Daniel Lorente has worked construction, flipped burgers at McDonald’s, been a camp counselor, telemarketing representative and doorman.

But Lorente’s part-time jobs never lasted more than seven months: He was laid off from each one as Spain’s economic gloom deepened into a historic crisis. Now the 21-year-ancient is staring into a dead-end future.

“How am I going to make it if I don’t have a steady job, to pay a mortgage, for example?” questions Lorente. “Or for a wedding, or anything involving a huge expense? You can’t get anywhere.”

Lorente is stuck among Spain’s “Lost Generation” of 20-somethings, with no work and no real prospects in sight: Roughly half of all Spaniards between 16 and 24 are jobless, the highest level among the 17 nations that use the euro. It’s a devastating depiction of blighted youth that threatens to distort Spain’s social fabric for years to come, dooming dreams, straining family structures and eroding the well-being of a speedily aging population.

“This puts the whole welfare state at risk,” said Gayle Allard, a labor market specialist at Madrid’s IE Business School. “The childish people who are coming on the market now are the lost generation. They are losing the advantage of their youth and energy and that does not come back.”

The staggering jobless figures – 48.6 percent for Spaniards between 16 and 24; 39 percent for those ages 20-29 – hold dire consequences for a country that grew accustomed to prosperity on the back of a property boom that collapsed in 2008.

The 1.6 million unemployed teens and childish adults in the nation of 47 million risk never having a decent start to a career. They probably won’t accumulate assets like their own homes or savings until they are in their 40s. And they then will liable face much higher taxes to maintain Spain’s costly social welfare system.

What’s more, they’re expected to place off having children or have less than their parents, slashing a birth rate that’s already declining just as Spain’s large baby boom generation starts to retire. That earnings less people to absorb the expenditure of caring for the swelling ranks of pensioners.

“It’s a historic waste,” Allard said. “The nation has not been transformed into a higher-productivity nation even though all those educated childish workers were available for the task. I would not be surprised if eventually they rebelled against the tax burden.”

Rage and frustration among childish adults have already full root. Thousands erected protest camps last spring and summer in Madrid and Barcelona in illegal tent cities set up in central plazas. Disorder erupted over again last week when students in Valencia protesting simplicity cuts clashed with riot police, generating nationwide demonstrations against alleged police brutality.

Some Spaniards dread that Spain’s relatively new democracy, launched in 1978 with decades of dictatorship, may become threatened if an entire generation ends up convinced they will never attain the same lifestyle as their parents.

“The main risk for the country is we could lose a generation who go away and the childish people who stay will have less culture, condemning Spain to crisis for many years to come,” said Ricardo Ibarra, the 27-year-ancient president of The Spanish Youth Council, which represents groups for childish adults.

“In 10 years we could have populism instead of democracy, and we cannot waste our democracy and toss it away.”

Segundo Gonzalez – a 23-year-ancient university student majoring in economics – says the only job offers he has received are for menial positions, for no more than eight hours a week with monthly pay of euro300 ($400).

“If those of us who should be entering employment have to place the country or can’t get a job, or can only get poorly paid and low-tax work, it’s going to be very complicated for us to be able to sustain our parents’ pensions,” said Gonzalez.

“Future prospects are very complicated, bleak.”

In a scene mirrored nationwide, Lorente lives at home with his mother and an unemployed 28-year-sister. Like many other childish Spaniards, he thinks Spain’s nation is so terrible as it heads toward recession for the second time in four years that he might not be able to go out until he hits 40.

But with the overall unemployment rate now at a eurozone high 22.8 percent, even family help networks are being eroded – as childish people find they can rely far less on handouts and shelter from mom and dad.

And with low-paying jobs the norm – often euro1,000 ($1,325) a month or less – institution graduates are increasingly moving abroad to do work below their qualifications, for example as bartenders or hotel workers in Germany or Britain.

Last year more people left Spain than came to descend for the first time in a decade. While 418,000 went to this country, 508,000 departed, the National Statistics Institute reported.

Ibarra of The Spanish Youth Council said his sister, a bank worker, was making euro18,000 ($24,000) a year but went to Switzerland where she’s now getting more than euro60,000 ($80,000) in a new bank job she likes more. Another friend of Ibarra’s who worked with computers in Spain is now a bartender in Scotland.

“The feeling is growing in our country that if you want a excellent life, you have to go away,” Ibarra said. “Childish adults are leave-taking for anything, and the typical profile is a qualified who can’t get anything or can’t get what he wants.”

Many Spaniards are reminded of the 1940s and 1950s, when men with no opportunities at home left for construction or factory jobs in countries like France, Germany and Switzerland. But the current running away is more worrisome because the nation is bleeding some of its best and brightest.

Spain’s phenomenal boom saw a massive boost in Spaniards getting institution degrees in the expectation that excellent times would translate into lucrative opportunities.

The reality turned out to be different, due to the financial crisis and rigid labor structures in which older workers loved generous benefits and were very nearly impossible to cut loose.

Employers cringed at giving new hires open-finished contracts with the same benefits, so younger workers often finished up with temporary ones, sometimes lasting just a few months. During the growth years, companies rolled these contracts over, but they now let them run out, boosting the ranks of the childish unemployed.

Experts say professionally trained childish adults are increasingly dumbing down their resumes to apply for jobs as janitors, secretaries and nurses aides.

“They do this because they reckon if they don’t that they’ll be turned down because they’ll be seen as frustrated and overqualified,” said Alex Navas, a sociology professor at the University of Navarra.

Reforms were passed this month that are aimed at slashing the high cost of laying off older and less-productive workers, a go that could open up new opportunities for childish people.

But for now, economists predict that joblessness will liable get worse with recession virtually guaranteed and the new labor laws prompting businesses to eliminate more jobs before they start making new ones.

Eric Lluent, an underemployed freelance journalist in Barcelona, teamed up with a jobless friend to set up blog called “The New Poor” that allows struggling childish Spaniards to document their tales.

The only rule is that contributors must submit photos, their names, and tell their tales in the first person.

“If things stay the way they are, we’ll all have to emigrate,” said one contributor, 29-year-ancient inventor Claudia Freixas.

Lluent, who lives with his parents, himself is gearing up to place Spain – for Iceland. While that country’s nation imploded three years ago, he’s betting the tourism business will come back, meaning he might land a job in a restaurant, bar or hotel.

But the 25-year-ancient Lluent worries that Spain is making an entire generation that will become alienated from society.

In his own posting, he wrote:

“I’m part of the Lost Generation, those childish 20-somethings stuck in the ditch of a society that we increasingly see less as ours and spot more as the enemy.”

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“The New Poor” blog (in Catalan and Spanish): http://elsnouspobres.wordpress.com/

Alan Clendenning can be reached at: http://www.twitter.com/alanclendenning

MADRID (AP) — With a voice so faint and hoarse it sounded like a word, an elderly Spanish woman dressed in black gave Spain‘s court system on Wednesday its first oral account of right-wing atrocities committed during the country’s civil war.

The historic testimony from 81-year-ancient Maria Martin came at the examination of Spain’s most prominent mediate, Baltasar Garzon, who is facing criminal charges for having opened a investigate into such crimes during and with Spain’s 1936-1939 civil war.

The civil war and its ruinous upshot of hunger and disease left an estimated 500,000 people dead, and accounts abound of atrocities that both sides committed during the conflict as Gen. Francisco Franco‘s right-wing forces overthrew a leftist Republican government and established a dictatorship.

The Franco regime carried out a thorough accounting of civilians killed by Republican troops or confidential army. But since Franco died in 1975 and democracy was restored three years later, no official government investigate has been conducted of atrocities by his supporters, until Garzon launched one in 2008. Those crimes involve the deaths or disappearances of more than 100,000 people.

Garzon, 56, has been accused by two right-wing groups of knowingly overstepping his jurisdiction, a charge that could effectively end his stellar judicial career.

Martin used a walker Wednesday to slowly make her way into the ornate chamber of the Spanish Supreme Court and take her place on a red velvet chair facing a panel of seven judges to testify in safeguard of Garzon.

A childish clerk helped Martin work the microphone as she told the court how at age six, in September 1936, troops loyal to Franco rolled into her village in central Spain and took away 30 people — 27 men and three women, including her mother Agustina.

“They took out of the house and took her away,” Martin said, her voice barely audible, her white hair pulled back in a bun.

She later showed reporters photocopies of ancient pictures of her family and tiny dog-eared notebook with a hand-drawn map of where she thinks the mass grave holding her mother’s remains might be. Her father Mariano was not in the village at the time, she said, even if it was not at once clear why.

She said when her father eventually went to question in this area recovering the mother’s body, he was threatened.

“‘Watch out, or we might do with you what we did with her,’” Martin said her father was told.

Now, but, the Spanish mediate who became well-known nearly the world for probing crimes against humanity in other countries and seeking to place those perpetrators on examination in Spain is himself on examination for that investigation. The main line of reasoning against him is that wartime atrocities were covered by an amnesty passed in 1977 as Spain tried to rebuild and place a dark chapter of its past behind.

Until now, no Spanish court had ever heard testimony from people who lost civilian loved ones to the pro-Franco forces who carried out summary executions and other such crimes, according to an official from the Supreme Court, the panel trying Garzon.

Garzon’s lawyers are summoning witnesses like Martin in an apparent bid to buttress his line of reasoning that he acted not out of leftist political bias or a zeal for headlines — conservatives accuse him of both — but rather to attend to hundreds of thousands of victims, women like Martin, whose rights have been ignored for decades.

Garzon insists his investigate was legitimate. He says Franco forces and the regime in its early years waged a systematic campaign to wipe out opponents and this amounted to a crime against humanity that cannot be wiped away by an amnesty law.

Garzon says mandatory disappearances cannot be covered by Spain’s 1977 law because if no bodies have ever been found, the crime is an ongoing, “permanent” one that remains subject to prosecution.

If convicted of knowingly overstepping the limits of his jurisdiction with his abortive investigate in 2008 — he bowed out reluctantly in a dispute over jurisdiction — Garzon faces up to 20 years of suspension from the bench, which would effectively end his career as a mediate.

Prosecutors say he has committed no crime, but the criminal case is being pursued by right-wing groups who have long criticized the well-known mediate.

Another witness that testified Wednesday, 75-year-ancient Pino Sosa from the Canary Islands, said pro-Franco forces took her father away with a group of men.

“They beat them. They kept them as prisoners and did a lot of things to them,” Sosa said, count that Franco forces even stole bread and salt from her home.

Sosa said her mother later fell ill.

“She looked for my father and never found him,” Sosa said. Authorities eventually gave her a death certificate for him but she refused to accept it.

“They took him away alive and she wanted him back alive,” Sosa testified.