Dominguez Garcia |
Santa Cruz de Tenerife (EFE).- One of the most recognized writers in the Canary Islands, the poet Elsa López (Equatorial Guinea, 1943), had her baby stolen on February 5, 1981 at the San Ramón Clinic in Madrid, where gave birth. It was “in the morning, early”, and “she was already unconscious” before entering the operating room, but she remembers that the responsible gynecologist was Eduardo Vela.
When she regained consciousness, the first thing she glimpsed, still dazed by the anesthesia, was the face of Dr. Vela announcing: “The girl is very ill and her heart is failing.”
Then a nun took the baby from the room. After a while, Ella Vela reappeared with a baby wrapped in a towel to tell her that the girl got worse, so they were going to baptize her because she did not believe “that she could still be alive”; The doctor insisted that Elsa López kiss him goodbye, but the girl’s temperature was “very cold, her face was purple and her lips were thick.”
Elsa López also remembers how Vela told her not to cry “because God wants this to happen for a reason.” When the writer went up to her hospital room in the company of her mother and her current husband, the doctor told them of the newborn’s death and explained that it was “for the best”, because the creature came with “deformities and God did not I would want that for no one.” After this, Dr. Vela disappeared.
That day Elsa López’s life took a turn, a depression disabled her for months to resume her job as a teacher in a high school, until, finally, she accepted the death of her daughter despite having “the constant obsession that she is still alive.” ”.
“I tell my husband that the girl was not there, that it was impossible, that it was very cold and a newborn baby cannot be like this,” the writer told EFE, who four years ago celebrated in the Parliament of the Canary Islands that His host land would have promoted a law on stolen babies for the first time in Spain.
Elsa López does not forget that day in March 1981 when her husband appeared at home with the magazine “Interview”, whose cover announced an investigation into Dr. Vela. A photographer had sneaked into the clinic and taken photos of a frozen baby.
“That baby was the same one that was shown to me,” he says 42 years later. Then, a very different stage began for her, the hope of finding her daughter was born.
Despite the couple’s attempts to find their daughter’s documentation, there is no trace. “There is no death certificate, nor birth certificate. Once the investigation into Dr. Vela begins, everything is eliminated. Those documents are protected by his family, ”says the 2022 Canary Islands Literature Award.
Eduardo Vela was tried in 2018 by the Provincial Court of Madrid and the sentence ratified that he was responsible for the crimes of illegal detention, assumption of childbirth and falsification of an official document. However, he was acquitted due to the prescription of the crimes.
During the investigation process of the case, the journalist Rocío Soriano managed to interview Eduardo Vela, who justified his actions by explaining that “they were never against structured families”, but “only” did so “when the mothers rejected their babies or belonged to prostitutes.” ”.
However, when the journalist alluded to the case of Elsa López, the doctor reacted “remarkably nervous.” The writer gave birth in 1981 at the age of 38, her and her couple were not married and she was separated from the father of her first daughter.
In addition, she was a well-known woman on the left, a highly respected academic female figure in Spanish universities, but as the author expresses, “it was not a Christian profile.”
Dr. Vela responded to Soriano’s question that “sometimes there are couples who really, as they make up a family, are not normal or suitable for a baby.” For the doctor, “those rare marriages” were not “good families.”
Over the years they made progress, Elsa López gave DNA samples to banks in different countries. She joined associations for the disappeared and mothers who were victims of child trafficking. There are numerous occasions on which the author believed she knew her daughter, but the evidence did not match.
“A part of the story of my own life was taken from me. Sometimes I wonder: what will become of her? Could she have been her mother? Will she be happy? If they assured me that she is happy, she would stay calm ”, she declares excitedly.
The writer assures that, despite the anguish, she is calm because she knows that her daughter has been raised in a wealthy family: “Vela had studied the adoptive families, she did not lack food or shelter, but that does not comfort me,” she says.
For Elsa López, the regional law that she celebrated four years ago is correct, but it has no physical, real or material effects: “I have a box full of documents waiting for a lawyer and a prosecutor to arrive to help us take this case forward”, Explain.
Elsa López relapses into the belief that “there is a political key to all of this. We are a country where there is great corruption in different sectors of society and all of this is covered up, in a very high percentage, with apparently religious language and using the name of God in vain”, says the writer.
For her, this situation is a “latent and constant pain, an open and living wound.” Her concern does not leave her and her hope remains intact to be reunited with her daughter, because “that is the purpose of the fight.” EFE