SÃO PAULO, Brazil – After almost two decades at large, Bolivia has requested the extradition of former priest Juan José Santana Trinidad, a Uruguayan national accused of having committed sex abuse against 30 minors between 2005-2007, when he was a missionary in Tapacarí in east-central Bolivia.

Santana, who had been on the run for 18 years, was captured Sept. 26 in the house of his parents in the Uruguayan city of Salto by national police agents. He’s been kept in custody since then, and must be sent to Bolivia when the extradition process is completed, within 60 days.

The laicized priest was in charge of a boarding school in Tapacarí named Ángel Gelmí, where over 70 boys with ages ranging from 8 to 17 lived and studied. In 2007, a local nun discovered he was abusing a boy and denounced him. Other cases also appeared, with victims telling the authorities what they suffered. Santana was 38 at the time of the scandal.

The testimonies revealed the horror of his acts. Santana would bring boys to his room at the boarding school and lock the door. There, he would submit them to a number of sexual practices, from masturbation to anal sex.

Then-Archbishop of Cochabamba Tito Solari told the press about the case when it erupted and pledged to collaborate with the judiciary. He also offered support to the victims. The priest faced a canonical suit and was laicized in 2011.

Santana fled the Andean country immediately after the disclosure of the crimes, looking for refuge at his parents’ house in Uruguay.

He led a secluded life, leaving the house only for a few moments to walk. Over the years, reporters located and approached him in Salto on at least three occasions. The most recent one was in August, when journalists of the Uruguayan newspaper El Pais talked to him in the city.

To the reporters who found him, he would repeat that everything had happened long ago and that it was a difficult topic to talk about.

“I’m devastated. The only thing I can tell you is this. I stopped living after that happened… I don’t know, I have no words… I only thought about my family, my parents, trying to overcome this with them. There are situations that are beyond my control, that don’t depend on me,” Santana told Bolivian newspaper El Deber‘s journalist Erick Ortega in 2023.

Despite an official request by Bolivia to Interpol for his arrest and the fact that his location was easily discovered by journalists, he was never sought by the Uruguayan authorities for all that period. The El Pais story seems to have been a game changer.

Uruguay’s top bishop, Cardinal Daniel Sturla, told the press that his country’s Church has never received any complaint against Santana, given that the crimes occurred in Bolivia.

“If he’s guilty, he must respond for the situations that he lived,” Sturla told the local news show Telemundo of Canal 12 TV station.

Susana Inch Sáinz, a legal advisor for the Bolivian Bishops’ Conference, told Crux that the Church has done all it could at the time of the scandal in order to allow Santana to be held responsible, but it was not up to it to detain him.

“The case was reported at the time by Archbishop Solari upon learning what had happened, pledging full cooperation to establish responsibilities. However, the actions of the judicial system did not guarantee the detention of the then investigated person,” Inch said.

At that time, she argued, there was no clarity as there is today in canonical regulations concerning the adequate reaction to that type of situation.

“But Solari acted by publicly denouncing the incident to the civil authorities and followed the canonical procedure that determined the resignation from the clerical state of the then priest,” she added.

The Church cannot restrict the right to liberty, nor does it have the power to detain or imprison, Inch said.

“That is the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts, in this case, the Bolivian justice. It’s inexplicable that the necessary precautions were not taken at the time or later, given that the location of the accused was already known through the press,” Inch said. Now, she hopes that justice is finally served.

The Bolivian Community of Survivors of Ecclesial Sex Abuse also considers that Santana has remained unpunished for too long.

“His detention is an important step towards truth and justice. We think that, with his arrival in Bolivia after the extradition process, he will face trial and some justice will be made concerning the victims,” Edwin Alvarado, a spokesperson for the Network, told Crux.

He said his group has been in touch with the victims, who have also been supported by local civic organizations, and will keep accompanying the case.