The Bolivian community of survivors (CBS) claimed this Friday with a plant and songs the sentence against the Spanish Jesuits Ramón Alaix and Marcos Reolons, sentenced to one year in prison for covering up the abuses of the priest Alfonso Pedrajas, also Spanish.
About twenty members of the CBS arrived at the main square of the central city of Cochabamba, to read the Conclusive Resolution of the Judgment which was known on Tuesday and was qualified by this community as “historical.”
Some participants sang typical rhythms with native instruments as part of the expression of “rejoicing” that, according to the CBS, opens the possibility to be clarified other cases also committed by other Jesuits.
Subsequently, the group went to the temple of the Jesus company to Hang more than a dozen posters with the portraits and information of the reported priests for abusing minors and their alleged cover -up.
The president of the CBS, Wilder Flores, explained to the media that although the penalty of a year in prison is minimal, the conviction against the two Jesuits is “historical” because “For the first time, two former leaders are condemned, Jesuit, So “the guilty seal nobody will erase it.”
However, Alaix and Reolons, both with more than 80 years, may take advantage of judicial forgiveness that applies in Bolivia to sentences under three years, so Nor should they keep imprisonment.
Reolons was provincial of the Jesuits between 1993 and 1999 to later be one of the highest officials of the Order in Rome, while Alaix was the highest authority of the Society of Jesus in Bolivia between 1999 and 2007.
Complaints for pedophilia against Jesuits in Bolivia have been sight after the newspaper El País published on April 30, 2023 Research on a Pedrajas newspaperwho died in 2009, in which he refers to the alleged abuses that perpetrated dozens of children when he directed the Juan XXIII school, since 1971.
The CBS argues that Pedrajas victims ascend almost two hundredand not to 85 as he mentioned in his diary, corresponding to abuses occurred in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in the missing Juan XXIII school in the city of Cochabamba.
Flores said that from now on, the criminal proceedings open against other Jesuits, some deceased, along with new names that revealed and that the complaints will be extended to several exprovincials that are alive.
Among the Open processes is that of the Spanish Jesuit Luis María Roma, That he died in 2019, six months after the order initiated an internal investigation into abuses to minors that kept it secret.
In February 2019, Efe announced the case of Cura Roma for a complaint of an ex -manmber of the order that requested the anonymity based on about thirty photographs in which he said he recognized the alleged aggressor of several children between six and twelve, whose victims are in tens of descriptions that the priest also recorded in his newspaper.
In this case, Jesus’ company admitted that The protocols for channeling a complaint were not applied Criminal, after an internal investigation that was filed and in which no victims were identified. The criminal case was closed and then reopened in 2024.
For its part, the Society of Jesus in Bolivia has stopped referring to these cases for several months on their social networks, its website and through its spokesmen, which were the official channels for the dissemination of information.
