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alright so this is part two of spain's stolen babies or spain stole my babies
spain stole my babies
so if you haven't heard part one you have to give it a listen because you
cannot follow all this craziness unless you have
yeah this is part one
oh exactly
so if you haven't listened you have to go back and listen to that
so when I left off I told the story of the first case that was successfully gone to court
had successfully gone to court against sister Maria Gomez Balbuena
unfortunately she died before any justice was served
and her victims never got to see her be held accountable for the pain that she had caused
at least the truth came out
true
so this will bring us to our next part of the story whose victims did seek justice
and to another player in this little ring
this little child snatching ring
on June 4th 1969
oh classic
this is still the dictatorship right
Ines Madrigal was born premature at the San Ramon clinic
I always mess up the name even though that is my husband's name
yeah there's some psychological issues here
what the hell
trying to roll your R's too much just say Ramon
okay on June 4th 1969 Ines Madrigal was born premature at San Ramon clinic in Madrid
at least that was the date listed on her birth certificate
at age 18 Ines learned that her mother
learned from her mother that she was adopted on June 6th 1969
but it wasn't until Ines was 41 that she learned about the shady processes surrounding her adoption
her adoptive mother shared her origin story with her either out of guilty conscience
or perhaps because she was caught out when Ines discovered that her birth certificate listed her adoptive mother as her birth mother
when confronted her adoptive mother said that she admitted that she was a quote gift from Dr. Eduardo Mella
a gift that only cost them out for a permit
so this was the physician who was documented as the attending doctor at her birth
okay the Ramon hospital
so remember him from Valbuena's stories
she had worked with him
he was working in cahoots with sister nun Valbuena
of course
and it was an act of charity on his part
I mean according to the mother who adopted perhaps
Dr. Mella became aware of the plight of Ines as adoptive parents through a Jesuit priest friend of his called Phoenix
he found out that her mom was a good but sterile woman
at the time her mother was working at a convent looking after children
when she and her husband discovered that they were unable to have children of their own
Dr. Mella and the priest, Felix, decided to reward the couple with a baby for her mother's dedication and effort
according to her mother
at the time Dr. Mella insisted that she fake a pregnancy by wearing pillows under her clothes
so that when she received a child none would be the wiser
I know like you know if this is Norway I totally get it but like hello nobody's gonna be touching her stomach here
there's no fucking way like half the freaking pueblo is gonna touch your stomach here the whole time
yeah just saying like that's not a great plan
yeah and especially like a pregnant woman like that's free range you can just walk up and do whatever you want
indeed indeed during the dictatorship they didn't even have revolting rights
well they're just yeah yeah cattle cattle
yeah pets okay she refused to comply but was gifted a baby anyway
so I just want to make clear right now that Ines is the daughter and Ines is also the adopted mother
okay so we're gonna hear Ines a lot okay how do you how are you gonna call them
one of them is Ines Madrigal which is the daughter okay and the other is Ines Bred the mother
mother pedis okay
so Ines Bred she refused to comply with this you know faking the pregnancy and then was given the baby anyway
yes okay so Ines believes that there was money exchanged for her right the daughter yes despite the fact that her mother claimed to know nothing about this
yeah perhaps this was a deal made between men yeah because because Ines recalled as a child having to visit the priest Felix yearly with her parents
and she believes that installment payments were made on the course of these visits
what fucking bastards I was gonna I was gonna fit in a little thing to say like it would be really hard for the mother to even get a bank account apparently so
yes but they were paying these in cash though yes cash yeah I mean you know I guess I guess you could trace bank account things even in the 60s I guess
but yeah I mean it definitely money is less traceable even today so yeah
additionally it was Felix the priest who shared with her parents that her birth mother had given up Ines willingly
hmm right so in 2010 Ines suspected that she must be one of these stolen babies separated at birth from her biological mother
Ines Perez her adoptive mother that is and herself they set out to find the truth behind her origins
in their efforts to locate Ines's biological mother and with the well-documented evidence that her mother could not have given birth as a sterile woman
they thought they could they had a chance right to figure out what happened
so in their efforts to locate her biological mother yeah they found that dr. Eduardo Vela could not have been the doctor who had assisted her mother in giving birth
because her mom never did give birth she was sterile all of this was stated as fact on her birth certificate right
well all of this being that her mother given birth to her but there was no way that she could have given birth because she was sterile
yes and the doctors they had they had certifications from dr. Vela saying she was sterile yeah and they had also documents stating that Ines was her biological mother
the birth of her was by dr. Vela who sat and assisted the birthing of her and then signed like yes this is her mother right yeah
so with all this documented evidence they were able to start the judicial process against dr. Vela in 2011
in Ines Paredes the mother the adoptive mother in her sworn testimony she acknowledged that she willingly participated in the covert adoption process
she provided proof that she had been medically declared sterile and swore to the fact that the doctor had pressured her to fake a pregnancy to make a new baby appear to be her own
in 2013 when Eduardo Vela was finally called to appear in the investigation phase of the court proceedings Vela claimed that he had no idea who Ines Paredes was
but he's got signed paperwork contradicting that yeah but she contradicted him in her declaration in court at the time she was living in Los Molinos
a small town outside of Madrid she testified that dr. Hart called her by phone and told her that he quote had a surprise for her
he then instructed her to come to the clinic in Madrid wearing maternity clothes with a pillow underneath and to complain to those around her that she was feeling nauseous
she and her husband went to the clinic in Madrid and were handed a baby girl the baby was already registered at Madrid district of Chamartin registry under her adoptive name
so under the name of those parents yeah like as a natural in her husband yeah when he was questioned about the discrepancies on the official birth certificate which bore his signature
he said quote I signed a lot of things without looking
sounds like a nice white man's answer convenient OMG
a police officer involved in the investigation for the prosecutor's office testified that when he went to attain the files of the baby adoptions from the 1960s to the present from San Ramon and Santa Cristina clinics
they were impossible to locate he interviewed dr. Villa and was told that they had all been burned
he confessed to the officer that quote he had burned all the files of the full adoptions
yeah for no suspicious reason in Madrid because quote at the time the legislation required it and
lol yeah it was at this time that the police in collaboration with the prosecutor's office suspected that there was indeed a plot involving dr. Bella to kidnap babies that had been in practice for decades
good they're seeing through the smoke and nurse yeah particularly involving women from shelters specifically the villa Teresita where unwed women would receive medical attention and shelter during their pregnancies in exchange for giving their newborns up for adoption
the situation for women at the time was extremely complicated who struggled with supporting for their children but as the years passed the situation approved for young women in this predicament and the supply of babies had dwindled and babies began to disappear from the centers
so originally there's a lot of women in the system and then that supply of babies dwindled as women got their rights essentially right
but then babies just started disappearing from these particular centers okay yes like majority centers are connected to the church yeah in Ines Madrigal's case in particular the representative for the prosecutor's office testified that when interviewing clinic workers
none could explain how quote a person goes in to give birth to a baby girl and an hour later another woman takes the baby but nobody knows anything about it quote yeah it's like a miracle to
put some there so there were no documents associated with the birth of Ines on these dates in question and none that supported somebody voluntarily giving her up for adoption nor there were there any witnesses who saw how the adoption process you know was
you know proceeded or how the child was handed over to the adoptive parents so nobody could testify to any of this happening so convenient furthermore the baby girl's baptism was celebrated without the presence of her family and the woman listed as a godmother
had nothing to do with her family and testified that she didn't remember even having participated in this baptism about sex Jesus so yeah there was just like layers upon layers of
Eduardo Vela's lawyer claimed in his defense that the doctor quote could have had something to do with the adoptions at the time but that they were totally legal and quote he denied that the doctor had anything to do with the irregular delivery of a girl and that if his signature
had appeared on any files contradicting that it is because somebody had been able to sneak it in specifically the biological parents were like let's put this doctor's signature on that we can just like not have
a baby that was his legal defense right that's crazy it is am I right that's legal terms that's called a flight of fancy
that's very sad very sad so in his parents, which is in his mother girls adopted mother yes she was able to give her testimony against Dr. Rilla just in time, but she died that same year in 1993 she was 93 when she died so this is in 2013.
So she gave evidence in 2013 against him. But this was only the investigative processes is not the court trial this is not the trial against him.
So, the court decided that there was enough evidence to take the case to trial on charges of kidnapping and falsification of documents which could fetch him 11 years in prison.
I wish Eduardo Villa wasn't present for this indictment as his lawyers claimed his health issues prevented him from attending.
They also said use the same tactics I indefinitely postpone the proceedings.
And they were ultimately able to do that until 2018.
Five fucking years. Yeah, five fucking years. The case went to court in September of 2018. Inez Madrigal and her lawyer Guillermo Pena, who was a lawyer for the SOS stolen babies association presented hurt their case and asked for a 13 year prison sentence and
350,000 euros in compensation for moral damages against Dr. Eduardo Villa, who was now 85 years old.
Much of the same evidence was presented that had been given in the preliminary investigation. So all that stuff I told you before. Yeah.
Very convincing. The judge in the case declared the following to have been proven on June 6 1969 at the San Ramon Clinic in Madrid Dr. Villa, the former director of the clinic gave a newborn premature girl to a couple he knew through a Jesuit priest.
He and the priests knew that the couple could not have children of their own and encouraged the woman to fake pregnancy. The couple registered the child as their daughter in the civil registry the following day without completing any adoption procedures.
The documents provided by Dr. Villa listed Inez's adopted mother as her birth mother and her date of birth as June 4 1969.
So in October the judge gave his verdict. The judge declared that Dr. Eduardo Villa was the author of the three crimes for which he was accused.
Illegal detention, assumption of childbirth and falsification of an official document.
But he was acquitted because the statute of limitations had expired.
The judge had set the start date for the statute of limitation as the date when the victim had reached the age of 18, which would have been 1987.
The statute of limitation for the most serious of the crimes that Dr. Villa was accused of and quit and charged with and the judge agreed that he had done was the crime of illegal detention.
Which is kidnapping right? Yeah. And that statute of limitation was 10 years.
This only gave Inez until 1997 to do something about her situation.
However, she only found out about being adopted on her 18th birthday.
And she didn't find out about the circumstances of her unusual adoption until 2012, which is when she reported those crimes to the authorities.
So, unfortunately, Inez wouldn't get any real justice aside from the fact that she was the one who brought these things to light.
And in the sense that she could try to get justice for what had happened to her and to many other families and women and children who were victims of this abuse.
She opened the doors to that. And I think that's something very important in any case.
So she did feel justified that the court had recognized that Dr. Villa had committed these crimes, although he would never be punished for those crimes.
She did plan to appeal her case to the Supreme Court to seek an extension of the statute of limitations or an outright elimination of them.
All right. So I'm going to give you one more note about Inez's story.
In 2019, after 32 years of searching, Inez discovered who her biological family was through 23andMe.
Oh, that's where I did my dinner. Me too. Me too. I don't think I'm related to her.
She was matched with a second cousin on the site. All right. So here's your point.
Here's your point. What was his name? Her cousin?
First or second? I'm going to tell you it's a Basque name. So first name.
You want to guess. First name? Yes. I'm going to go.
You get three guesses. What's the year though? Tell them the years.
2019. 2018. 19. 19. Excuse me. But this is not a guy, right? Yeah. It's a man. Yeah.
Yeseba? No. Let's see. Another.
Is this person 20 years old or 50? He's her cousin. Oh, cousin.
So roughly the same. Yeah. So he's from an ish 1970.
Come on. It starts with an A. Alphabetical order. A. A.
Aitor? Yes. Oh my gosh. I was fighting that day.
I thought I guessed that name every week. I was like, don't say Aitor. No, you say the name now.
Lycar. Lycar. You know. Aitor. Yes. Aitor.
So she matched with a second cousin who was named Aitor.
Between the two of them, they tried to find out how they matched up.
After checking Aitor's paternal side and getting no match, they discovered that they were matched to her.
His paternal side. Maternal side. Excuse me. His maternal side.
Once this happened, it led her to be connected to her three biological half brothers.
Oh, see that's the nice part of the story. And they were all living in Spain.
Despite this shittiness. She also had a half sister living in the US.
And she had a surviving maternal aunt. Right.
It was upon reuniting with her family that she discovered the truth behind her adoption.
According to her siblings and her aunt, she found out that her mother had voluntarily given her up for adoption.
So she wasn't stolen. Sure, but still. I mean. Her biological mother had died at age of 73 in Madrid in 2013,
which was the same year that her adoptive mother died. Oh, wow. Her two mothers died the same year.
That's so crazy. That was really wild to me to find out. Yeah, it's one of those weird ones, right?
In a press conference, Madrigal explained how in 1968, when her mother was unmarried,
she found out she was pregnant and had made the choice to adopt her out.
She said, quote, she never even knew if I was a boy or a girl.
And quote, I also didn't know if at any point she regretted it, because even if she had,
she wouldn't have been able to do anything about it. End quote.
At the time, Spanish law allowed six months for biological mothers to be able to recover their child
before the adoption process was complete. But in her case, the official documentation of her origins
was falsified to make her adoptive mother appear as her biological mother. Yeah.
So there was no way for anybody to change their mind. Yeah, that's like one of the cases I'm going to talk about in a minute here.
Ines has reported her findings to the Spanish prosecutor's office, who performed their own DNA testing
and confirmed Ines' official background. They no longer consider her to be a stolen baby.
However, Ines' Supreme Court case can proceed anyway to determine how the Spanish judicial system
should handle future cases of stolen babies. Yeah, it's important.
It's important to consider those things. And yeah, because the system is also failing here.
It's not only the crime. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Many break time now? Yes. We're good. See you guys in a minute.
Ayayayayayayayahoo!
And we're back. Okay, so Ines did bring her appeal to the Supreme Court.
So in June of 2020, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time on a stolen baby case.
You know, at first I kind of thought, oh my gosh, it's kind of an old story.
And then now I'm like, no.
It's so...
This is very nice.
That's why we started though with the sort of socio-historical context.
Because it seems like it's an old story because so much of the roots of it comes from that...
But it's still very present.
Exactly.
In everybody's lives, or a lot of people's lives.
In almost everybody's.
So this court, Supreme Court case, was of Ines Madrigal,
who was appealing her case in the lower courts of Madrid, the provincial courts,
that had acquitted Dr. Eduardo Vela.
Because of the frequent statutes of limitations.
Had he been convicted, he would have been acquitted by the Supreme Court
because according to their ruling on the main crime of illegal detention,
which was that of theft of a baby,
they declared that it was not sufficiently proven in her case.
Primarily because Ines was able to track down her biological family,
and they said that she had been given up voluntarily by her mother.
Wow.
So I have a little side note here.
However, I would argue that this could be hearsay, right?
That could be hearsay in this case.
Without the actual mother alive to testify that what went down in her own experience
was that she'd given it up voluntarily.
It's not proven that it was...
Right, like nobody actually, she never actually said that, right?
So it's like from the family members that have said that, right?
What was most important about this case was that it would affect the many others
that were in the same situation as her.
They wanted their cases to be heard in the lower courts,
but without a precedent being established by the Supreme Court
as to when the statute of limitations would begin,
many of these victims would face the same problem that she did.
They could prove their case, you know, either that they had been stolen
or that their baby had been stolen, or they couldn't...
but they couldn't obtain a conviction because the statute of limitations had run out, right?
So needless to say, so many, many, many people were waiting
for the Supreme Court to rule on this matter.
The question before the court was when does the statute of limitations start
and when does it run out?
So should it start at the birth of the baby
and then run out when the child comes of age?
Or does it start when the adult discovers that they've been stolen?
The lower courts had been struggling with this issue
and hoped that the Supreme Court could finally lay down like a precedent
in all future cases concerning these stolen babies.
So this wasn't to be at all.
In the end, the court decided that in Inez's case,
that because she wasn't actually quote unquote stolen,
what they call the crime of illegal detention,
it wasn't proven and because the party accused of the crime had since died,
they weren't obliged to rule on the matter.
But Inez's lawyers argued that the statute period should have begun
at the moment when she discovered her real identity,
not when she became of age, 18.
Primarily because the doctor was found guilty
of falsifying her birth documents and so she had no way of knowing who she really was
because she was registered under that erroneous information.
In a way, we're assuming a person under 18 finds the documents,
discovers that discrepancy, and does something about it before 18,
which I don't even know if you can start.
What 18-year-old of sound mind to go, you know, I'm going to take this to court.
They're just going to be grappling with the fact that they were adopted
and found out their birth certificate was falsified
and then they're going to go through like years of therapy
before they actually do something about it.
So in Inez's case, her mother admitted that she was adopted when she was 18.
But it wasn't until her 40s that she discovered that the circumstances behind her adoption.
Okay, so that's a long time, 20 years more, right?
So as for all future cases concerning stolen babies, Judge Antonio de Moral,
I would like to point out the name of that judge.
Moral.
Literally would be of moral, morality.
Yeah, as if.
Well, I mean, that's his decisions.
He says, quote,
We cannot examine this issue for purely speculative purposes or to offer solutions to other hypothetical issues.
He added that they would need to hear the arguments of the parties involved in other possible cases.
And as for this case, he said, quote,
It is nonsense in a jurisdictional resolution to separate on the prescription, which is the statute of limitation,
of a non-existent or unproven crime that is attributed to a deceased person, end quote,
when referring to the now dead Dr. Bella.
That's his point of view.
I'm not quite sure I agree.
Because it later came out that Inez was voluntarily given up for adoption and not stolen or illegally detained,
they couldn't rule on the statute of limitations for that crime.
Are you all following me?
Yeah.
So far?
Yeah.
Okay.
So other families who had hoped that there would be some easier path to finding justice without the burden of worrying about bringing it before court,
before the statute of limitation runs out, are shit out of luck.
The cases will continue to go through the lower courts and some may find their way to the Supreme Court through the appeal process,
which will then be determined on a case by case basis.
I'm holding my chapella.
So I'll give you another case.
There was another case that went before the Supreme Court in July of 2020 concerning an appeal that came from a lower court in Huelva.
The baby in question supposedly died at childbirth at the Manuel Luis Hospital in Huelva in 1992.
The death was certified by doctors and the mother was told that her own health for her own health, sorry,
she couldn't see the body as it would cause her more pain.
They performed an autopsy and saved some of the baby's tissues.
The family didn't see the corpse or claim the remains and express that it was out of their own ignorance for not insisting to do so,
as they assumed the health care workers were working in their best interests.
It was the hospital who then buried the remains in the cemetery.
However, when the issue of the stolen babies came to light in 2011, the family started to harbor suspicions about their baby's demise.
And after contacting the Association of SOS Stolen Babies of Huelva,
as you can see there like SOS Stolen Babies of different provinces, an investigation took place
and they found that the tissues of the deceased baby did not genetically match those of the mother.
Oh my gosh, it's so much fucked up shit.
It was then sent to Court of Instruction 2 of Huelva.
Their case was dismissed as it had been prescribed, which means the statute of limitations had run out.
And that's it.
And therefore they appealed their case to the Supreme Court.
Much like what occurred in Ines' case, the court ruled that because there is no one person that can be held responsible for the crime,
they could not go into assessing the statute of limitations associated with that crime, and therefore they upheld the dismissal of the case.
Excuses, excuses, excuses.
The court conceded that this case is, quote, a matter of social repercussion, end quote.
But that because this particular case is inadmissible, it wouldn't be possible to offer solutions to other hypothetical matters
that would then allow them to adopt a jurisprudential doctrine, so a system of laws, for other possible cases.
So all these cases that are being brought to them, they can't rule on and create precedent for one reason or another.
Yeah, excuses, excuses, excuses.
So until somebody can bring a case where the accused is still alive and convicted of the crime of, quote, illegal detention, or the theft of a baby,
the question of whether or not the laws on the statute of limitations in these cases will be modified definitively remains to be unseen.
And that's the situation today. Remains to be...
2024, the Supreme Court has not said anything about this situation with...
They can't. And they're saying we can't rule on it.
We can't rule on it.
That's, you know, there's a concept called absurd. I think that's absurd right now. I think that's absurd.
Okay.
Let's see. What are we going to be forcing people to listen?
So basically that's what happens in the Supreme Court. Nothing has ever been definitively determined.
So now everybody understands better?
Because they can't. They don't have a case that will allow them to create precedent.
Okay. Let's take a break.
And we're back.
In 2018, the Socialist Party, POSC, under the leadership of Pedro Sanchez, won the elections and announced his intention to exhumed Franco's remains from the Valley of the Fallen Monument.
And which under some lengthy legal battles with Franco's descendants, he was able to do, or they finally took place.
I did see some of those things.
In October of 2019. Okay. So they took out the remains.
They did. Finally.
Additionally, the Sanchez government aimed to rectify what they saw as the shortcomings of the historical memory law.
Okay. So they tried to just like revamp.
And they called it the Democratic Memory Law.
Okay. They introduced the new law called the Democratic Memory Law to just like,
just change the name. Fix the last one that was made in 2004.
Was it 2004? Did I say?
So the new law came into effect on October of 2022 and outlined a number of changes.
One provision stipulated that all secondary and vocational school students would be taught about the dictatorship.
The law would also call for the removal of all remaining symbols of Francoism in the country and find those who promote fascist symbols or try to humiliate victims of fascism.
The fines could range from 200 euros to 150,000 euros.
It abolished. This is my favorite part. It abolished 33 titles of nobility granted to fascist supporters by the regime.
30 30 fidgets went down.
You are no longer noble.
I love that. Right?
Yeah, but then we're given to Franco's family. I have to point out. I don't know if 33 is enough. I would have guessed he'd give 33 only his family. But hey.
Just 33. They abolished. There was probably a lot more that should have been.
So it also dissolved the Francisco Franco National Foundation, which basically promotes Franco's legacy.
The children of exiles were offered citizenship as were the descendants of women who had married non-spaniards and had lost their citizenship.
And it made the government responsible for exhuming and identifying the bodies of those buried in unmarked mass graves.
Oh. But during the Civil War as well?
Yeah.
The law established an official register of victims in order to ease the identification of surviving relatives through DNA testing. Very logical step.
And there were other provisions that were established during the Civil War, but I'm not going to go into them because it doesn't serve a purpose for our episode. Sure, it's the most relevant thing.
So for our purposes, this covers the progress the country's made since Franco's death. Yeah.
In attempting to rectify what happened in the past, but as you'll see, there are many legal battles still to be fought and a lot more issues to redress.
Particularly when it comes to addressing the child trafficking scheme.
That's barely been touched.
Let's talk about the exhumations.
So like many of these stories involve women who are told that their babies had died.
And as their stories came to light, people sought to exhume the graves of their supposedly dead babies.
Yeah, there's actually a really important case from Gipuskwa.
Yes, I read about that.
Related to the exhumations. And I believe this was the first exhumation in the Basque Country.
The main character in the case is Mercedes O'Cariff.
She gave birth to a baby girl who she named Rebecca on July 3, 1977 at the Clinica Martin Santos in San Sebastian in Larnosti.
And she recalls a birth that was, and I'm quoting, plagued with irregularities.
She was constantly sedated throughout the whole process. She never even saw the baby like the cases we talked about previously.
She was told the baby was struggling to breathe and was taken into the intensive care unit for infants and put in an incubator.
And she and her family were told that Rebecca died seven days later.
So when stories about the stolen baby started coming out around 2011, the family's suspicions rose and they realized that they had no official paperwork regarding her death, Rebecca's death.
Birth and death.
Birth and or death.
Yeah.
And so after a lengthy judicial process, a lot of the, Julie just gave a lot of the details about this whole process in other cases, but this family was involved in similar processes.
So after this lengthy process, a judge from the Supreme Court of the Basque Country ordered the disinterment of the baby's remains, which took place on Tuesday, January 10, 2012.
So, Mephiles, her husband and her nine surviving children were present for the occasion and for the coming DNA tests to see if this is Rebecca.
But as suspicions, no, confirmed suspicions, they found an empty tomb.
Wow.
This was the first exhumation in the Basque Country of a case of an alleged stolen baby in 2012.
Yeah.
12 more exhumations occurred in 2012 in that year here in the Basque Country.
Right.
I was unable to find any clear data regarding the exact number that occurred up to now here in the Basque Country.
But according to my sources in 2012, there were 200 open cases in the Basque courts denouncing stolen babies.
121 were in Gipuzkoa, 48 in Biscaya and 31 in Araba.
So, it sounds like the Basque places have been targeted in a way, right?
Yeah.
And also, I mean, and I can imagine, just look at those, think of those numbers and think of everything we've spoken about up until now.
I mean, these are only the numbers of families or people, individuals who have requested this, who have gone through the system.
Who have, yeah.
Put themselves through that horrible trauma.
And the small number of the cases that I'm sure actually exist out there.
Yeah.
So, Ruth Puertas.
She gave birth at the Vergen Blanca Clinic in Bilbao, which is in Begonia.
I've heard about her a lot, yeah.
She gave birth on May 9th, 1990 motherfucking 3.
1993.
This is into the 90s, you guys.
Yeah.
Incredible.
I mean, yeah.
I mean, so fucked up.
She was told by her doctors that her child was born with deformities and with very serious medical conditions.
Ruth disputes this because she saw her child before he was taken away.
She never received a real diagnosis for her son.
And she was told that he was born without kidneys and had subsequently died as a result.
Her son's body was buried in.
What's that?
Dedio's cemetery.
You know, the big cemetery that's in Dedio, right?
Yeah.
However, Ruth never believed that her son had died.
She searched for him everywhere she went.
She would examine the faces of babies and children that she saw playing in the park to see if she could discern any resemblance to her.
When all the stolen babies' cases were coming to light, she finally felt vindicated that she wasn't crazy.
Yeah.
It's so strange.
And she'd been told by specialists and doctors since her son's birth and death that she was, in fact, crazy.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
That's very, very traumatic.
She inquired about her son's case at the hospital where she'd given birth.
The doctor and midwife could not be located.
This is after 2011-ish.
When the other pediatricians on staff at the time were asked if they remembered a case of a baby with such serious medical complications, none could recall such a birth.
And she was informed that had there been a case like that of her son's, all of them would have gone to look at the baby as it was such a rare occurrence, right?
Right.
They would have all gone to go see this child with terrible deformities and no kidneys.
This is what happens.
What are we going to do?
To be like, as a pediatrician.
As a training.
Yes.
For, yeah, like, oh, okay, here's a new different case, right?
Yeah.
She filed a complaint and requested the exhumation of her child's grave, which was granted.
So when they did exhume, no skeletal remains were compatible with a newborn or discovered in the coffin that supposedly held her son.
Only some larvae and some hair from which DNA could not be extracted and some stains that due to the shape could correspond to an umbilical cord, but no biological remains.
Okay.
So the conclusion was that her child had never been buried there.
Yeah.
Just like this family.
Yep.
The judge who issued the ruling in her case was very apologetic to Ruth and her husband for the lack of answers.
Her son was not buried there, but nobody could tell the couple if he was alive or dead.
The silver lining, if there is one, is that she does have some evidence now that gives her credence to her claim that the baby didn't die.
This has been filed in the courts and until further evidence comes to light, it will reopen the case.
So far, both the pediatrician and the psychologist who treated her at the time have not been heard from again and could not be located when they tried to track them down.
With the help of the association, Icharopena, which is the association of stolen babies in Biscayet, her case and hundreds of others are being investigated.
Icharopena went before the Basque Parliament, they went to expose the circumstances the victims signed themselves in right now, and to denounce the institutions who treated them in this way and the inaction and indifference with which the situation has been handled.
The vast majority of the complaints that have come forward have been archived and filed.
Okay.
That closed, but like they're here.
Filed away.
They can be opened at some time, right?
I hope so.
So when they find that the statute of limitations has expired, there's little more that can be done legally.
Additionally, as each case is investigated on an individual basis, it is difficult for those representing the victims to talk of a widespread plot when pleading their case in court.
The courts have to only take into account the facts of individual cases and the centers and institutions involved in those particular cases.
I agree with you.
So it says that Icharopena, spokesperson Charo Ruano says, well, it's difficult to discover a plot when the complaints are separated.
If each one goes to court, it is difficult to compare that many have the same data and circumstances.
That work is left up to us.
When we have everything well tied up, it will be known.
So they might bring it.
They're bringing it.
They might bring it.
But I don't know what that would do legally.
Yeah, because if you think about it, when something is like institutionalized, there is no one person to blame.
Right?
Exactly.
You can't.
And then how is that supposed to set precedent?
Right?
Like you can't.
You know, the people working, the civil servants working like at the desk in the courthouse can easily say, I have a paper that says you were adopted.
Go home.
Like this is what I have to deal with.
Go away.
Like you're like, I don't know what you're talking about.
It says you're adopted.
Goodbye.
Or your birth certificate says your parents are your parents.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Go home.
Yeah.
All right.
We're back.
Okay.
So Goyo, you have another story from Gipuskwá.
Yes.
I want to tell a story from Gipuskwá about a woman named Amaya Ferregido.
Her life hasn't been easy at all.
She said in 2018 at age 46 that she's had a life of suffering and lies since she discovered at the age of five that the woman she thought was her mother was not actually her mother.
Man.
So her story dates back to 1971 when her biological mother just five days after Amaya was born on August 6th of that year in San Sebastian handed her over to a couple from Gallarta, which is here in Vizcaya.
It's between Musquiz and Portugalete.
So in the Bilbao area, pretty close to where we are right now.
Just north of us.
Yeah.
So this couple were apparently friends of a friend and allegedly took her in to care for her temporarily because her mother was in an economically and socially vulnerable situation.
Right.
So according to Amaya, her biological mother acted out of desperation as a single mother in a time when the law was on the side of men.
As if it wasn't.
Still.
Still not the case.
But in fact, Amaya's birth mother could have been accused of adultery at this time by her husband, from whom she was separated but not divorced, which if you remember way back to my introduction, divorce was illegal at this time.
Yep.
And Amaya was not his child.
So Amaya's mother separated from her husband, has a baby with someone else, can be accused of adultery.
And importantly, adultery was punishable by up to six years in prison at that time.
Oh my god.
So she's basically in a situation of total desperation.
Amaya says that her mother had every intention of regaining her custody once these problems had been solved.
However, in the meantime, 20 days after her birth, Amaya's adoptive mother registered her as her own biological daughter with her husband's surname and her surname.
So you may wonder how she did this.
She provided.
Yeah.
She provided, as we mentioned previously a falsified birth certificate at the civil registry.
And once this was done, Amaya's mother had no way of getting her daughter back.
Yep.
Wow.
I mean, yeah, it's incredible.
It's just incredible.
So Amaya recounts that her adoptive family even kicked out her biological mother out of the house when she came to visit her and that her biological mother had no choice but to accept the situation.
And she refers to that her growing up her family situation as an illegal and vile way of behaving.
And then in the town where she grew up in the neighborhood where she grew up at school, kids started teasing her saying that she had been adopted.
And when she was five years old, her mother, her adoptive mother told her that that was true.
So all throughout her growing up years, she had this stigma in her mind.
Yeah.
And this trauma in her mind.
So many years later she started investigating her past and she found in the Bishopric of San Sebastian the baptismal certificate of a baby girl born about the time that she would have been born, who had no known father.
Okay.
So little to go on, but you got it.
But she slowly started investigating and putting the pieces together and she found discovered the woman who had given birth to this child.
She sought her out.
She found her.
She had remade her life in Ponferrada in Leon, which is Leon is a province just southwest of the Basque region.
Pretty more or less southwest of the Basque Country.
Yeah, it's quite west. Yeah, we've got Burgos and then Leon, but it's southwest of the Basque Country.
And this woman was named Maria Jose.
She had multiple other children whose DNA matched Amaya's.
So she found her birth mother, her birth family.
But sadly, Maria Jose had died before Amaya was able to reach the family.
So fast forward to 2011, which is sort of like the base moment of all these cases when everything came out.
Her experience with the courts begins.
Her lawyer named Inigo Sancho explains that the worst things are the obstacles and contempt that they encountered when turning to the administration to try to clarify what happened.
So litigation was terrible, as was any contact they had with the courts.
And I mentioned I was kind of alluding to this a minute ago that she, Amaya recalls that even one time when she went to the courthouse, her ID was thrown back at her in contempt, saying, like, you're an adopted child.
All the paperwork is here. Like everything is set, like almost like saying, what are you?
What are you trying to do here? What are you trying to prove here? Like, get over it like you're adopted.
Here's the paperwork. No.
So she was just basically told your papers are all in order here.
It's retraumatized. Yeah, exactly.
And then you wonder why there's not so many people coming. Yeah, exactly.
Reiterating the trauma. Exactly.
Making you suffer it over and over again. Yeah.
Or just like face it. It's the fact. Yeah. This is you. Deal with it.
Bastards. Yeah.
So in 2015, a court finally recognized that Amaya Ferjido's second surname should be Munoz, which was Maria Jose's surname, her birth mother's surname, instead of the one that appeared in the civil registry, which was her adopted mother's surname, who had taken these illegal or forged documents saying that she was the birth mother.
So Amaya chose to retain her adoptive father's surname, Ferjido, as her first surname.
And now she goes by Amaya Ferjido Munoz, taking on her adoptive father's surname and her birth mother's, yeah, her biological mother's surname.
So for anybody listening who doesn't already know or wasn't paying enough attention when this has come up before in the pod.
I can't remember which episode that was in, but I remember you guys talking about the surname thing here.
Everybody just as a quick review, everybody here has two official surnames on their ID. The first surname traditionally is the father's first surname, which is his father's, which is his father's everything. Yeah.
And then the second surname is traditionally the mother's first surname, which was her father's. Yeah.
And then everybody has multiple, they list off multiple surnames that come from the father's mother, the mother's mother, etc, etc.
But focusing on the question at hand here in the court was the she wanted her second surname, her mother, her maternal surname changed to her birth mother's surname. And she achieved that in 20.
And she had to fight for it. Yeah, she had to fight for that. No, she had to fight for that.
That was one of the one of the cases that she presented before the courts. And then in 2015, finally she got that.
As the courts had finally begun to recognize the truth behind her story, she and her lawyers began lobbying for politicians to admit the existence of stolen babies and adopt administrative measures that would help them and other victims in their searches for their biological families.
Perhaps not be so humiliated during the process. Exactly.
Finally, in April 2018, a judge declared that Amaya is in fact a stolen baby raised in lies and falsehood by a couple who stole her from her birth mother.
So she stated that her life has been based on the lies of a priest, a nun, a doctor and a guardia civil who was the one who took that falsified birth certificate to the civil registry and registered her as the daughter of people who were not her parents.
It is crazy. Amaya highlights the fact that her tragic story and that of so many other stolen children here in the Basque Country and in all of the Spanish state because we can't.
I mean, a lot of the history that we've been talking about is related to the whole Spanish state.
But our focus right now on Amaya and people here. Yeah, people here in the Basque Country, but that the the story of all these people is due to a lack of protection of women.
And sadly, Amaya and Maria Jose were never reunited and will never hear Maria Jose's testimony about her experience because she passed away before all of this came to light and before Amaya could find her.
Well, I have a story from the Basque Country where people were reunited.
I love that. Some glimmer of hope.
So here we go.
This is the story of Benedicta Garcia.
Your cousin.
So she was 26 years old when she went to work as a maid in a seaside town of Catalonia.
She met a man and they began seeing each other.
She later found out that this man was married and with children of his own, but not before discovering that she herself was pregnant.
When she told her lover of this news, he refused to help her.
Oh my gosh.
As did her own family.
I can't believe that.
Right.
He said, no, not going to help you.
Her family was like, no, you are a disgrace.
You're a crazy woman.
That's not my child.
Yeah.
There's no DNA right now.
So fuck you.
So pregnant, pregnant and single in 1960s Spain, Benedicta decided to move to Bilbao where she figured she could blend into a bigger city and where nobody would know her and she would be less likely to be judged for her delicate state.
In Bilbao, she sought out the help of a convent run health clinic to help her through her pregnancy and where she would later give birth to her child.
After giving birth to a daughter, she was convinced by the nuns that she could go out to work and they would look after her child in her absence.
After a while, she claimed the nuns started avoiding her, making excuses as to why she couldn't see her child.
Her child was sleeping or was too sick for a visit, etc.
Then one day she was told by the nuns that her daughter Pilar had been given to a family and that she should not think about her anymore.
Don't think about her anymore.
Yeah, just stop thinking about her.
Right? That's easy, right?
Yeah.
Seven Hail Marys, stop thinking about her.
Seven Hail Marys.
It's over.
To our fathers.
So appalled that the nuns could do such a thing, she set out to hire a private detective and a lawyer.
So this is a woman, a single woman in the 1960s.
Yeah, during the dictatorship.
She hired a private detective and a lawyer to find her baby.
According to her, the nuns had simply paid the men off.
The detective told her, quote, Your daughter is very happy with her family and she stopped trying to find her.
So Benedicta, she went on to marry another man, but she never had any more children.
Sorry to hear.
In 1980, her husband was killed in a car accident and Benedicta said that she was more determined than ever to locate her long lost daughter.
Good for her.
She said, quote, I didn't want to die without finding her.
I hired another detective and a lawyer.
I kept looking and eventually they found her.
Good, good, good.
So insist, insist, insist.
Yeah.
Pilar Moncluse was found in 2011.
It took a long time.
It's again 2011.
It's a big year.
So forty six years after she was given up for adoption without the consent of her birth mother, the two women reunited and Benedicta now in her 70s recalls the day that they laid eyes upon each other.
She remembers having to take a couple of pills to calm her nerves before opening the door to her.
I feel her.
We laugh, but we all feel this.
Yeah.
Right.
I would need those pills too.
I need them right now.
Jesus.
The story is very hard.
Just hearing this story, we need a couple of pills.
We do, we do.
She said, quote, When I saw her, I realized that this is my daughter.
My heart was beating.
It was nerve wracking.
As for Pilar, the event was equally disquieting, but also kind of an anticlimax.
And she surmised it this way.
Quote, She was waiting for us in the doorway.
And when I saw her, I thought, This is my mother.
We kissed and then went upstairs.
We chatted.
It was a little cold.
I saw her again two days later and it was very difficult.
She wanted to be my mother, but I didn't know her.
I felt very bad, anxious.
I had an anxiety attack.
I have slowly gotten over it, but it's been a hard time.
I can't change her life or my own.
I have no idea who she is really.
I'm getting to know her.
For me, my parents are the people who brought me up.
It is very difficult to establish a mother-daughter relationship after 50 years.
I try not to think about it too much.
I love her a lot and I'm here for her, for whatever she needs.
I call her pretty much every day.
I send her photographs and videos to try to make up for lost time.
But it's not possible.
I know that.
That's so true, though.
That's a very honest stone.
And those feelings, that is so raw.
That's what you just could...
Yeah.
It's really sad.
It is sad.
To say the least, the reunion has been challenging for both women.
Pilar has a husband and family of her own with two daughters.
She says of receiving the call from Benedicta that she has asked her why she abandoned her,
and she's going to have Benedicta explain what really happened to her.
Pilar went on to express, quote,
I would have preferred it if I hadn't been abandoned.
Quote, knowing that you've been stolen, that a mother's life has been destroyed, is very upsetting.
And thinking about it made me very angry.
And there's your parents.
It's such a hard, so many layers, right?
The parents that she's loved her whole life.
And she discovered stole her.
And it's like she still has all those good memories.
I mean, thankfully...
Those are her parents, yeah.
Yeah.
Thankfully, she had a good life and childhood.
Wow.
There's...
Yeah.
None of this is easy at all.
No.
She found out that she was adopted when she was 13
through somebody other than her own parents and then confronted them.
They admitted it without really giving her a back story of how she was adopted.
She said that she saw a program on TV about the stolen babies in Spain
and had a look at her own papers where she discovered some irregularities.
Oh.
But when she asked the courts in Barcelona to look into it,
they refused, saying there was no evidence.
So...
She got nothing, right?
Neither of these want me to go into anything.
Initially, yeah.
I'm just going to go into what happens here.
These reunions are very complex,
and the parties involved are coming into them with very different expectations.
The mother is seeking out her child in a sense of trying to recover them.
Whereas the adopted child has a family and aren't necessarily searching for a new one,
they might be satisfying a curiosity.
Jaime Linizma is a family mediator who specializes in these types of reunions and says,
quote,
It's unlikely that there's ever going to be a mother-child relationship.
They can get on very well, but it's difficult to create a relationship of that kind.
It's going to be a mixture of a friendship or a family relationship.
The children often feel angry,
and the mother has to understand that finding her child is not the same as recovering them.
The child has to assimilate the information that could create difficulties in their relationship with their adoptive parents.
The two women keep in touch regularly, but they both admit it's been a struggle.
And we're back.
We're back.
So, Goyo, you have another story for us?
Yeah, the next one that I wanted to tell you guys about was about a family from a small
town called La Cumberri.
It's such a beautiful name.
It is beautiful.
It's a small town in Navarroa, which is the southeasternmost region of the Basque country.
The town is really close to the border with Gipuskwa.
It's a border town.
It's about halfway between Donosti, where I live, which is the capital of Gipuskwa, and
Iruña, Pamplona, which is the capital of Navarroa.
Okay, so halfway.
Yeah, it's about halfway between Donosti and Pamplona.
Cool.
But the most important setting for the story isn't the hometown of this family, La Cumberri,
but Pamplona, and more specifically, a health clinic called El Hospital Virgen del Camino.
So this story, like the one Julie just told us, gives the opposite perspective from the
one that I talked about before with Amaya Zergida Muñoz.
So here we're talking about the perspective of a family whose relative was stolen, or
more importantly, a mother whose newborn baby was stolen.
So Estefania Ero, who goes by Fanny, and her husband Anibal Fenteno.
I love these names.
I know.
I love them.
At least they're not Maria's.
Yeah, it's Estefania Ero, Fanny, and Anibal Fenteno.
Estefania, my sister, is Estefania.
Hi sister.
Hey.
So they were a married couple, a young married couple, age 20, expecting their first born
child, who was a baby girl in 1969.
Okay.
Cool.
Fanny had...
That year to have your baby babies.
Yes, there you go.
Yeah, a lot of our stories happened in that year.
So Fanny had chosen a gynecologist in Pamplona who was a trusted doctor in the family as
her sisters had given birth with him.
As her due date approached, the doctor admitted her to the clinic that I mentioned before,
El Hospital Virgen del Camino, where she gave birth to a baby girl on July 30th of that
year, 1969.
In a 2018 interview with a local news channel, Fanny says, I remember everything was going
well, but suddenly someone said, heart rate is dropping.
This is my translation.
Heart rate is dropping.
The doctor.
She was born right then and there and they took her away.
They didn't even let me see her, but everything else seemed perfectly normal.
Just minutes later, Fanny and Anibal were told their daughter had been stillborn and
hospital staff immediately sedated Fanny as we were talking about before.
She was drugged.
Freaking sick face.
And Anibal was told that he couldn't see the baby because it would have been too difficult
for him to deal with.
In this case, the woman who just gave birth is drugged and the husband who's there, where's
my fucking baby?
Oh no, she's dead and you can't see her because it's going to be too hard for you.
They've had a lot of times to practice this freaking thing.
Yeah, exactly.
Clearly this has been rehearsed.
There's a great system working.
So Fanny believed that this was true for 47 years until the stories about stolen babies
started coming out.
She says that when she started hearing these stories, she realized the same thing could
have happened to her because the things that happened during that birthing process were
so similar to the other victims' testimonies.
And after one specific conversation with a girl who thought she had been adopted but
later discovered that she had been a stolen baby, Fanny began investigating with the help
of her family members.
And suspicions immediately grew.
They started requesting official documentation, birth certificates and all the other documentation
related to the birth and they found numerous irregularities.
Among those irregularities, there was a payment of a hospital benefit for a child that, if
a child was born and lived 24 hours, the hospital could collect some kind of benefit.
Well, benefit is probably not the right translation, but they could get money from the central
system.
Like they had successfully birthed a child or something?
Yeah, and so they got money and that benefit was charged.
So that was like in the documentation to say like some child had been born.
And lived 24 hours.
But the child was apparently stillborn and that obviously couldn't have been the case
if she exactly, both things cannot be true.
They also found a hospital admission form for Fanny with the code de social, in Spanish,
social D period, which apparently was a code for a mother giving birth who did not have
sufficient resources to care for her child.
But that wasn't Fanny's case.
Oh my God.
Wow.
Oh my God.
That's so crazy.
Oh my God, it's like coded.
It's coded.
There were codes.
Oh my God.
Exactly.
Search all social D.
Exactly.
Great list.
So Fanny says, and I'm quoting, well my translation, but I'm quoting, in my house we've never
been able to watch children's themes in movies or advertisements.
My children know that it caused me tremendous pain because I had lost a daughter when I
was young.
But at the same time, she says that the whole experience was something that she kept private
all those years, like kind of what we were talking about previously.
Hold it in.
Don't exactly keep your trauma in.
And she said she did that in part because she didn't want to burden anyone else.
She didn't want to cause anyone else to worry or cause sadness for anyone else.
So she just kept it in all those years.
So much pressure to do that.
So Fanny and Anibal have put the case in the hands of the prosecutors.
But according to all my sources, no formal accusations have been made to this state.
Fanny's not looking for any revenge or reparations of any kind, but in a 2018 interview, she
says in tears, I just want to know where she is, what her life is like, if they raised
her right, if she doesn't want to be involved with me, that's fine.
I just want to know if she's okay.
And I want to see her.
I watched that interview multiple times and I was just in tears.
And I even wrote you a message one time and I said, I am in tears.
You said you just watched something and you were crying.
I am in tears about this story.
Like it's just so moving.
It's so tragic and so moving.
So unfortunately the family search for the stolen babies still continues.
They put together information including photos of Fanny's four sons.
To see if there are similarities.
Yeah, to see if there are similarities as well as photos of her at the age that her
daughter would be now.
In hopes of finding her.
And the latest info I could find on this case was an article in Noticias de Navarra, like
the regional newspaper.
Did you mean like close to 50 now?
Yeah, she's 52, 52, 54 now.
So the last article I found about this family's case was from July 31st, 2021.
So like two and a half years ago.
And that is the day after Fanny's stolen daughter's 52nd birthday.
And the article just highlights the fact that the previous day, July 30th, wasn't a day
for celebration in the family as they're still searching for their stolen relative.
Apparently, though, the family has one lead in their search for the stolen daughter.
But if she is who they think she is, she was adopted by quote, important rich people.
Like the majority of these stolen babies were.
So they assume she might not even want anything to do with her humble working class birth
family.
So there's.
Yep.
And that same article from 2021 quotes Fanny saying they stole my baby girl.
I'll be looking for her as long as I live.
If it's okay with you guys, I would like to tell a few further personal anecdotes about
this.
Please.
You know, when you and I had started talking about doing this topic, I kind of like kept
it quiet.
I didn't want to tell anyone.
And I started researching.
But then I got all excited that I was going to make a cameo here on the pod.
And I told a couple of friends.
And then, of course, everyone's like, well, what's the theme?
And I was like, well, that's a secret.
You have to listen to the pod.
But in the end, I ended up giving in.
And I spoke to five people about the theme.
And four of them had personal anecdotes related to this.
So one of them is a friend's family.
It's a family from small towns and Basarys here in Vidkaya around the Bilbao area.
It's a friend that you know as well.
Her mother had seven pregnancies and she's the product of the last one.
But she has only four siblings.
So everything was apparently normal with the first three children in the family.
And then one child died.
And according to my friend, her mother says that that is true.
Yeah, it was the baby actually did die.
So the first four pregnancies are accounted for there.
But immediately after giving birth in pregnancies number five and six, hospital workers and
religious leaders told her mother that the babies had died in childbirth and that she
couldn't see the bodies for the same reasons that we've talked about previously.
And it would be too hard for the family to deal with blah, blah, blah.
So my friend's mother never believed that that was true.
If you talk to anybody here, I talked to my mother-in-law about this because her mother,
my husband's grandmother, found out she was adopted when she tried to get married.
Ramon's parents were married in the 70s.
So this is her mother getting married in the 50s or during the dictatorship.
So then my in-laws cousins have tried to look into her where she came from and have hit
all these walls trying to find out.
And the other day I was with my mother-in-law and I told her I was doing this story.
And I said, it made me think about your mom being adopted.
And she said, yes, she passed away a while ago.
What they had told her was, no, no, no, if she's not the one looking for the information,
nobody's privileged to find that information.
And she's basically nobody can ever know anything about.
So all those records are sealed because she's not the one looking for it.
That's insane.
Genetics, genetics, genetics, genetics.
The circumvent system makes the fucking blood talk.
At least we're going to find some cousins.
Well, one of the other people I spoke to is actually in all of this insanity, a happy
ending.
So it's the family-in-law of a very close friend of mine.
Her mother-in-law had similar experiences to many of the women that we've talked about
today.
Heavy sedation around the time of giving birth and being told that her baby was stillborn.
She never told her children, her...
Yeah, the rest of the surviving children.
A few years ago, her stolen daughter contacted her, somehow found her and contacted her and
the family has reunited and there's this amazing connection.
I don't have all the very, very specific details.
It's difficult to get into and it was an intense conversation.
And so I started kind of mentioning this also and then it just kind of got like...
It snowballs.
It's just a number.
It got too close to home.
So I had to stop.
It became too close to home and I'm not even from here.
So imagine.
That for me was my biggest take home from all of the research I did and all the reading
and all the conversations that we've had, like bringing it back to the Basque country.
Well, first of all, we have to say as we started with the socio-historical context of this
is a bigger thing than just the Basque country, but the way it's affected here and how small
it is where we live and how connected we all are here, you ask anyone here, I guarantee,
and I've learned this in the two months that we've been talking about this topic, ask
anyone and someone will have a direct or a semi-direct connection to this story.
So that's it for today's episode and we bid you a gulur!
Crimes of the Basque Lands is written and produced by Douglas Di Carvalho, Julie Garcia,
and Megan Dooley.
The sound and editing for each episode by Douglas Di Carvalho, and Megan Dooley.
Theme song written by Douglas Di Carvalho, Julie Garcia, and Megan Dooley.
Sung by the choir with no name and produced by Tom Squires.
Podcast art by Distinct Signal.
Follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Crimes of the Basque Lands and contact us at crimesofthebastelands.gmail.com
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Until next time, agur!