The file of the Catholic priest Luis Alberto Mosquera Delgado, prosecuted for raping a six-year-old boy, was analyzed at the time by the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice.
On that occasion, April 2004, the magistrates decided that the trial against Mosquera be transferred from Lara to Yaracuy, according to judgment No. 108, drafted by the then magistrate Rafael Pérez Perdomo.
The filing of this trial was requested by Leonardo Pereira Meléndez, the priest’s lawyer, who argued that the case “has caused a public scandal and has really moved society, which has expressed its rejection through graffiti painted on the facade of the San Jacinto Church (Barquisimeto, Lara state) and demonstrations held in the city”.
The majority of the magistrates approved filing the trial in the state of Yaracuy, with the exception of Alejandro Angulo Fontiveros. This magistrate wrote a save vote at the end of the sentence, in which he reflected on pedophilia, considered as the sexual attraction of adults towards children of the same sex.
Angulo Fontiveros criticized the filing because it was not going to contribute to “duly investigating the aberrated crime.” Filing “promotes impunity,” he said.
The then magistrate Angulo Fontiveros described rape as “one of the greatest aberrations of the criminal cast”, a fact in which “the internet has greatly influenced since children are made victims of sexual crimes in the very growing network of child prostitution ”. Already at that time in the country there were several priests accused of committing sexual abuse against children, Angulo recalled.
“The Catholic Church itself anathematizes the crime of rape, to the point of considering it a crime against humanity if it is perpetrated against children,” recalled Angulo, who suggested revising “mandatory celibacy.”
The priest Mosquera Delgado was sentenced to 7 years and six months in prison, according to a sentence issued by the 2nd Judgment Court of Yaracuy on 10/19/6. Article 374 of the Penal Code establishes a penalty of 15 to 20 years when the violation is against a child.
Mosquera is currently suspended as a priest, he wrote on Facebook.
mario moronta
• Mario Moronta, vice president of the Venezuelan Episcopal Conference, was not pleased when the Washington Post newspaper published a report criticizing the fact that the priest Luis Alberto Mosquera Delgado was in charge of a parish in Lara after serving 7 years in prison for abusing a six-year-old altar boy.
• “It calls attention to the fact that they investigate us, but not other entities, not only religious but professional, where the number of sexual abuses is greater,” Moronta said on July 6.
