EL PAÍS launched an investigation into pedophilia in the Spanish Church in 2018 and has a data base updated with all known cases. If you know of any case that has not seen the light, you can write to us at: [email protected]. If it is a case in Latin America, the address is: [email protected].
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The Company of Jesus of Bolivia sings the mea culpa and admits that his actions regarding the case of pedophilia by the Catalan priest Lucho Roma, who abused and photographed at least a hundred indigenous girls and left everything in writing “were negligent, indolent and disastrous,” according to a statement published this Sunday by the congregation on its website at 10 pm local time, four in the morning in Spain. The reaction comes hours after EL PAÍS published the article The Charagua manuscriptsan investigation that uncovers how Lucho Roma wrote down in some manuscripts the sexual assaults he carried out on dozens of minors while he was a missionary, how his superiors carried out an investigation that confirmed the crimes and, after Roma’s death in 2019, they hid the findings in a drawer.
The Jesuits hid these documents for four years and did not report the case until one year ago, when EL PAÍS published the first diary of another Spanish Jesuit, the now deceased priest Alfonso Pedrajas, who in turn admitted to having attacked at least 85 children since the seventies to the nineties and how his superiors covered up his crimes. At that time, the Company delivered the summary of the Lucho Roma investigation to the Prosecutor’s Office, but the justice system closed the case when the victims were not found. Now, after the publication of these unpublished files, the congregation has urged the Bolivian State Prosecutor’s Office to reopen the case “in light of the evidence of the victims’ testimony” and to resolve “the responsibilities of those who could have known the facts and did not” act. “in accordance with law”.
The Catalan priest Lucho Roma abused hundreds of indigenous girls in Bolivia for decades. He photographed them, recorded them on video and recorded everything in writing, in the second diary of a pedophile priest to which EL PAÍS has had access. On this occasion, the order carried out an internal investigation that confirmed the crimes and their cover-up. The Jesuits, after the death of Rome in 2019, kept the findings in a drawer where they have remained unpublished, until today
The Jesuits also affirm that they will create an internal commission to contact the victims and assist them. This group will be led by the current delegate of the order’s Healthy and Safe Environments team, lay psychologist Sandra Carvajal. “Those who acted in this way must be held responsible for their actions in handling such situations,” she reads in the press release. A year ago, this position was held by Jesuit Osvaldo Chirveches, a former senior official of the order and one of the superiors who did not report the Rome case to justice. In any case, the order still does not respond to why it did not report the case at the time it became aware of it nor why it did not apply the conclusions that emanated from said internal investigation: repair the victims, inform the order and create a team to address all cases of abuse that remained hidden from the public.
In case of The Charagua Manuscripts It’s a horror story. Lucho Roma was a Spanish Jesuit who landed in Bolivia in 1955 to train as a religious. The internal investigation of the Jesuits affirms that Rome’s first abuses of indigenous girls occurred in the eighties, when he held a high position in the order in La Paz, the country’s capital. Between 1983 and 1994, the investigations indicate, Roma visited the Trinidad and Pampa community in the Yungas to attack minors. But the bulk of his crimes occurred between 1994 and 2005, when he was appointed missionary in Charagua, a town in the southeast of Bolivia (at that time with about 2,500 inhabitants) and whose majority population was Guaraní. There he wrote a diary in which he detailed what he did with the little girls: “I touch the whole thing with my hands… I feel the heat of the intimate area, with natural warmth! How beautiful these girls are, naked they smell like soap!”
Roma wrote down the names of 70 of his victims, although the number of those affected, according to the investigation, surely exceeds one hundred. He also described how he photographed them, recorded them on video, and how he then masturbated with that material. She gained the minors’ trust with gifts and then took them to her room, where she attacked them and took photos of them. “Today 10 girls came through my room and I must have taken about 95 photos of dear little girls.” Likewise, she would take them on excursions to a nearby stream in the town to take snapshots of them and abuse them.
Impunity
The first time there is evidence of the secret archive in Rome was in 2008. The Jesuit was transferred to Sucre three years earlier and there one of his companions came across some of these images on the common computer of the community where they lived. He reported it to a superior, but he did nothing. Around that time, the woman who was cleaning the pedophile’s room came across photo clippings showing explicit scenes of a minor being raped by Rome. In the interrogation that the Jesuits did to her within the framework of the internal investigation, this woman said that she was afraid and did not tell it until 2016. She did it to another Jesuit. He, in turn, declared that he reported him to the provincial (the highest position of power in the order) and that he did nothing either.
The Company did not react until 2019, when another former colleague from Rome told a journalist from the Efe agency that he had also seen the photographs of Rome on the common computer in 2008, that he saved some copies on a memory device and that, since then , had kept it a secret. The reporter reported his discovery to the order and published the news, but without giving details of the case and the identity of the aggressor. It was then that the Jesuits opened the internal investigation, found all the material that Rome continued to hoard, interrogated his companions and acquaintances, commissioned a psychiatric medical expert report and obtained a signed confession from the religious. He said this: “I got carried away, in some situations, by libidinous acts, inappropriate for a religious person, with girls from eight to 11 years old.” Shortly after, Lucho Roma died in Cochabamba. He was 84 years old. The Jesuits buried the entire summary and locked it in a drawer.
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