1 of 1 The Catholic Church in Bolivia is under investigation for allegations of pedophilia. illustration image. — Photo: AFP/Archivos The Catholic Church in Bolivia is under investigation over allegations of pedophilia cases. illustration image. — Photo: AFP/Archive
Pedro Lima, who currently resides in Paraguay, is in Bolivia to testify as part of an investigation by the Bolivian Public Prosecutor’s Office into crimes committed by Catholic religious.
Between 1992 and 2001 he was a Jesuit. He spent time as a novice and professor in several cities (Oruro, Cochabamba and Sucre). In all, he says he witnessed the abuse. Lima, testifying before the State Ministry on Monday (22), accused three Jesuits of covering up alleged abuses he observed in Sucre, the country’s constitutional capital, in the late 1990s when he was a professor at the order.
“The problem is that I was talking about the cases. They told me that dirty clothes are washed at home (…) The answer was that they expelled me,” he told RFI.
Pedro Lima condemned Marcos Recolons, then a high order official in Bolivia, who would rise to the head of the order in the Vatican a few years later. “Recolons called me and said the Society would sanction me and cut my funding [dos estudos] because I kept talking about cases of pedophilia. It was a way of silencing me,” he says.
“We know that there are still very serious cases that public opinion is unaware of, but we will make ourselves known so that they are known,” says Lima.
Lima reveals these cases 22 years later, motivated by the pedophilia scandal that rocked Bolivia this week.
The Vatican sent one of the sex crimes institution’s chief investigators, Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu, to Bolivia to investigate allegations of pedophilia.
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Pope Francis responded to a request from President Luis Arce, who sent a letter to the Pope asking him to verify the origin of all foreign religious who had entered his country.
The Bolivian Bishops’ Conference explained that Bertomeu’s visit is not directly related to the recent denunciations, but that it had previously planned to analyze “the advances in the field of prevention culture promoted by the Vatican”. At the moment, however, the specialist is concentrating on investigations on the subject.
Bertolomeu arrived in Bolivia from Paraguay, where he was investigating similar allegations against local church officials. The specialist had already led an investigation into abuses by priests against minors in Chile in 2018.
scandal
The Spanish Jesuit Alfonso Pedrajas, known as “Pica”, who died in 2009, is the originator of the scandal. After his death, a diary of the priest with confessions about child abuse was published. The Bolivian authorities are investigating whether other representatives of the Catholic Church in the country are also involved.
Pedrajas’ nephew found a 300page diary on his uncle’s computer in which he confessed to sexually abusing dozens of minors in the 1970s.
According to private texts accessed by the Spanish newspaper El País, Pedrajas allegedly abused around 85 minors in Catholic boarding schools in Bolivia in the 1970s and 1980s.
One of the most shocking admissions in the diary relates to the fact that Pedrajas wrote that he spoke to his superiors about his actions, but they did nothing about it.
After the information was published by the Spanish newspaper last April, there were complaints from former students about further cases of sexual abuse in schools run by religious in Bolivia, including Jesuits, but also Dominicans, Franciscans and other religious orders of the Catholic Church .
In recent years, various countries in Europe and America have denounced thousands of sexual assaults committed by priests, bishops or other members of the Catholic clergy.
In many cases, investigators said they were recurring crimes that had been covered up for years.