The Government has pardoned in the Official State Gazette this Wednesday María Sevilla, president of the Free Childhood association, sentenced to two and a half years in prison and four years of loss of parental authority after having separated her son from the father for space for two years, between 2017 and 2019. Thanks to the pardon, the woman will not have to return to prison and will be able to continue seeing her offspring.

Seville, cheered even today by hundreds of feminist associations that have requested her pardon and treat her like a heroine, was arrested in April 2019 by the Police when she was holding the boy, then 11 years old, in a farm in Cuenca from which only he let it air for half an hour a day to avoid being discovered.

Seville receives this pardon without having repented -it has publicly repeated that it would commit a crime again "to defend my son"-, and even today maintains that it kidnapped the minor to defend him from abuse by his father, although all the complaints he filed against him They were archived due to lack of evidence and two procedures are pending against her for false accusation and procedural fraud.

The minor suffered personal injuries and a severe delay in school derived from his departure from normal life, as has been attested in the successive procedures.

Since her mother's arrest she lives with her father and has managed to rebuild her life normally, and in recent months she has repeatedly made it clear to educators and social services that she rejects her mother's attitudes -as this newspaper has published- that now collides with the pardon granted by the Executive: Justice had denied the woman parental authority for four years, to protect her son from her, but the pardon changes that sentence for 180 days of community work.

Sevilla had indoctrinated her son, in his flight, in the evangelical faith, and when the police arrested her, the child repeated that his father was "the devil", according to police sources.

Now, despite the fact that she has repeated that she would do it again, she will be able to continue to have contact with the minor.

Despite the fact that the police authorities took it for granted that Seville's complaints against her ex-partner and father of the child were instrumental, Seville even took these to the Congress of Deputies, where she went, at the initiative of Podemos, to speak to parliamentarians as authority in cases of abuse and domestic violence in 2017, which did not prevent him from fleeing months later with his son.

During her visit to Parliament, Seville and other mothers of Infancia Libre -some of them later convicted- took a photo with the current minister Ione Belarra.

Seville has maintained since then that these abuses have occurred and continue to occur today, despite the fact that the monitoring of the boy's evolution by social services and authorities is constant and all notice a notable improvement in him.

The Prosecutor's Office led by Dolores Delgado has supported the pardon granted today by the Government.

When she was Minister of Justice, Delgado interceded on behalf of Juana Rivas, another of the mothers convicted of similar acts, before the Italian Government, in a completely unusual action by the Executive.

The argument put forward to grant the partial pardon now is that Sevilla has entered prison voluntarily -she began serving last March-, and that she has paid the fine of 4,000 euros imposed, but the pardon file itself highlights that the woman did not even has repented.

A week ago now, the Minister for Equality, Irene Montero, referred to both Seville and Juana Rivas as "protective mothers" in an interview on Telecinco, and included her pardons -also the one already granted to Rivas, appealed to the Supreme Court- in the framework of the "fight against sexist violence".

Rafael Marcos, father of Sevilla's son, has never been convicted of similar acts, and no proceedings have even been instituted against him.

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