The Felices los Niños Foundation is now “an abandoned forest where you breathe a very dense air,” described Tamara Grinberg, a photographer and teacher who worked between 2016 and 2019 in the place, where she took images that were later part of a photographic essay by who received a study scholarship that took her to Madrid, Spain.
Grinberg worked for six years at Hurlingham’s Secondary Agrarian Education School No. 1, the first art school in the Municipality that is part of the Educational Pole that operates on the property that used to belong to the Felices los Ninos Foundation.
In dialogue with Télam, he said that he began to work when Father Grassi was arrested and the Foundation intervened.
“When I began to realize what the place was, I began to register it,” said Grinberg, whose work focused on ecclesiastical sexual abuse in Argentina, especially in the Grassi case.
As a teacher he began to tour the facilities of the property. “When I entered the plant there were still people who worked when Grassi was director of the foundation. There were priests who continued to give Health and Adolescence,” she recalled about those years.
He described living together at that time as “difficult and tense” and said that some of his students had been baptized by Grassi and did not know “what he had done”.
“At the time the director had signs that said “Father Grassi Innocent” next to a life-size sculpture of Mother Teresa of Calcutta next to her desk,” he detailed.
According to Grinberg, at that time the discourse prevailed that “it was all a lie”, that “it was a bed that had been set up for the priest”, so there were many people defending him.
Part of these images were added to a photographic essay entitled “What a Body Can” on ecclesiastical sexual abuse, with which he won a scholarship to do a master’s degree in documentary photography in Madrid.
“The property is huge and the place is abandoned. I took the photos with what encouraged me to walk in the forest,” he told Télam about the place that had housed one of the most important homes in the country in the nineties. .
Among them, there are pictures of home “Los Juanitos” in which children between 6 and 12 years old livedthe chapel and Grassi’s last office.
“The place was with long grass and you found virgins as if they were sculptures in the middle of the forest. Something happens that happens with the places where acts of great violence occurred, no matter how much one resignifies them, there is still a very tense air” , commented.
With Grassi in prison for child abuse and allegations of embezzlement, the foundation stopped receiving the previous flow of donations, and the deterioration of the facilities began to be noted.
“When the first complaints come out and people stop donating at the level they used to. He (Grassi) received very large donations and walked through all the television programs,” he remarked.
“They didn’t even come to cut the grass, there were electrified walls. At the time, the foundation had French faucets, but we did not have spare parts, all the pipes had to be changed,” he recalled.
Photos: Tamara Grinberg.
The property today: an Educational Pole and a rehabilitation home
The main headquarters of the Felices los Niños Foundation, a property of 65 hectares in the Buenos Aires party of Hurlingham which was in charge of the priest Julio César Grassi from 1993 to 2001, is today divided between an Educational Pole, a rehabilitation home administered by the Bishopric of Morón and a National Gendarmerie sector.
In 1993, the National State granted Grassi the free assignment of the use of the property that at that time belonged to the district of Morón, for a project called “Home Farm School Workshop”.
After the accusations of child sexual abuse and corruption of minors that led Garssi to prison and the embezzlement scandals that surrounded the foundation, the State Assets Administration Agency (AABE) was left in charge of the property, and ceded five hectares to the Diocese of Morón and the National Gendarmerie.
HOUSE OF OUR LADY OF THE GOOD TRIP
As reported by the Morón Bishopric to Télam, the AABE granted him two hectares where the “Casa Nuestra Señora del Buen Viaje” rehabilitation home is located, where there are between 50 and 60 boys in different stages of treatment.
There, there is a two-story construction: in one live the boys who go through the first and second phases of rehabilitation, while on the ground floor are the bedrooms, common space rooms, kitchen and a covered soccer field. The upper floor is disabled.
In addition, they have another smaller-scale construction, in which there are bedrooms, kitchen and a common space for those who go through the third phase of rehabilitation.
A third space is intended for the use of laundry, and in a sector of the property there is a garden where they work together with the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA).
NATIONAL GENDARMERIA
According to the AABE survey, the remaining three hectares were ceded to the National Gendarmerie, which uses the land as a barracks.
EDUCATIONAL POLE
On the grounds of the Foundation that Grassi knew how to lead, when he was a very popular figure and received vast donations before the allegations of abuse were known, there are also 11 educational complexes.
Claudia Bracchi, Undersecretary of Education of the General Directorate of Culture and Education of the province of Buenos Aires, told Télam that in 2014 the Provincial Directorate of Legal Entities intervened in the foundation to transfer the private management establishments to the state orbit.
In 2015 an agreement was signed between the “Felices los Niños” administration council and the General Directorate, but two years later there was a new intervention with the aim of dissolving the entity.
In this way, in 2018 with the 11 educational entities operating at all levels (maternal, initial, primary, secondary, teacher training, adults and professional training), the Hurlingham Educational Pole was formed.
As detailed by the official, the institutions group a population of 2,796 people between students, teachers and assistantswhich is divided into two sectors, one with eight hectares and the other with two and a half.
