Pastor José Linares Cerón in a picture from his social networks.
Since founding the Pro Family Pro Life movement in 1989 at the age of just 22, José Linares Cerón has been preaching exemplary living. This evangelical pastor and self-proclaimed advocate for children looked forward to Peru’s Family Day every second Sunday in September to offer advice on how to lead children with love and wisdom. “The child learns who it is through the relationship with its parents,” he said. One of her daughters, now 33, recently denounced what she had kept secret for years: that Linares Cerón systematically raped her and that she gave birth to a child in 2003 at the age of 13 as a result of the abuse.
“I want this monster caught,” he has told the media, without showing his face or revealing his identity. His hell began at the age of seven when he moved in with his father. A 1,000 square meter house made of noble materials in the Surquillo district of Lima, where Linares Cerón lived with his seven brothers. The only two women were her and her grandmother. Her father, who accumulated power over time, forced her to sleep with him until she was twelve. And just at that age, when she had already dropped out of school because no one cared for her, she became pregnant by her father. “I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t know what was forming inside me because they never took me for a antenatal exam,” he said.
But the sexual violence and homelessness also came from her uncles. She accuses Pablo of inappropriate touching and Robert, who is eleven years her father’s junior, of raping her “at any time of the day or night” for many years. When it was confirmed that she was pregnant, José Linares Cerón told her that this child was not hers but Roberts and revealed that he was aware of the collective irritation. “When I held my son in my arms, my father manipulated me and forced me to tell the police that my son belonged to a person who had left me. When I left the hospital he took me to my stepmother who was his secretary. He let me sleep with my son on a mattress on the floor,” he recalls.
In October 2006, the ordeal continued: at the age of 16, she gave birth to her second child. In this case, she indicates that the father was Robert. Both sons are in the care of Linares Cerón, he says. “I never had a normal life. I didn’t go out, I didn’t study, I didn’t throw children’s parties, everything was in the house and the only social life I could lead was with my father.” A man who also physically assaulted her. Once, for defending her stepmother, Linares Cerón punched her and almost suffocated her. “I mustered up courage and yelled at him with all my might for touching me, for raping me when I was a child. My father went insane and grabbed my neck against the wall. I managed to ask my uncle Pablo, who lived in another room, for help. He touched me too when I was little. This is a life surrounded by horror.
José Linares Cerón has meddled in Peruvian politics and national debate with his Pro-Family-Pro-Life movement. He promoted the failed dismissal of former mayor Susana Villarán in 2013; he founded the collective Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas, formed in 2016 to stop widespread sex education in schools on the grounds that it was a “gender ideology”; He has supported the candidatures of Keiko Fujimori, particularly the last one, in which he subscribed to the narrative of electoral fraud that could never be verified and promoted marches by radical groups against the Peruvian left.
On his website, where he can be seen with a girl, he describes himself as a “social warrior” who lectures around the world on “honesty, principles and values”. The truth is that he doesn’t spread much love both on his social networks and in these meetings. “The UN intends to use the gender agenda to pave a way towards legalizing pedophilia”; “gay dictatorship is unacceptable”; “The pro-abortion agenda aims to let our youth rot and degenerate,” are some of his messages of peace. Internationally, he promoted Mitt Romney’s campaign to become the Republican Party candidate in the 2008 US election.
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His background does not appear to be that of a blessed man who has followed the Lord’s way. In 1991, he was accused by a member of his church of abusing and impregnating his teenage sister. He was also charged with coercion, invasion of privacy and violation of morality. All cases prescribed. Today Pastor José Linares Cerón is missing. Your networks remain silent. His daughter pleads for justice.
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