Spain Now Sees More Migrant Arrivals Than Any Other European Country

By Lucia Benavides

Originally published on NPR on Sept. 20, 2018.

A center run by the nonprofit Spanish Commission for Refugees in Málaga has been busy all summer. It’s a colorful, two-story building with an outdoor courtyard, and people constantly come and go, speaking an array of languages and blasting music from their phones.

“Look, they’re coming in now,” says Francisco Cansino, the center’s director. “They’ve just arrived.”

About a dozen people walk in wearing matching black hoodies and sweatpants given to them by the Red Cross. They came from one of a number of ships docking here earlier that week.

This summer, Spain became the main entry point for migrants crossing into Europe. As of early September, more than 35,000 people crossed into the country either by land or sea, surpassing other leading entry points and topping Spain’s own total for all of 2017, according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration.

How Spanish Women Were Allegedly Targeted In ‘Stolen Babies’ Cases For Decades

By Lucia Benavides

Originally published on NPR on August 27, 2018.

For almost 40 years, Pilar Navarro thought her daughter was dead.

She gave birth at a private Catholic hospital in Madrid in 1973, anxious to start a family. But less than 24 hours after delivery, Navarro’s nurse — who was a nun — told her and her husband that the baby had died from respiratory issues. The young couple could not see the body because the hospital had already baptized and buried the child, according to the nurse.

“We never thought a doctor or a nun would do something like that,” says Navarro, who is now 68. “We couldn’t understand it.”

It wasn’t until 2011, when thousands of stories about Spain’s “stolen babies” came to light, that she thought perhaps her daughter had been stolen too. The stories she read were disconcertingly similar to her own.

Between the 1930s and late 1980s, lawyers and advocates say, newborns were separated in hospitals from their mothers without consent and placed into a sprawling clandestine adoption network. Many of the children wound up in families loyal to the regime of late dictator Gen. Francisco Franco.