The Bolivian Community of Survivors, which brings together victims of sexual abuse committed by clergy in Bolivia, has asked Leo XIV in an open letter for an “institutional, just and definitive response” to their complaints, most of them against Jesuits, many of them Spanish. The letter, released on Saturday, November 7, while the Pope was touring Uruguay in the first leg of his trip to South America, also asks that his visit include a space to listen to the victims from Bolivia, a country not included in the itinerary. According to the AFP agency, the organization plans to deliver it this Monday at the Apostolic Nunciature of Bolivia, as explained by its secretary of international relations, Edwin Alvarado.
The signatories maintain that the abuse crisis in Bolivia “does not find an adequate institutional response”. They claim to have filed formal complaints with the Bolivian Episcopal Conference, the Nunciature and Cardinal Toribio Ticona without obtaining any accountability so far. In the cases involving Jesuits, the letter states that “impunity prevailed” thanks to an institutional framework that protected the accused, and points to the structures of the Society of Jesus in Spain and Bolivia and its General Curia in Rome. They ask the Vatican to intervene in the pending ecclesiastical investigations.
The organization estimates around 810 victims in the various cases it has documented in the country, although, according to AFP, it does not specify whether these are all different individuals. In just one school in Cochabamba, Juan XXIII, it identifies 400 victims of five Jesuits who worked there as directors, educators, nurses and spiritual guides. Among them is the Spaniard Alfonso Pedrajas, who directed the center from 1971 and whose diary, according to the investigation published by El País in 2023, described abuses against dozens of minors. Pedrajas died in Bolivia in 2009 without having been tried. The letter also includes the case of Spanish Jesuit Luis Roma, who died in 2019 and is accused of having abused at least 75 indigenous Guaraní girls.
The Pedrajas case has had a criminal consequence that the victims consider insufficient. In September 2025, a Bolivian court sentenced former Spanish Jesuit provincials Marcos Recolons and Ramón Alaix to one year in prison for covering up his abuses while they governed the order in Bolivia. On October 28, the Community filed a canonical complaint with the Archdiocese of Cochabamba requesting their excommunication and expulsion from the clerical state. According to Religión Digital, the archdiocese responded that it does not have jurisdiction to handle the demand. The letter to the Pope also includes that refusal.
Most of the Jesuits named in the most serious cases have died, which, in the victims’ view, shifts responsibility to those who covered for them and to the institution. A few weeks ago, the Society of Jesus expelled from the clerical state and from the order the Jesuit Francesc Peris, accused of abusing minors in Spain and Bolivia, a decision that the Bolivian Network of Survivors described as a symbolic gesture because, in its view, it does not address the congregation’s complicity.
The letter arrives as Leo XIV is scheduled to meet in Chiclayo, during the Peruvian leg of the trip, with victims of the Sodalitium of Christian Life. According to AFP, the Church has on several occasions expressed its regret over the Bolivian cases, and Pope Francis expressed his shame and consternation in June 2023. Neither the Nunciature nor the Society of Jesus has publicly responded to the letter.
The victims from Bolivia are asking the Pope for what they say they have not obtained from their bishops, the Nunciature or the Jesuits: that someone be held accountable for those who covered up the abuses.
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