SÃO PAULO, Brazil – Abuse cases committed by Catalan Jesuits in Bolivia will be investigated by the Catalan ombudsman – an office appointed by the regional parliament – following a request from the South American country’s Survivors’ Community.
The group accuses the Catalan province of the Society of Jesus in Spain of turning Bolivia into a kind of “dumping ground for pedophiles” by sending Jesuits there; they were known to have committed sex crimes.
The Bolivian complaints were added to an ongoing investigation into abuse cases reported by former students of Barcelona’s Casp–Sagrat Cor de Jesús School, launched by the parliament’s ombudsman in 2023 after dozens of allegations emerged.
Some of the priests reported by Casp students, like Father Francesc Peris (known as Padre Cesc), were sent to Bolivia, where they continued their history of abuse.
Cesc, for example, had been abusing people in Catalonia since the 1960s. After several complaints, his province decided to transfer him to South America in 1983. There, he worked at the Juan XXIII School in Cochabamba.
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Cesc Peris — who was widely known as an abuser at Casp, to the point that students nicknamed him “Sex Penis” — stayed in Cochabamba for only a year, but that was enough time for him to make new victims.
One of his victims described how Peris “would go from bed to bed” at night in the girls’ dormitory at Juan XXIII. The number of abuses he committed in Cochabamba remains unknown. Not only girls were targeted – at least one boy reported being abused by him to the Survivors’ Community.
Peris was sent back to Barcelona the following year and continued abusing minors until 2004. In 2005, he was finally removed from the school and barred from working with minors. Earlier this year, a judge ruled that all of Peris’s crimes had reached their statute of limitations, so he will not be punished.
Father Lluís Tó González had a similar path. He spent years teaching at another Jesuit school in Catalonia and was eventually convicted of abusing an 8-year-old girl in 1992. He received a two-year prison sentence but was soon afterward sent by the Catalan province to Bolivia.
In South America, he repeatedly abused girls, especially vulnerable ones, such as the daughter of a cleaning woman in El Alto, near La Paz. Letters exchanged between Jesuit priests in Catalonia and the Bolivian provincial in the 1990s, Father Marcos Recolons, were discovered by Barcelona newspaper El Periódico and show that the order knew Tó continued committing sex crimes.
In 2024, the Catalan Jesuits disclosed to the press that since 1948, there have been 145 allegations of sexual abuse against members of the province. Tó is one of the most frequently accused priests, with 25 cases. He died in Bolivia in 2017 without facing punishment.
Another serial abuser in Bolivia from Catalonia was Father Luis Roma (known as Padre Lucho). Between 1994 and 2005, he lived in Charagua, a town in southeastern Bolivia with a predominantly Indigenous Guarani population.
Lucho kept dozens of photographs of Guarani girls – aged between 8 and 11 – in sexualized poses, which he took after persuading them to visit his room.
In his diary, he admitted to having let himself “be carried away, in some situations, by libidinous acts unbecoming of a religious.” An internal investigation into his crimes, involving 70 victims, was carried out by the Bolivian Jesuits in 2019. He died that same year.
According to Wilder Flores, head of the Survivors’ Community, Bolivia’s Society of Jesus only disclosed that inquiry in 2024 because it knew no penalty could be applied, since Lucho had died.
In 2023, the scandal involving Spanish Father Alfonso Pedrajas was revealed. He died in 2009, and his diary—detailing 85 abuse cases he committed over the years in Bolivia—was uncovered by the newspaper El País, sparking a major outcry in Bolivia.
Flores said he believes the revelation of Lucho’s crimes was driven by the pressure generated by Pedrajas’s case.
“They knew no consequences would follow from making the case public. But they ended up revealing the contents of the administrative procedure against Lucho Roma. Since then, several victims have seen the news, and some have even recognized themselves in the photographs,” he told Crux Now.
Two of the abused girls, now adults, decided last week to press charges against four former provincials and a priest of the Bolivian Society of Jesus. They accuse them of covering up Lucho’s crimes. The case will be handled by prosecutors in Santa Cruz.
Lucho Roma’s case is also connected to Catalonia in other ways. Flores recalled that his brother, Father Francesc Roma – also involved in at least one abuse case at the Casp school in the 1980s – visited Lucho in Bolivia in 1998.
“Letters show that Lucho invited his pedophile brother to experience ‘the delights of Charagua.’ The Catalan provincial allowed Francesc to come, and the Bolivian provincial accepted his visit,” Flores said.
Flores’s said Bolivia was treated by the Jesuits as a “dumping ground for pedophiles, since they would send here priests they knew had abused children in Spain.”
“That situation has international implications, so an international investigation is necessary if we want to establish the historical truth,” he said.
The Bolivian Survivors’ Community also urged the Catalan parliament to establish a committee to investigate crimes against humanity allegedly committed by the Society of Jesus.
“The cases of abuse attributed to several Jesuits in Bolivia ‘originate’ in Catalonia, as it has been the ‘mother’ province of the Society of Jesus in Bolivia since the 1950s. The main aggrieved party is the Bolivian state, as a criminal system has been created that has persisted for 69 years and remains unresolved to this day,” said legal expert Alejandro Klock Varas, the Survivors’ Community’s attorney, in a report released by the group.
In September 2025, a Cochabamba court found Father Marcos Recolons and another former provincial, Father Ramón Alaix, guilty of covering up Pedrajas’s crimes. They received a one-year prison sentence and were ordered to pay damages to the victims.
According to Edwin Alvarado, a spokesperson for the Survivors’ Community, progress on the Spanish front has a bittersweet feeling.
“We are optimistic because we understand that the investigation by the ombudsman and the Catalan parliament will help consolidate the historical truth that we have been building in Bolivia regarding ecclesiastical sexual abuse, as a foundation for continuing the pursuit of comprehensive justice,” he told Crux Now.
At the same time, however, “we view this development with shame, because in Bolivia we were unable to establish a bicameral, multiparty parliamentary truth commission that is autonomous, funded, and independent.”
