The first minutes of “The Asunta case”: this is how Rosario Porto and Alfonso Basterra introduced their daughter to society

Calm music and a little Asunta in fiction that jumps along the cobblestones of the old town. So, like a happy story, it begins the Netflix series The Asunta case. «No charity work, nor fashion. For a charity work you sign up for an NGO and, the day you decide to leave, you unsubscribe and that’s it… but not this… You know it’s a lifetime. It is the same as biological motherhood or paternity.». That is the explanation given in the fiction by Candela Peña in the role of Rosario Porto. A sequence that faithfully fictionalizes a real video. A TVG report in which Asunta’s parents give an interview in which they talk about the girl’s adoption. An adoption that arouses interest because Asunta was the first girl adopted in Galicia.

Smiling parents and daughter enjoy the day in Compostela. A smiling couple who had achieved their great goal: becoming parents. “I think it is an enormous commitment that you make when you bring a boy or a girl,” Rosario Porto said in reality.

Asunta had arrived in Santiago when she was only nine months old. Her parents managed to go through all the procedures and obtain the international adoption in just one year. «It was landing and starting to cry. No one could approach except Charo or me.», Alfonso Basterra said then.

Years before this report, Asunta and her parents had already appeared in the press. Rosario Porto was a media regular as honorary consul of France. In 2001 she told La Voz de Galicia what it had been like to inherit that position from her father. Four years later, on January 6, 2005, the three appeared in a beautiful photo as testimony on cases of international adoptions. Little Asunta was only five years old in that report.

“At first he was surprised by the sounds, the faces, but nothing more,” said Porto in the text signed by Elisa Álvarez, who also defended that the expense of the adoption procedures was not an exorbitant amount. Among them was a $3,000 donation to Chinese orphanages. “A car already costs more,” said the lawyer. (See the full page here)

The family told their story on a special day since they were going to attend the parade of the Three Wise Men. They pointed out that, for the moment, they were considering a daughter and that it had been the case of a Catalan couple that had given them the impulse to adopt so far from our borders, something so unusual at the time. “They don’t dare give her a little brother, so she will continue to be the queen of the house,” the text ends.