As we prepare for the re-inauguration of a fascist monster, it might be good to learn more about something we already know: Fascists steal children.
The first Trump regime separated children from their parents partly for political reasons and partly for sheer delight in cruelty, and this has been a pattern.
In Argentina in 1976, General Jorge Rafael Videla led a right-wing military coup, supported by the United States, and overthrew the civilian elected government. Then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with coup leaders shortly after they took power and advised them to destroy their opponents quickly before there was time for protests over violations of human rights to occur in the United States.
They did not need this advice: This was one of the bloodiest military dictatorships of the last century. An estimated 30,000 people were murdered or disappeared. Approximately 500 of these were pregnant women who were killed only after giving birth and whose babies were given to families who were part of the regime.
On Dec. 5, 2024, a former prison guard at the Villa Urquiza jail, a clandestine detention and torture center, was convicted of “the illegal appropriation of Mario Navarro” and sentenced to seven years. The guard, Santo González, the only defendant in the case, will undoubtedly serve this sentence under house arrest given that he was sentenced to 12 years in 2014 for crimes against humanity committed at the same prison, yet was not imprisoned. He is one of the few, none of them powerful, who has been held in any way accountable.
Navarro was one of the few children born in this situation whose mother survived. In 2005, his mother communicated with the National Human Rights Secretariat, which ordered the National Identity Commission (CONADI, by its Spanish initials) to start an investigation to find her child. After reaching out to the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo office in Rosario, Santa Fe, and then to the CONADI, Navarro was finally able to meet his mother in 2015. He had always known something was not right but got no answers from his “family.”
Navarro became the 119th child to be identified by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. The president of the Grandmothers, Estela Carlotto, is 92 years old. Her 22-year-old daughter Laura was imprisoned and killed in 1978. Laura gave birth to her son, Guido, before she was murdered by the dictatorship.
Carlotto found Guido in 2014. “Shortly after the murder of my daughter Laura, I swore to her, in front of her grave, that I would not let a day go by without fighting for justice for her and her partner, and that I would search for all the kidnapped children until we found them all,” says Carlotto. “And that’s what I’m doing. It’s my life.”
Baltasar Garzón, a Spanish judge and human rights activist, stated that “the appropriation of children, as well as rape, has always been aimed at humiliating and subduing the enemy. Taking away the enemy’s child was a bargaining chip. They change a person’s life by taking them out of their environment and biological family.
“And the method used in Argentina was especially perverse: waiting for the mother to give birth, then taking the baby from her, torturing her, killing her and making her disappear.”
The fascist regime in Spain, after the 1939 defeat of the republic by the military coup led by Franco, was also noted for stealing children and killing parents. Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, a leading Spanish right-wing psychiatrist trained in Nazi Germany, promoted the idea of a Marxist “red gene” carried by the children of people of the left. He thought the genetic tendency might be suppressed by removing children from their mothers and placing them with fascist families.
Vallejo-Nájera also said that the Reds should “suffer the punishment they deserve, with death the easiest of them all.” He explained “female revolutionary criminality” as being part of the animal nature of the female psyche.
The fascist regime’s forces, aided by the Catholic Church, which ran the hospitals under Franco, began a massive program of kidnapping newborns. They took children orphaned when their parents were killed by Franco’s firing squads and torture prisons and stole newborns belonging to women who had given birth in jail as political prisoners.
Garzón estimated that, based on historical sources, more than 30,000 Republican children were kidnapped by the fascist regime so that they could be given to families in favor of the Franco government. Few ever found their parents; few parents among the survivors ever found their children.
On Sept 11, 1973, a fascist coup led by General Augusto Pinochet and backed by the United States overthrew the elected government of Chile. Thousands were killed, tortured and disappeared. His regime actively promoted the international adoption of Chilean children. While sometimes the reasons were financial rather than ideological, the climate of terror made it impossible for parents whose children were stolen to protest. Mothers were told that their babies were born dead but never got to see them.
Ana Maria Olivares is a Chilean journalist who investigated this and who now works with Hijos y Madres del Silencio (Children and Mothers of Silence), which helps to reconnect families broken by forced and illegal adoptions.
“During this time, Chile became one of the world’s leading exporters of children. The hospitals were run by the military; the mayors were no longer elected and were also put in place by the military, even the neighborhood councils. It is very difficult to go to fight for anything. That’s why they always remained silent.”
The stolen babies belonged to poor people, of course, and to indigenous communities. Dr. Karen Alfaro, a researcher, and now dean of the Philosophy Department at the Universidad Austral de Chile, says that “the Pinochet dictatorship sought to control the birth rate, especially in the case of rural women—it was a way of controlling the ‘quality’ of the country’s population.”
But, she says, poor women were also targeted for ideological reasons. Poor women were seen as supporters of the Popular Unity coalition and of Salvador Allende. “Poor women were [seen as] protagonists during all the mobilization processes; they were liberal, they were sexually free. So controlling their bodies was a goal.” Another motive was cash: Alfaro’s research records cases of foreign foster parents paying between $6,500 and $150,000 to adopt a child.
At least 1,360 of the children forcibly removed from their parents at the U.S. border under the Trump regime are still separated from their parents, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch. At least 5,000 children were separated from their parents with no tracking process that would allow them to be reunited.
Parents were lied to, being told that if they agreed to be deported, their children would be returned. They were deported but without their children.
No reunification process was even attempted by the government until it was ordered by the courts, in cases brought by the ACLU. Although many countries treat refugees cruelly, only the United States had a policy of removing children from parents as a “deterrent measure.”
Human Rights Watch urged the Senate to reject the appointment of any of those responsible for this policy, which is “enforced disappearance and may have constituted torture.” The director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement when these children were torn from their parents was Thomas Homan. Trump has announced that Homan will be the “border czar” for the next episode of his regime.
How will we respond when the destruction of families and the theft of children is again being carried out?
