Three Jesuit provincials in Bolivia were formally indicted by the general prosecutor’s office for having allegedly covered up abuses perpetrated by former Archbishop Alejandro Mestre of La Paz in the 1960s.
The Bolivian Association of Victims and Survivors of Ecclesial Sexual Abuse praised the measure but hope to add more denouncements to the current inquiry.
Father Bernardo Mercado, 43, the provincial of the Jesuits in the South American country, Father Osvaldo Cherviches, 52, who was the provincial between 2014-2018, and Spanish-born Father Ignacio Suñol, 81, who was the provincial between 2019-2022, are being officially investigated for failing to take Mestre’s case to the authorities.
According to a press statement released by the prosecutor’s office, Chirveches, who was then responsible for “healthy environments” at the provincial curia – the department in charge of dealing with abuse accusations – was informed in November of 2021 of Mestre’s abuse case.
The Spanish-born Jesuit was a teacher in 1961, when he allegedly abused a minor twice.
Mestre died in 1988.
Chirveches sent the case to then provincial Suñol, who ordered the opening of a canonical process.
The inquiry was directed by Chirveches, who recommended the case be closed. Mercado, the current provincial, agreed to do so. Prosecutors and police were not informed about the accusation against Mestre.
The three Jesuits have been informed by the judiciary not to leave the country and to get in touch with the victims, and must present themselves to a designated judge when they are told.
“That’s a step in the right direction,” Edwin Alvarado, a founding member of the Association of Victims, told Crux.
“But now we want to demonstrate that the three of them had been repeatedly guilty of covering up cases of abuse,” he added.
According to Alvarado, the association has evidence that the three Jesuits knew all about the abuses perpetrated by several priests, including Luis María Roma, who systematically abused and took pictures of hundreds of Indigenous girls between 1994-2005, and Alfonso Pedrajas, who described in his diary dozens of abuses perpetrated by him over decades.
The discovery of Pedrajas’s diary and an article published by Spanish newspaper El Pais last year caused great commotion in the Bolivian Church and led to the denunciation of several other abuses committed by Jesuits.
The group of survivors was formed during the avalanche of reports against the Society of Jesus, as many victims realized that there was a pattern in the way their cases had been handled by the Congregation, according to Alvarado.
“I talked to Chirveches in January of 2023, before El Pais‘s article,” Alvarado said.
A former student at the John 23 school in Cochabamba, where Pedrajas worked for decades, Alvarado was first abused by him when he was 14. He says he was victimized again, in other degrees, by two other staff members.
“The first problem I noticed was that Cherviches changed the title of my document, which was a denouncement, to a ‘testimony.’ He also pretended he didn’t know the name of another priest I was accusing, Francesc Peris,” Alvarado said.
He then had to recount all his sufferings to a commission appointed by Chirveches, something that made him feel terribly uncomfortable.
“At that point, I still hadn’t heard of ‘revictimization,’ but that was what they did to me. They would ask me this and that without taking any care. It was about the worst time of my life that I was talking about,” he said.
At the end, Chirveches asked him what he wanted, Alvarado recalled. He answered that he only wanted a public letter of apology signed by the Jesuits, in which they recognized the crimes perpetrated by them.
“Chirveches looked down on me with supreme contempt and said that ‘everybody wants something here, either money or a job.’ That was an unexpected aggression,” Alvarado said.
As former students of John 23 met and shared their stories, the association began to be born. It now has 23 members, but several victims have been in touch with it. The group has been taking part in a number of initiatives in order to make the Society of Jesus in Bolivia be institutionally held responsible for so many cases of abuse.
“Among our goals is that all priests are driven away from schools and that the Jesuits are ordered to shut down their internal organs to deal with abuse cases, which must be solely analyzed by the Bolivian authorities,” Alvarado explained.
Father Sergio Montes, a spokesperson for the Jesuits in Bolivia, told Crux that the congregation still hasn’t been officially notified about the accusation of two among the three priests, so it can’t make a public declaration yet.
In an article published by the Fides news agency on Aug. 9, lawyer Audalia Zurita, the Society of Jesus’s attorney, said that the accusation of crime against Bernardo Mercado is “irrational,” given that the abuser died and the provincial only learned of his crime long after his death.
“That’s why there can be no cover-up by any means, nobody who died can be penally persecuted, and the responsibility is personal, it’s not inheritable by one’s children, friends, or colleagues,” Zurita said, according to Fides.
The article described how the accusation against Mestre was received in 2021, all the measures taken after the interview with the victim, and the recommendations received from the General Curia in Rome, which consults the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith.
The conclusion was announced in 2023, on Jan. 25, and established that given that Mestre died in 1988, the canonical process could not be taken ahead.
In February of 2023, the Jesuits got in touch with the Bishops’ Conference, the Archdiocese of La Paz, and the Apostolic Nunciature, due to the fact that Mestre had been an auxiliary bishop in Sucre (1976-1982) and Archbishop of La Paz (1982-1987). No other potential victims have manifested till now, the article said. The process was presented to the prosecutor’s office in May of 2024, according to the Jesuits – after the Pedrajas’s scandal.