents and give them to ‘respectable’ families who supported the regime.
02:23
02:36
(to next page)
It appears that set the moral compass for what was to follow – doctors and nurses in public and church run clinics involved in the theft and in many cases, the sale of babies born to poor, powerless mothers. Told their child had died at birth, their babies were then adopted out.
03:09
driving
BRAULIA BANDERAS FRANCO: “They were falsified signatures.
I was told my child was not born”.
03:33
friends in cab
WILLIAMS: In Valencia two friends share a cab ride to town and hopefully some answers.
03:39
BRAULIA BANDERAS FRANCO: “In those days you’d never imagine anyone doing that to you”.
03:45
Amidst Valencia’s astounding modern architecture is the building many see as their only hope of recovering a stolen past.
03:49
Vicen Bono & Braulia Banderas Franco
Vicen Bono on the left said she was told two of her babies died at birth and her friend and neighbour, Braulia Banderas Franco was also told her had baby died. Now she believes that is a lie.
04:00
WILLIAMS: “Do you believe that your son is out there somewhere, twenty-eight, twenty-nine years old now?
04:15
BRAULIA BANDERAS FRANCO: “Of course he is. In the beginning it was difficult to understand what was happening, but now I walk along the street watching. If this has happened, why shouldn’t I be able to find him if he’s alive?”
04:23
women walking
papers
WILLIAMS: Both these women suspect their children were stolen by hospital staff and sold. Vicen has come to the Valencia courthouse to start a legal process her friend Braulia has already begun, gathering documents to push for exhumation. Braulia’s search has already uncovered a trail of dodgy paperwork, starting with the birth certificate.
04:39
BRAULIA BANDERAS FRANCO: “My husband’s signature is forged. That’s not his signature. The clinic where I gave birth is false. The doctors are false. Everything is forged. It says that he died at midday, and that’s not true. Everything is a lie”.
05:03
WILLIAMS: “What does that tell you about what happened?”
05:30
certificate
Braulia Banderas Franco
BRAULIA BANDERAS FRANCO: “That there’s something strange going on that is not normal. If that document was genuine my doctor would be on there, and the name of the clinic – and my husband’s signature would not be forged”.
05:32
leaving courthouse
WILLIAMS: Emerging from the courthouse armed with a new file of medical records, the two friends are heading home to pour through the evidence.
05:49
women at door
WILLIAMS: “It’s a long time ago, but are those feelings still strong, are they still raw?”
05:59
women
VICEN BONO: “At the moment no, it is the opposite. I am like at the border of a miracle. I’m by the doors of a mystery. It’s like life is giving me a second opportunity. It was very unfair that they took my children and I know that it is very difficult to find them. Now I have a reason to continue living”.
06:05
and son
WILLIAMS: Vicen Bono did go on to raise another son. He’s fully behind his mother’s quest to discover the truth about his missing siblings.
06:44
Vicen Bono
VICEN BONO: “Now I want to be in peace. Now I can’t be in peace. I want the court to order the exhumation of both babies and to examine my DNA with their DNA. Only then could I be in peace. The only way to know is with the exhumation of the bodies”.
06:58
meeting
WILLIAMS: What started as a single story in a newspaper late last year has triggered hundreds of legal claims and thousands of questions. This is a meeting in Valencia of ANADIR a new organisation dedicated to reuniting families and getting justice for them. Here mothers line up to give DNA swabs with birth records falsified, missing or incomplete, this new DNA database may be their only hope.
07:31
Super: Amaya Gorostiza
DNA technician
AMAYA GOROSTIZA: “We can’t solve everything because the tool has limits of course as any other tool, but yes, it’s a solution for a lot of things”.
08:00
WILLIAMS: No one really knows the full extent of what went on, but lawyers involved in cases estimate around three hundred thousand illegal adoptions took place and around fifty thousand of them were outright thefts …where poor young mothers were told their babies had died at birth, only to be given to another family considered more suitable. A transaction often greased with cash.
08:12
Enrique Vila
ENRIQUE VILA: “It was very easy for a doctor to deceive the biological mother and tell her that her child had died – and then hand it to the family he chose. There was no control on behalf of the administration. There were many doctors who became very wealthy doing this”.
08:42
photos & documents
WILLIAMS: It’s claimed doctors, nuns and others conspired to deceive not just the mothers but the children themselves whom it appears were given new identities, birth certificates stating their adoptive parents are their biological mothers and fathers creating a virtually untraceable lie that only DNA tests can expose.
09:09
Enrique Vila
ENRIQUE VILA: “If the parents who bought them do not come forward there isn’t much the judge can do. If they don’t know in which hospital he was born, we can’t get hold of the records. What’s more important is the creation of the DNA databases. The more people register, the more likelihood of there being a match”.
09:34
WILLIAMS: For Valencia based lawyer Enrique Vila, this is both a professional and personal quest. While he represents some of those demanding prosecutions, he says he too was adopted illegally and can’t trace his birth mother.
10:01
WILLIAMS: “From what you understand now, should some of those doctors be in gaol?”
10:18
Enrique Vila
ENRIQUE VILA: “Without a doubt. Some of those doctors are still alive and practising and there is enough evidence to convict them”.
10:23
(see next page)
Rural
Espi
WILLIAMS: But for there to be a market for this blackest of trades, there needed to be buyers.
Amidst the rural tranquillity of Ontinyent near Valencia lives a man tormented by what he did thirty years ago. Manuel Espi always knew it was illegal but unable to have their own children, back in 1982 he and his wife bought a baby boy from a clinic in nearby Valencia. They named him Lucas.
10:35
Photo of Lucas
Manuel Espi
MANUEL ESPI: “He was beautiful. And there was something different about him – peculiar. Although small, he was already well-liked by people. He pulled faces and facial expressions, and charmed people”.
11:16
photo of boy on tractor
family photo with child
WILLIAMS: But this was no simple transaction. Over the coming months there were demands for more and more money. Essentially an extortion racket with menaces – pay up or lose your child.
11:34
Manuel Espi
MANUEL ESPI: “When I told them that I was going to report this they asked me whether I wanted to go to gaol. They told me “you must pay!”
11:47
close up of document
WILLIAMS: Eventually after paying the equivalent of four years wages the paperwork stating Lucas was their natural born son was provided, but even then it was unsigned and of course a fraud.
12:04
document
Manuel Espi
photo Lucas
Manuel Espi
MANUEL ESPI: “But I always felt remorse.
I have carried this burden for these last 21 years. Finally I can let go of it.
When Lucas died my wife said, “we only had 18 years to enjoy him” but I said “no, we enjoyed him for 18 years” which is not the same”.
12:22
WILLIAMS: Lucas Espi and his girlfriend were just 18 when both were killed in a terrible accident when a gas tank exploded.
12:55
Manuel Espi
MANUEL ESPI: “We were always grateful to Lucas. I always loved him – still love him and will always love him. Lucas was a precocious, peculiar and unique boy who left his mark – not just with me, but with people. He was a unique person. That’s why I even thought that we lost Lucas because we were being punished for being selfish. We didn’t deserve him… we didn’t deserve him”.
13:07
Barcelona
vaults
WILLIAMS: Certainly the breadth and scale of the baby trade appears huge but precisely how big may be impossible to measure. In the Catalan City of Barcelona, tourists and locals alike are drawn to Gaudi landmarks like this extraordinary church.
But there is another city on a Barcelona hill the tourists don’t visit, housing the departed in multi-story vaults where evidence of a dark past is literally buried.
13:56
steps
But for increasing numbers not for long because in these valleys of the dead in Barcelona and beyond, there are answers set to be exhumed.
14:37
Philip Williams to camera
WILLIAMS: One of the really sad consequences of this whole story is that as it gathers momentum, people who had accepted the fact that their baby had died are left wondering now was my child trafficked? Were they actually brought up by another family under another name? And some are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to answer that question.
14:47
Nuria & Philip walking
Officially Nuria Pellicer Creus’s sister was still born. Her little body placed in a white coffin in the family vault. Nuria doesn’t believe it and wants the coffin opened and any remains DNA tested.
15:08
WILLIAMS: “If you get permission to open that box, what do you think is inside?”
15:23
Nuria Pellicer Creus
NURIA PELLICER CREUS: “A doll, wrapped in bandages. My parents always said that – and I think so too. That box remains the same after 36 years”.
15:28
WILLIAMS: “Is it possible that the horrible reality is that your sister did die just exactly as the doctor said?”
15:45
Nuria Pellicer Creus
NURIA PELLICER CREUS: “No. The baby was not dead. They weighed her, washed her, cut her umbilical cord. That’s the first thing I found. The second is on the certificate – my father’s signature. It’s not his. My sister is not in that box. My sister was sold”.
15:53
WILLIAMS: Already coffins in other cases have been opened. In one instance the skeleton found inside was not a baby girl as it should have been, but a boy - and of course the DNA didn’t match. Nuria Pellicer Creus is heading to the courts to demand her sister’s coffin be opened and the prosecution of those she blames for the theft of a sister she’s never known.
16:20
b&w photos
Williams to camera
While there are nearly a thousand investigations already underway, no one doctors included, has yet been charged and many of the private clinics where it’s alleged these crimes took place, have like the paper trail, disappeared. The nuns and doctors who once ran this private Madrid clinic have long gone. It’s now an old people’s home but questions remain about the fate of some of the babies born in this place.
WILLIAMS: One of the really frustrating parts of telling this story is the lack of documentary evidence and perhaps that’s for very good reason. The people that used to work here are hardly making themselves available to tell their side of the story, but there is one man with some very chilling evidence of what was going on here at least thirty years ago.
16:58
Germán Gallego is a semi retired photographer who three decades ago was tipped off about the clinic by a staff member. He’s about to show me the pictures he took there late at night for an exposé published in a magazine and a warning, these are disturbing images.
17:56
Germán Gallego with Philip Williams at table
photo baby
GERMÁN GALLEGO: “I arrived, it was winter, very cold… they opened a gate and I entered a room that was very small… and there were freezers. The person took out a child – it was a girl – and put it there and I took a photo”.
18:15
WILLIAMS: “What was your understanding the baby was there for, what was the purpose?”
18:33
photo baby
at table
GERMÁN GALLEGO: “I knew why it was there – they had it to show the mothers who wanted to see their dead child. They were told their child was dead, although it wasn’t but they showed them the dead child that was kept in the freezer”.
18:38
WILLIAMS: Germán Gallego says there were other babies in the freezer to mix and match according to need.
18:56
GERMÁN GALLEGO: “I had worked in current affairs magazines when I was young but it still affects me. These children were bought and sold as if you were buying an apartment. It was crazy. I don’t know how it happened”.
19:03
Train
Randy Ryder
WILLIAMS: But what of the children who were switched in this macabre deception, sold sometimes overseas and who grew up utterly unaware of their true heritage.
Shuttling into this murky saga is a man who was raised American and comes from Texas. It wasn’t until he was a father himself, showing off his baby son at a family gathering that the truth came out.
19:26
Randy Ryder
RANDY RYDER: “At some point during our conversation my grandmother looked at me and said well you know you don’t carry my blood – and that’s how I found out”.
19:55
photos
WILLIAMS: When confronted, his father admitted that he’d paid five thousand dollars to buy Randy as a newborn.
20:11
RANDY RYDER: “It floored me. I mean at the age of twenty-eight to find out that the people you thought were your parents are not your parents and the style of.... the way I found out... it was just really incredible”.
20:18
WILLIAMS: With both his adoptive parents now dead, Randy Ryder has come to Malaga, the place he thinks he was born and sold but tracking down his past is no easy task.
20:34
map of building
externals
Super: Randy Ryder
RANDY RYDER: “There is no identifying information, it just seems to have vanished, everything has vanished. The hospital has vanished, the records have vanished,
the birth records are falsified – everything is just either falsified or it’s gone, magically just disappeared”.
20:46
20:56
records
WILLIAMS: Sure enough his birth records falsely state his adopted parents were his biological mother and father, both of whom are no longer alive. Randy has one strong lead, Dr Manuel Munoz Nieto, the doctor who forty years earlier delivered him and signed the birth certificate. When they met Randy had a catalogue of questions.
21:12
Randy Ryder
RANDY RYDER: “How it’s possible that he was able to sign his name to a document, a legal national Spanish document verifying and certifying that this woman gave birth to me without any sort of identity checks, without….. I just can’t imagine that any reputable doctor would do such a thing”.
21:37
Dr Nieto seated
WILLIAMS: With the controversy about black market babies growing, Dr Nieto couldn’t satisfactorily answer all of Randy Ryder’s questions.
22:03
RANDY RYDER: “He was not nervous at all. Confident in his answers, but I also felt that definitely very concerned with proving his innocence with the answers”.
22:11
walking
WILLIAMS: As he wanders the streets and sights of Malaga he could be any other tourist, but Randy’s not looking at the buildings or monuments but rather searching for one special person, the woman who gave birth to him forty years and one day ago.
22:30
Randy Ryder
RANDY RYDER: “There are these occasional moments where you wonder, okay this could have been the street where you know somebody from my past was walking along or maybe somebody worked over here… so there’s that sort of, you know strange connection that you have. You think about those kind of things.
The day that I wonder mostly those kind of things is whenever my birthday rolls around I always think about that because I know that if she’s alive and that is indeed my birthday, I know we’re thinking about the same thing at that moment”.
22:49
22:05
WILLIAMS: Another solid piece of evidence is still standing, although they’re now commercial offices, this once was a private maternity clinic, the place he was born.
23:22
RANDY RYDER: [standing outside of building] “I’m just thinking about you know this is the place where forty years ago roughly somebody walked through these gates and went inside there and had a baby”.
23:33
WILLIAMS: “Wow it’s quite amazing architecture here”.
23:48
Randy & Philip enter
corridors
RANDY RYDER: “A beautiful building.
One of these rooms could’ve been the room where I was born, where my biological mother had me and then somewhere along here, somewhere in this process that hand off was made to the adoptive parents. I will walk out of this building today by my own choice and freewill. I wasn’t able to do that the first time”.
23:52
WILLIAMS: Spanish prosecutors are already investigating nearly nine hundred cases. There could be thousands more to come. It may have happened decades ago, but the effects for all are raw and very much in the present.
24:24
Randy Ryder walking
WILLIAMS: “When you dream of your perfect ending to this story, how does it go?”
24:43
Randy Ryder walking
Randy Ryder
RANDY RYDER: “It’s really simple, it’s just being able to piece the puzzle together. I mean a lot of this I was doing for myself,
but a lot of it I was doing to sort of put together a picture for my son, for the next generation also you know? It would be nice to be able to explain to your offspring where you come from and who you are and who they are”.
24:48
music
25:08
Credits
Reporter: Phil Williams
Editor: Garth Thomas
Producer: Bronwen Reed
Camera: Cameron Bauer
Research: Giles Leclair