Bolivia Investigates Pedophilia Accusations Against Priests

On Thursday, Bolivia's Attorney General Juan Lanchipa formed a commission of prosecutors to investigate eight complaints of pedophilia against Catholic priests.

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"So far, the Prosecutor's Office has received eight complaints, which are based in the cities of La Paz, Cochabamba, Tarija and Santa Cruz. These complaints refer to deceased priests and people who are still alive," Lanchipa said.

"Several people are involved in the complaints. We will give the most appropriate treatment to these cases because this issue is very sensitive for our society," he pointed out.

These complaints were received as part of the protection measures program, which allows witnesses and victims to provide their statements.

"We are concerned about the negligence that the Catholic Church had by not having denounced the facts in a timely manner and providing some form of protection to the victims," Lanchipa said, recalling that these abuses remained hidden and unpunished for decades.

This scandal exploded in Bolivia after the Spanish media El Pais published testimonies of the victims of Alfonso Pedrajas, a deceased Jesuit whose personal diary, which was discovered by his nephew and handed over to journalists, revealed abusea against 85 Bolivian minors.

The Prosecutor's office asked El Pais to send a digital copy of the diary of Pedrajas, who was director of the John XXIII Boarding School in Cochabamba in the 1970s, after having worked at other schools in Peru and Ecuador.

The Ombudsman Pedro Callisaya asked the Bolivian Episcopal and Archbishopric Conference for information on these facts and asked the victims to come to his institution to make confidential complaints.