How 70,000 Facebook users reunited a foster mother and son

“I’m going to tell you all a story. Look carefully at this face; one of you might know something about him. After all, that’s what the social networks are for. When I met him it would have been some time around 1982. I met him in the crèche of a juvenile court where I used to take toys and clothes, as well as to take the kids out to play or for the weekend. It was love at first sight. He grabbed hold of my skirt and wouldn’t let go. They’d found him in an apartment: he had been tied to a chair for three days. His mother had gone off with a man and hadn’t come back.”

Yeny Zaera wrote this message on her Facebook page on February 20, not really believing that she would find the child in the photograph: Francisco Javier, whom she looked after between the ages of two and six. She had wanted to adopt him, but was unmarried, had no job, and was considered too young. But more than 70,000 people saw her call on the social network, and after just three days, Francisco Javier Juárez Martín was found alive and well in the northern city of Logroño. Thirty years after they had last seen each other, EL PAÍS was present when the two were finally reunited.

I thought about running away with him abroad, but my boyfriend talked me out of it, saying the police would find me”

Thirty years after she last saw him, Zaera, now aged 57, holds Francisco Javier’s hand and relives the terrible moment she said goodbye. “They called me and said, ‘You have to hand over the child tomorrow.’ I thought about running away with him abroad, but Marcos [then her boyfriend and today her husband and father of her three children] talked me out of it, saying the police would find me straight away. In the end, I took him. He was banging his head against the wall. It’s engraved on my memory. I told him, ‘Look at me. Don’t ever forget me. Search for me. If I’m not with you, it’s not because I don’t want to be, but because they won’t let me keep you.’ And for the rest of my life I have been asking myself whether he remembers me, or whether I was just one of many who left him, just like everybody else left him.”

Still holding her hand, Francisco Javier says he never believed Yeny had abandoned him. “She rescued me from hell,” he says, reminding his former foster mom how he called her father Superman, how she once took him to the house of a friend of hers that had a swimming pool, and how she used to give him hot chocolate for supper and sing Italian pop songs before going to bed.

The reunion takes place in Arnedo, halfway between Logroño and Zaragoza, where Yeny lives. Francisco Javier, 35, is accompanied by his adoptive parents. “I remember the day I was introduced to them and how I cried in the back seat of their car, thinking about Yeny.” The couple say they had no idea of the existence of Yeny. Francisco Javier and his three older siblings were all put up for adoption, and sent to different families who agreed to stay in touch so the children could continue to see each other.

Yeny, who even hired a private detective to try to find the family that had adopted Francisco Javier, says for several years she hoped he would find her. Once when she was fostering him, she was ordered to take him back to his biological mom. He and his brother ran off, turning up at Yeny’s house. “I later learned that they were beaten for trying to escape,” she says. Yeny adds that she couldn’t understand how the authorities allowed Francisco Javier’s mother to see the boy. “I couldn’t bear it, because I knew he wasn’t being looked after. I went to see him one time, and found that he had been locked in the bathroom.”

Francisco Javier says he still remembers the beatings and punishment his family gave him: “My grandmother used to beat my brothers and would lock me in a dark room saying that the rats were going to eat me…”

The table where Francisco Javier and Yeny are sitting is covered with photographs. His adoptive parents have prepared an album charting the last 30 years of his life that she has missed: vacations at the beach, birthdays, military service… “Yeny and I are family, and we will always see each other from now on,” says Francisco Javier.

“Just to know that I can call him on his birthday is everything to me,” says Yeny. “Over the last 30 years I haven’t been able to, but I have always thought about it. I used to think: ‘Today he will be 15, today 20, today 35, I wonder where he is. Is he happy? Does he still remember me?”