(BOLIVIA)
The Pillar [Washington DC]
September 3, 2025
By Edgar Beltrán
Two superiors we handed one year prison sentences on Tuesday, both of which are expected to be commuted
A Bolivian court sentenced two Jesuit priests on Sept. 2 to one year in prison for covering up the abuse of disgraced Fr. Alfonso Pedrajas, SJ. Pedrajas was accused of abusing at least 85 boys during his time in Bolivia and left a diary attesting to his crimes.
The priests convicted of covering up abuse, Fr. Marcos Recolons SJ and Fr. Ramón Alaix SJ, served as provincials of the Society of Jesus in Bolivia from 1993-1999 and 1999-2007, respectively. Pedrajas, who died in 2009, spent much of his ministry in Bolivia, including running a school for boys from poor rural families.
Recolons also served as councilor general of the Society of Jesus in Rome between 2004 and 2012.
According to the court ruling, both Recolons and Alaix knew of Pedrajas’ abuse both from Pedrajas himself and a number of his victims but did not notify authorities or file criminal complaints and, in some instances, pressured alleged victims not to file complaints.
Despite the one year jail sentences imposed by the court, however, neither Alaix or Recolons are likely to spend actual time in prison, as Bolivia applies an automatic commutation to most sentences of less than three years in prison.
During the trial, the prosecution presented complaints of 18 victims of Pedrajas, the accounts of 34 witnesses, and 21 pieces of material evidence, including internal documents of the Society of Jesus that were argued to prove local superiors knew of Pedrajas’ prolific abuse.
The prosecution argued during the trial’s closing statements that “it was shown that some victims of abuse were able to tell the provincials about Pedrajas’ conduct. Nonetheless, even though [the provincials] had an obligation to investigate, as the victims were minors, they didn’t take any protective measures.”
Pedrajas’ abuse became public after Spanish newspaper El País published an extensive investigation in April 2023 after obtaining a diary in which Pedrajas himself narrated his many predatory attacks and how many Jesuit friends and superiors knew about his crimes.
Pedrajas confessed in his diary to have abused at least 85 minors between 1972 and the early 2000s in various schools run by the Jesuits.
In the diary, Pedrajas also detailed how many of his superiors, including Recolons and Alaix, acted to protect him.
After the El Pais report, the Bolivian prosecutor’s office opened an investigation and charged Alaix and Recolons with covering up abuse in March this year.
According to the Bolivian prosecutor’s office, hundreds of internal documents were seized in the offices of the Society of Jesus in La Paz and Cochabamba in May 2023, and that some of them showed that the Society’s hierarchy had received internal complaints of abuse against Pedrajas and other priests, and decided to cover them up, move the priests to different assignments or offer payments to victims.
El País also reported that it obtained documents from Bolivian authorities showing letters to the then–Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Fr. Peter Hans Kolvenbach, outlining the reasons behind the reassignment of priests across Bolivia.”
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The diary of “Padre Pica,” as Pedrajas was known, has been described as a horrific but possibly unique insight into the life and mind of a serial sexual abuser, and the ecclesiastical culture which allowed him to continue preying on minors for decades.
Covering nearly 50 years of ministry, the diary was returned by the priest’s male lover to Pedrajas’ family in Madrid shortly after his death in 2009. It was stored in an attic until 2021, when one of Pedrajas’ nephews took it on himself to contact the Bolivian schools where Pedrajas committed his crimes, as well as the superiors of the Society of Jesus.
After he attempted to report what he learned from his uncle’s diary to Jesuit superiors, the priest’s nephew told El País that he was not given any update or information on a possible investigation, prompting him to go to the press.
Throughout the diary, in addition to detailing his serial predations upon boys, Pedrajas also recounted at least seven Jesuit superiors with whom he discussed his abuse, some in the context of sacramental confession, but many not.
In one case, Pedrajas recalls that the Jesuit responsible for preparing him for his final religious profession told him not to mention the abuse of minors in his confessions, that “nothing is going to happen to [him],” and to think of his crimes as “isolated cases.”
Still, on at least one occasion in the 1980s, the priest appeared to have been given some kind of punishment —- he was sent by his superiors for a year to work as a laborer in a Bolivian mining camp.
Pedrajas’ diary also included documents, added by the priest, including evaluations by his superiors, discussing his suitability for other roles. He was put in charge of novices for the region in 1989 but, while he was discussed as a candidate for promotion to superior, the evaluations concluded that Pedrajas was “manipulative” and had “certain philias and phobias” over which he lacked self-control, though abuse of minors was not specifically mentioned.
He remained a novice instructor until 1998, when he was placed in charge of new Jesuit initiates after their first religious professions.
In 1997, Pedrajas returned to Spain for several months and met with a Salesian priest and psychologist who advised him, according to his diary, to “see the dignity of these defenseless people” he was abusing but to “avoid feelings of, and fixations on, guilt” about what he was doing and instead focus on the need to distinguish between consensual and non consensual sexual encounters.
The priest told Pedrajas that “the most important thing is not the sexual issue, but the need for tenderness and affection” in his abuse. Pedrajas himself wrote that he told superiors of his “need to be loved” which “for years has led me to seek affection where it was not appropriate.” Throughout his diary, Pedrajas referred to his crimes as sexual and religious “repression.”
At different times, Pedrajas also recorded feelings of shame and guilt about his abuse, which grew after some of his former students began contacting his parents in Spain to tell them their son was an abuser.
The priest also wrote about the international reporting of the Spotlight scandals in the Archdiocese of Boston in 2002, saying that reading the coverage left him feeling “trapped between two walls (the past and the present) and they are closing in on me, crushing me.”