DOGA 2025 (English edition): The Battle for My Identity (Robo y tráfico de bebés)

“There are stories proven by documents and court rulings that are nevertheless still silenced. This is one of them.” Olmo Gómez Aldaz (http://gomezaldaz.com/en/)DOGA 2025 is neither a novel nor a conventional autobiography. It is a statement of facts. A book of memory, evidence, and restitution that documents a real case of identity theft and fraudulent adoption that took place in Spain in 1971, and the subsequent struggle to recover biological filiation, name, and erased genealogy.Born in Bilbao during the Franco dictatorship, Olmo Gómez Aldaz was separated from his mother at birth, registered under a false identity, and handed over through an irregular adoption within an organized network that crossed religious, medical, administrative, and judicial institutions. Decades later, a sustained investigation—supported by DNA evidence, historical archives, and judicial rulings—made it possible to prove the facts and culminated in a final court judgment restoring biological filiation, establishing an unprecedented legal precedent in the Spanish legal system.An archive turned into a bookDOGA is neither a closed legal case file nor a sentimental testimony. It is a living archive structured as a public declaration. The book articulates three complementary layers:– Declaration: a first-person account of the loss of identity, the search for origins, and the confrontation with the system that made it possible.– Archive: original and verifiable documentation (civil registry records, adoption deed, DNA tests, expert reports, court orders, and judgments).– Context and analysis: a historical reconstruction of the apparatus that enabled these practices—foundling institutions, religious associations, registry secrecy, the medicalization of motherhood, and institutional continuity between dictatorship and democracy.Keys to readingDOGA advances a clear thesis: adoption, as it has been practiced, is not a neutral or benevolent act, but a form of structural violence that erases filiations, breaks genealogies, and manufactures administrative identities. Against adoptive ideology and reparative sentimentalism, the book asserts the right to truth, to biological filiation, and to memory.A second edition that expands the conflictThis second edition incorporates an unpublished section—DOGA Is Still Alive—documenting what occurred after the ruling: institutional reactions, discursive resistance, and the real limits of public recognition. Among these events is the disappearance of judicial information initially published by the newspaper Público and later self-censored and removed from its digital archive, an episode that reinforces the book’s central thesis: the conflict over identity does not end when the truth is proven.Legal and political dimensionThe case presented in DOGA results in a legally exceptional situation: the coexistence of restored biological filiation and an adoptive filiation that remains in force. This anomaly exposes the tension between biological truth and legal fiction and opens a fundamental debate on reparation, memory, and the need to review—and abolish—the mechani Read more