The Bolivian Community of Survivors, which brings together victims of sexual abuse in the Church, has filed an ecclesiastical complaint requesting the excommunication and expulsion from the clerical state of the Spanish Jesuits Ramón Alaix and Marcos Recolons, former provincials of the Society of Jesus in Bolivia, who were convicted by Bolivian courts for covering up the abuses committed by fellow Jesuit Alfonso Pedrajas. The complaint, filed on Wednesday, October 28, and addressed to the Archbishop of Cochabamba, Óscar Aparicio, also requests that they be permanently barred from holding any ecclesiastical office and from residing in religious houses or near minors, according to the EFE news agency.
The complainants accuse the two priests of several offenses that, according to the document, are defined in the Code of Canon Law: covering up crimes against the sixth commandment committed by another cleric, absolving an accomplice in a sin against the sixth commandment involving a minor, abuse of ecclesiastical authority, and crimes against human dignity. They request that a preliminary investigation be opened, that both be declared guilty, that the maximum penalty be imposed on them, and that the case be referred to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, according to the Bolivian newspaper Opinión, which cites canon 1717 as the basis for the request for an investigation.
Alaix, 86, led the Jesuits in Bolivia from 1999 to 2007. Recolons, 82, was provincial from 1993 to 1999 and later held a senior position in the order in Rome. In September 2025, a Bolivian court sentenced them to one year in prison for cover-up, a sentence that, according to EFE, was upheld despite the defense’s appeal. The trial took place between July 16 and September 2, 2025, and was based on the testimony of nearly twenty victims, Pedrajas’s diary, and the confessions through which, according to the same agency, the superiors would have been aware of the abuses. The ruling states that Pedrajas “involved seven Jesuit provincials” and “received the protection of the order”, according to EFE.
Pedrajas, who died in 2009, directed the Juan XXIII school in Cochabamba from 1971, where, according to the investigation published by the newspaper El País on April 30, 2023, based on his diary, he abused dozens of children. That report brought the case to light. Since then, the Bolivian Community of Survivors has taken its complaint beyond Bolivian courts: in April of this year, the Parliament of Catalonia admitted for processing their request to investigate the transfer to Bolivia of Catalan Jesuits accused of abuse.
The complaint is filed just weeks after the Society of Jesus expelled from the clerical state and from the order the Jesuit Francesc Peris, accused of abusing minors for decades in Spain and Bolivia, after finding him guilty in a canonical criminal process, and after the order then acknowledged “serious errors” regarding his abuses. Neither the Society of Jesus nor the Archdiocese of Cochabamba has commented on the new complaint, according to the information published so far.
With this complaint, the victims move the case of the two former provincials from the criminal to the canonical sphere: they ask the Church to judge them under its own laws for the same acts for which Bolivian justice has already convicted them. The decision to open or not open a preliminary investigation now rests with the ecclesiastical authority in Cochabamba.
Convicted by Bolivian justice for covering up Pedrajas, the two former Jesuit provincials remain priests; their victims now ask the Church to judge them.
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