Former students of the Colegio del Salvador Gonzalo Elizondo (left) and Pablo Vío, in Buenos AiresENRIQUE GARCIA MEDINA
Colegio El Salvador, with more than 150 years of history, is the most prestigious Jesuit school in Argentina. But the facility is now facing criminal charges for allegedly covering up the sexual abuse that a teacher committed on dozens of students between 1998 and 2003. His victims, who were between 10 and 11 years old at the time, accuse the school authorities of being necessary participants in the abuses and criticize the disinterest of the Pope, who was a professor there in the 1960s.
Brother César Fretes was the sixth grade teacher, a position that allowed him to call students at any time and receive them alone in a classroom. He was also a companion in the camps and spiritual retreats organized by the school. That context prompted him to find rooms to “abuse at least 42 students at the institution,” according to the complaint. Ten of them have dared to appear in court. Although Fretes died in 2015, five former Jesuit school authorities have accused her of being “necessary participants in the crimes of sexual abuse, underage corruption and aggravated concealment.” The penalty for these charges is 15 years in prison.
According to the applicants, the fact that he was responsible for imparting sex education enabled him to gain the children’s trust and then to manipulate them and carry out the abuse. It took almost all of them years to put it into words, and when they did, they believed it had happened only to them. Solitude started breaking last year when Gonzalo Elizondo and Pablo Vio raised their voices. After them, more victims appeared. To date, they have registered 42, but they believe the real number could be twice that.
Nicolás Quinteros I need more than 15 years to process it. He first became aware of this when he told his partner, as a result of a conversation they had about the controversy in Argentina over the use of Comprehensive Sex Education (ESI) in schools. “It was 2016, 2017 and the media was talking about ESI. I told my partner that I’m very much in favor of good implementation because I had a very bad experience that shouldn’t have happened and if it was implemented well it wouldn’t have happened. I told him that one day this guy, César Fretes, saw me tormented and crying and told me: ‘Go and wait for me in the bathroom.’ When the professor entered, the two were alone. Using excuses, she persuaded him to show her his genitals. “Nico, that wasn’t done badly by ESI, that was abuse, you were underage,” his wife told him, as he recalled in an interview with EL PAÍS.
“I have long identified it as abuse and give it that name, but until last year I thought it was just me. To see that there were 40 cases, which may be many more, changes everything,” says Francisco Segovia. “We are facing a fact that is collective in nature, it was not a madman who has a perversion, maladaptive behavior, but people with ecclesiastical and educational functions were organized around him to cover up and protect this image of the school and leaves us completely free of containment,” adds Segovia.
Former students of Colegio El Salvador Nicolás Quinteros, Francisco Segovia and Gonzalo Elizondo.
A week ago, the judiciary ordered two raids in the case: at the school headquarters and at the Loyola center of the Jesuit order in the city of San Miguel in Buenos Aires. The complainants say that among the documents found are papers showing that both then-principal Rafael Velasco and other school authorities knew that Fretes was a pedophile and tolerated him until complaints multiplied. They are also accused of not fully investigating the initial allegations against him, which date back to 1998, and of allowing Fretes to return to the host school after his expulsion.
The school expressed its position through a brief statement, as it did last year when Elizondo and Vio first made the abuse public. According to the text released after the raids, they “offered their full cooperation so that the officers who intervened could carry out the procedure so that the facts under investigation could be clarified”.
The Society of Jesus, the organization on which the school depends, also highlighted as a sign of collaboration that “more information was sent spontaneously to the Court than was available in the Formation Centers, since it was the Curial Headquarters from which the raid was launched”.
One of the complaint’s attorneys, Carlos Lombardi, called the school authorities’ cooperation “capricious” and “hypocritical” because he believes that they provide the documentation requested and that they are more interested in protecting the institution’s image than than repairing the damage caused. “Previously, the approach was to protect the perpetrator at all costs. And if it was untenable, evict it. Now the modus operandi is to shield the institution without giving information to the victims, limiting itself to apologies,” says Lombardi.
Fretes died with impunity in 2015, but complainants are confident the circle that covered him up will not. The main obstacle to the progress of the proceedings is the statute of limitations on penal measures. The law extending the statute of limitations was approved in 2015 and the crimes they want to try are earlier, but Lombardi cites precedents like that of the priest Justo Ilarraz, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison to believe they can serve it out on the defendant’s bank.
“We will insist that the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was already in force in 2003, be applied. Justice should enforce this principle, because the passage of time only harms and increases the pain of the victims,” says the lawyer.
The complainants agree with Lombardi. “You say it was a different time, but there were city laws that compelled you to report on this type of case,” says Elizondo. After spending a year looking for answers at school, he says he didn’t get any. His letter to Pope Francis also went unanswered. Because of this, his distrust of the Catholic Church’s real commitment to combating pedophilia is enormous.
“Rafael Velasco was the rector of the school in those years when these abuses took place, and today he is the supreme authority of the Society of Jesus in Argentina, that is, the supreme authority of the Jesuits in the country where we denounce. Another one we denounced, Andrés Aguerre, was appointed rector of the Catholic University of Cordoba last year. It’s very shocking that we’re saying that they made the abuses possible, that they covered it up and that it seems like it didn’t matter,” denounced Elizondo. All their hopes are in righteousness today.
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