BarcelonaA Bolivian court has sentenced the Catalan Jesuits Ramon Alaix and Marcos Recolons on Tuesday to a year in prison, both of the Jesus’ company, to cover up the sexual abuse committed by the priest Alfonso Pedrajas, already dead. In addition, sources in the Bolivian Survivors (CBS) community have assured the EFE agency that the door opens to follow four more court proceedings. According to this organization, which represents the victims, there would be 12 more (deaths) who would have committed sexual abuse of half a thousand minors in boarding schools, colleges and rural areas of Bolivia, and would have had the favor of the then senior officials in the country to hide the facts.
“The two defendants have been declared guilty and authors of the crime of coverment, both have been sentenced with a year of deprivation of freedom to fulfill the public prison of Cochabamba, and other measures have been arranged for the victims,” the spokesman for the Bolivian community of survivors (CBS), Edwin Alvarado, told Efe, who has insisted that this sentence has opened that this sentence has been opened and that this sentence has been. For the rest of the court proceedings they are pending. Last week the judge already denied the appeal filed by the defense of Alaix and Recolons, both over 80 years old, for the prescription of the case. Pedrajas was director of the Joan XXIII school in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba since 1971, and according to the CBS he would have abused almost 200 victims.
In Catalonia, the Jesuits a year ago already recognized up to 145 victims of sexual abuse by 44 aggressors from 1948 to the present, as a result of an investigation that also identified a total of 44 abusers, 29 of which were Jesuit religious and 15 lay people. Most of these abuses were perpetrated in the schools of Casp and Sant Ignasi de Sarrià – all two in Barcelona -, which together have 118 complaints of the total. However, from the religious order they admitted that they are “fully aware” that these data do not represent the total number of victims.
