In November 1967, Amparo Gonzalez was 18 when she woke up in a Madrid maternity ward to hear her baby had been still born and buried in a common grave.
Now she is convinced her child was one of thousands snatched during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.
"At the time, it was really frowned on for a single woman to have a baby," said Gonzalez, now 62 with two other children.
"The first question the sisters asked when I got to the clinic was: 'What do you plan to do with the baby?'," she recalled.
The day after giving birth under anaesthesia, the clinic informed the young mother her baby was dead. "We sent it to the cemetery," where babies were buried in common graves, she was told.
"It was impossible to get back," Gonzalez said.
Only after threatening legal action did she obtain a death certificate and a birth certificate, and they were full of contradictions. The dates don't match and the cause of death is not the same.
Enrique Vila, lawyer for the Anadir association of baby trafficking victims, said Amparo was a perfect target: "A woman of modest background, who they knew did not have the means to start legal proceedings."
Spanish General Francisco Franco riding his horse near Bilbao seen in this file photo. Franco was one of the longest reigning dictators in Europe and based his power on the prinicipal of authority and the marginalization of opposition political parties.
There are no clear numbers on the victims: estimates range from hundreds to tens of thousands of cases of child snatching during the 1939-75 dictatorship and up to the end of the 1980s.
Children of jailed left-wing opponents were stolen from their mothers with state approval and often the blessing of the Roman Catholic Church to purge Spain of Marxist influence.
A 1940 decree allowed the state to take children into custody if their "moral education" was at risk.
Historians say many of the "lost children" were put in Catholic religious orders and became nuns or priests, while others were illegally adopted by other families -- usually supporters of the regime -- with changed identities.
The practice continued even after Franco's death as an illegal business that provided babies for cash to women unable to give birth.
In many cases, according to Anadir, new mothers were told their babies had died suddenly within hours of birth and the hospital had taken care of their burials when in fact they were given to another family.
Often the babies' identities were faked and they appeared as blood relatives in documents. Sometimes the future mothers pretended in public to be pregnant before buying their baby.
Carmen Torres, born in 1968, is still looking for her twin sister, Susana.
"After 16 days in an incubator they told my parents she was dead, that she had been buried in Almudena cemetery," the largest burial ground in Madrid, she said.
"She is not on the cemetery registry," Torres said.
As if a pact of silence had been broken, witnesses to the trade in children now seem to be cropping up across the media and on social networks.
"I thought I was an isolated case but I realise that there are lots of others," said Rocio Garcia, born in 1980, who is convinced she was a stolen child after discovering her parents paid a "clinic" for her adoption.
An archaeologist exhumes the remains of Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) victims, in Calzada de Oropesa, near Toledo
"They told me they had made a 'gift' of 50,000 pesetas to a sister," said the young woman who does not believe their version of events.
People still find it hard to speak about matters related to Franco, especially since the buyers in this case came from influential families, said Zaragoza University modern history professor Julian Casanovas.
The illegal trade flourished in a vacuum even after Franco's death until the first adoption law came into force in 1987, he said.
Francoism "was very marked by corruption and all this is just the follow-on of what existed during the dictatorship," Casanovas said.
Today the legal investigations are just beginning.
And there is a glimmer of hope for other victims: in December a mother in Barcelona was reunited with her daughter after having been told in 1970 she had died in a clinic.
The daughter hired detectives who traced her biological mother and proved the connection with a DNA test. They have asked not to be identified.
Virginia Grognou / AFP / Expatica
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Mothers continue to search for babies taken from them at birth, kidnapped or bought off maternity wards during the Franco period.
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