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Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
June 1, 2026
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
Sexual abuse happens on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border: while in Texas a priest could face life imprisonment, in Chihuahua nothing happens.
In Texas, Anthony Odiong refused a plea offered by the state attorney’s office and now waits for a sentence that could put him in jail for life for abusing his flock.
In Mexico, Catholic priests find ways to avoid accountability regarding abuse, while the Luz del Mundo Church gets ready to spin off, to become a political party.
The time is all but ripe for binational stories. What was called back in the 1980s the Spirit of San Antonio, the first approach between the U.S. and Mexican governments of the day that would evolve into what is now the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement is probably dead.
But the proximity remains an undisputed fact for Mexico and the United States, for those who live on the border, for people who have spent time on both sides of the Rio Grande, and even more for those who travel back and forth. This is all the more evident when it comes to the seemingly endless clergy sexual abuse crisis.
Even a casual observer, one who is not following the crisis to the dot, cannot dismiss the clues. North of the border, “things happen”: priests are arrested and sentenced or, at least, clearly disciplined by their dioceses; reparations are paid; dioceses go bankrupt, and bishops must acknowledge the scale of the damage.
South of the border, “nothing happens:” in the extreme cases where a priest is arrested, there is a chance for him to go scot-free on technicalities; victims are systematically revictimized, Catholic lay persons in social media still portray the Catholic Church as the victim of a conspiracy, and bishops follow the 3D decades-old playbook: delay, deny, dismiss.
More recently, north of the Rio Grande, in Texas, the news is dominated by the swift conclusion of a jury trial in Waco. On May 29, a jury of twelve found Catholic priest Anthony Odiong guilty on three felony counts of sexual assault for exploiting his clerical authority to abuse female parishioners under his spiritual direction.
Arrested in Florida in 2024 after fleeing Texas, Odiong’s conviction underscores the potency of a specific Texas statute that treats sexual coercion by a religious cleric as a first-degree felony—carrying a potential life sentence.
Odiong was originally born in Nigeria and ordained there in 1993 for the diocese of Uyo, Nigeria. The diocese sits in the southern state of Akwa Ibom. Although overwhelmingly Protestant—with Catholicism a clear minority—Akwa Ibom acts as the heart of the Nigerian Bible Belt, a region where male religious leaders exert overwhelming, unchecked authority over their flocks.
An “invitation”
Like many other Catholic priests ordained in Africa, Odiong moved to the U.S. in 2006 with the approval of his then bishop (now at Calabar), Joseph Effiong Ekuwem to serve in the diocese of Austin, Texas, although later, for undisclosed reasons, he moved east, to New Orleans, Louisiana, where regulations and enforcement are less stringent than in Texas, although he managed to become a U.S. citizen.
Formally, he was following bishop Gregory Michael Aymond, who originally “invited” Odiong when he was the bishop of Austin, Texas. When Aymond got the jewel of the U.S. Catholic South, the archdiocese of New Orleans in 2009, Odiong got a new “invitation” to minister.
Perhaps Aymond was already aware of some issue, hence his preference for the figure of the invitation, a mechanism that can be rescinded at will, a fuse a Catholic bishop can blow at will. However, it is almost impossible to know what really happened as New Orleans and other dioceses in Louisiana have made a name for themselves when trying to avoid transparency and accountability.
But the fact that he was getting these “invitations” and not following a formal incardination process is already suspect. This is more relevant as he was appointed as pastor of a parish, a job usually reserved for either incardinated priests, that is to say, priests formally associated to the diocese, or offered to a religious order that appoints with the bishop’s approval the pastor.
More so when one takes into consideration that there was no way for Odiong to become a U.S. citizen on his own. The process, especially after 9/11, makes it almost impossible for an individual on his own to go through the labyrinth-like process. One needs a massive support from either relatives, friends or employers to hit the right notes when trying to become a citizen.
When the first formal charges were filed in Texas, Odiong moved further east, to Florida. It was there in 2024, where U.S. Marshals tracked him down near a hotbed of radical conservative Catholicism and resistance against Pope Francis, the Ave Maria University, where he ultimately lost his freedom.
It should be noted that during his time in Louisiana Odiong was in touch with Lawrence Hecker, at the time a Catholic priest and fellow sexual predator, who avoided the kind of trial Odiong faced in Texas because he entered a guilty plea in 2024.
During his bail hearings, Texas prosecutors successfully fought to keep Odiong’s bond at 5.5 million dollars, to emphasize he was a flight risk to his native Nigeria, where he was actively building a luxury home and instructing parishioners as to how to use funds he was wiring from the U.S.
Odiong rejected a plea deal offered by the Texan authorities after his 2024 arrest. The deal involved a fast-track sentence of 20-year jail. In doing so, Odiong was gambling a life sentence. After a swift trial, that is precisely the kind of punishment he faces.
South of the border
South of the Rio Grande, in Chihuahua, the news is that there is no news. Despite the many pending cases, in Chihuahua, as in Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas, the four Mexican states sharing the border with Texas, nothing happens. Not that there are no cases or no reports. Quite the opposite. Reports abound, what there is not is the will of police, district attorneys and judges to do what Texas did: probe reports, build a case, send to a judge, and get a conviction.
Los Angeles Press has been following some of the Mexican cases as part of its ongoing coverage of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, especially those from the diocese of Ciudad Juárez, as a proxy for what happens in the state of Chihuahua at large, but also as a proxy for the will of the Mexican bishops to actually improve their benchmarks as to how to handle the sexual abuse crisis.
What follows is the disheartening comparison as to how the police and judiciary in Texas are able to achieve certain goals, offering a measure of justice to the victims, while justice in Chihuahua, Mexico, and Latin America at large remains stagnant in a scenario where victims are forced to deal on their own with the effects of abuse, with no hope or expectation of a solution to their claims.
As previous installments of this series have proved, the issue is not that of the Catholic Church’s theology or even its own internal rules, as those have been proved to be lax to the point of being irrelevant or non-existent for practical purposes, but what the systems of justice are able to achieve or not when confronted to a similar challenge.
This series has provided comparisons of the kind of plight victims of clergy sexual abuse confront in Mexico and the United States. Over two additional installments, the series compared what happens in the Catholic dioceses of California (see above), with the deceitful tranquility one sees in their sister dioceses in the Mexican Baja Californias.
What the comparison proved is that theology or doctrine plays no actual role, as both remain the same both sides of the border. What is more relevant, despite the similarities of Catholicism across the border, there are stark differences in behavior depending on what side of the border abuse happens. While the Catholic dioceses in the United States must comply with stern regulations, in Mexico and, for the most part, all over Latin America, such regulations are either absent or, what is worse, unenforced.
Before, back in 2023, the series offered a broad comparison of how the dioceses of the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, dealt with their own cases, as the story linked below proves.
While El Paso was willing to acknowledge clergy sexual abuse as a reality and, as such, willing to comply with Vatican directives to create at least a commission to deal with the issue in its own territory on top of being forced by Texan authorities to comply with the stern state laws on clergy sexual abuse, Ciudad Juárez did its best to deny the very existence of cases.
Far from correcting such behavior, despite the lip service to the alleged existence of a “lay state” in Mexico, the authorities in Chihuahua as in any of the other 31 jurisdictions in Mexico are more than willing to forget or dismiss clergy sexual abuse claims.
And Juárez has plenty, some of them able to gain traction in media across the border and in Mexican national media, as in the case of Aristeo Baca, a favorite of former governor and current senator of Chihuahua, Javier Corral. What is worse, Ciudad Juárez was for reasons only known to the diocesan curia there, unwilling to at least set up a commission to prevent clergy sexual abuse, until very recently.
While Baca’s high-profile conviction in 2021 remains paralyzed in a multi-year federal amparo (habeas corpus) limbo that protects his house arrest, the case of another Juárez (former?) priest, Istíbal Valenzuela, exposes the more aggressive side of the curia’s cover-up apparatus.
A summary
The father of one of his victims summarizes the situation as follows:
First, regarding ecclesiastical matters: absolutely nothing has happened. My daughter’s abuser continued serving as a vicar in parishes from 2023 to 2025. Suddenly, he disappeared. He no longer appears in the media.
According to an email sent to me by the diocese’s Abuse Prevention Commission, this individual has not exercised his priesthood since May 9, 2025, but I was not told whether he is suspended, if he requested leave, or if this resulted from a canonical process—which I highly doubt. It is also unclear whether he was transferred to another diocese or if he was laicized or reduced to the lay state.
All the individuals involved in the cover-up—all the priests implicated in covering up for this guy—remain active. And well, it is fully documented to all the Catholic Church authorities that they are doing nothing about this deeply flawed process.
Second, the State Human Rights Commission, the ombudsman of Chihuahua, has just issued a ruling in our favor. It is a recommendation to the Attorney General’s Office and the Deputy Attorney General’s Office for the Protection of Children and Adolescents of Chihuahua.
It was a very tortuous path that lasted five years; however, despite the fact that the newly appointed head of the commission expedited the processing of the recommendation and managed to issue it, there are officials who are obstructing it. I dare say they participated in the re-victimization of my daughter, and they remain active within the State Human Rights Commission.
One of them is Alejandro Carrasco Talavera, who was the interim head of the commission. The other is the individual who was recently named head of the Ciudad Juárez office of the Commission, Eduardo Sáenz Frías, who currently faces an administrative proceeding for negligence and a series of irregularities he committed while serving as an investigator from 2022 to 2025 regarding our case.
And third, the State Attorney General’s Office of Chihuahua (Northern Zone) has done absolutely nothing from 2022 to the present date. There are lower court and appellate judges who have ordered the head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Verónica Gaspar, to conduct further investigative actions, and she refuses to carry them out. She hides from the attorneys handling the case and stalls on summoning specialized personnel. There are actions she must execute, such as summoning individuals from the diocese, and so forth, and she has not done so. Basically, that is what has happened.
A story of impunity
As noted by the father of the victim, who remains a minor in a case originally exposed by Los Angeles Press in 2023, although only in Spanish (see the story linked below or here as an automated translation), Istíbal Valenzuela provides a perfect example of how priests and their lay employees cover up for predatory clergy.
As noted by the father of the victim, the diocese of Ciudad Juárez moved Valenzuela as a vicar to shield his predatory behavior, and he is now in some sort of canonical limbo, quietly removed from public ministry.
What is clear, however, is that his digital footprint was scrubbed from the web pages and social media accounts controlled by the diocese of Ciudad Juárez. Not that such accounts are truly informative. Best case scenario they are designed to pretend that they represent a very active diocesan community.
Valenzuela’s “disappearance” at least in the diocese’s social media accounts, where he used to be a frequent flier, has happened almost at the same time that, for unknown reasons, Pope Leo XIV decided to transfer bishop José Guadalupe Torres Campos from Juárez to Ecatepec, a massive, densely populated diocese almost coterminous with the eponymous municipality north of Mexico City.
Torres Campos’s transfer happens at a time when in Rome the general secretariat of the Synod acknowledged the need for more transparency and accountability in the process for selecting candidates to bishop. Vatican News published a story on the issue, available here and a summary of the report from the Synod’s office is available here.
In that respect, it is impossible to think of Torres Campos’s transfer as a prize or a promotion, unless it is an attempt to familiarize Torres Campos with any of the two major Catholic Church sees in central Mexico about to be open: the archdioceses of Mexico City and Tlalnepantla. If that is the case, then Rome will be sending all the wrong messages as to what is the route a Mexican bishop must follow to advance his career.
Ecatepec needed a bishop there is no question about that as, despite his lackluster performance, Oscar Roberto Domínguez Couttolenc, the previous prelate there, got a promotion to archbishop of Tulancingo in mid-2024 and since then the diocese was vacant.
Reveries of Ecatepec
But one needs to be aware of the kind of challenge Ecatepec is on its own. Little over two decades ago, as an example of how pervasive is violence in that region of Mexico, even in religious settings, there was the monstruous 2005 assassination of a male teenager by his own father.
Dagoberto Valle Arriaga, the murderous father, happened to be a priest in the neighboring diocese of Texcoco, at the time under the aegis of the current archbishop of Mexico City, Cardinal Carlos Aguiar Retes. Valle Arriaga lured his own teenager son into Ecatepec to kill him as a way to end a series of conflicts where the teenager was willing to dare Valle Arriaga with outing him as a Catholic priest.
In other words, Valle Arriaga, a priest in Texcoco, killed his own son in Ecatepec to prevent a sudden end to his ecclesiastical career, the same reason why Renato Poblete, the Chilean predator, a Jesuit champion of social justice in the last decades of the 20th century, forced his female victims of clergy sexual abuse to have abortions when he got them pregnant.
Although at first the case was swiftly addressed and framed as one of domestic violence, resulting in a 55-years sentence, the maximum allowed at the time by Mexican law, Valle Arriaga barely remained six years in jail. Silently, with little or no notice to the public, in November 2013, the federal judiciary granted him an amparo (habeas corpus) letting him walk free.
Formally, the federal court exposed a catastrophic structural failure in how the prosecution built the case: the state had pushed for a maximum sentence for kidnapping and homicide without ever locating the boy’s physical corpse.
By failing to produce the remains, and thus failing to provide the so-called corpus delicti—the physical body of evidence required by law to prove a crime occurred—the state’s apparatus left open a massive procedural back door, allowing the former priest to walk out of prison and audaciously demand that Rome restore his rights as a priest. It is anybody’s guess to figure out if this was “an honest mistake” or if this is just one more example of how Mexican (and Latin American) justice fails by design to offer this kind of easy exits to criminals.
Even if one puts those issues aside, the black box of the Juárez diocesan curia and the calculated inertia of Chihuahua’s justice system are hitting a wall. Defying the domestic institutional exhaustion that usually swallows these cases, the father of one of Istíbal Valenzuela’s victims has been pushing past local barriers to escalate the case all the way to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH).
He is not following the route Argentine survivors have been going through. One way or the other, in Argentina, the victims of former priest Justo José Ilarraz know where the Argentina judiciary stands on his and other cases, as the story linked after this paragraph told a couple of weeks ago.
The victims in Argentina are aware of how the country’s Supreme Court decided to grant informal impunity to Justo José Ilarraz by sticking to a formalist take on the statute of limitations. In Mexico, the issue is that whether one goes into the swamp of Aristeo Baca’s case or one goes into the Istíbal Valenzuela’s quagmire, nothing happens, it is a huge bank of fog like those at the top of the tallest peaks in the Sierra Madre in Chihuahua.
The international escalation in Ciudad Juárez is a move by a father seeking to strip the Mexican judiciary of its capacity to hide behind administrative backlogs, forcing Mexican federal and state authorities to answer for the structural impunity it guarantees to religious predators by delaying as much as possible any significant resolution on these kinds of cases.
Main problem there, of course, is the ill will that the Catholic Church engenders in Ciudad Juárez and anywhere a parent sees him or herself in a similar situation, well aware of how both the Church, the state and the federal authorities are unwilling to offer a measure a justice in these cases for reasons that have nothing to do with the Mexican institutional design, as the politicians boast every March 21st, as loud as they can, the notion of an allegedly “lay state.”
Voting for predators
But these issues are relevant not only for the Catholic Church. Over the last four years, Mexicans on both sides of the border have witnessed how first the state of California and later the U.S. Department of Justice, dismantled the U.S. side of a binational network of clergy sexual abuse at the Luz del Mundo (Light of the World) Church.
Guía Garden Grove
The Luz del Mundo Church is a Pentecostal denomination born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, that expanded in Mexico into Baja California, Chihuahua and other states on the border, and in the United States into California, Texas, Illinois, and other states with large Mexican populations.
While Naasón Joaquín García was first charged and declared guilty in a trial in California, and now is part of a federal process, in Mexico the authorities were unwilling to act against him and his accomplices in Jalisco, Baja California and other Mexican states.
Putting aside the weakness of law enforcement in Mexico on this or any other case or issue, in Mexico some of the Luz del Mundo Church’s ability to exempt itself from any accountability stems from its prowess as an election partner, a fact that came to full display late last week when the current leaders of that religious organization put once again to test the alleged existence of the so-called “lay State” in Mexico when letting the world know about their intention to become a political party.
In their new reality where Naasón Joaquín García, their unchallenged prophet and leader, is expected to spend several decades in jails, from California to New York, where he is facing U.S. federal sex trafficking charges, the Luz del Mundo Church did what other religious organizations in Latin America do frequently: they spin off.
Usually, they mutate into either firms or non-for-profits as a way to disguise their activities, as the stories devoted to the Peruvian Sodalitium in this series (see the stories linked above and below) have proven.
In this rather extreme case, the bet is into spinning off into a political party, probably as a way to seize most of the influence they are able to exert over their flock at this point, before more details about the kind of criminal enterprise become public in the federal trial about to happen in New York. Perhaps this will be the last time they are able to offer themselves as a loyal voting bloc to larger parties willing to pay the price of a coalition with them.
Registered as the Humanist Party of Jalisco (Partido Humanista de Jalisco), the new entity already got its first win after the election authority in that Mexican state approved their application and they are now only waiting for the final approval of the Mexican national elections’ authority.
Granted, if the national election authority does not raise a major objection to the state authority ruling, they will not be able to join a coalition, but they will be able to register candidates on their own for the Jalisco state 2027 midterms. If the U.S. federal trials can be delayed to the Fall of 2027, there is a chance they could have enough votes to secure one or two state representatives, allowing them to enter the standard practices of political horse trading in the state legislature and perhaps in the 2030 general election.
Post Data
Almost at the same time the verdict was known in Waco, on the other side of the world, in La Paz, the Bolivian judiciary ratified a sentence involving three former superiors of the Society of Jesus, the so-called Jesuits in that Latin American country.
Their case has been explored in more detail in the installments linked above and below this paragraph. In a nutshell, is about the ways in which the Jesuits send to Bolivia priests with a known record of sexual abuse without preventing it. The fact that the predators were European, Spaniards to be more precise, and the victims were, for the most part, underage members of marginalized First Nations communities just adds a somber, deeper, racialized, aspect to the kind of abuse that happened there over several decades.
What matters in any case is that even if they remain guilty, there is the issue of how much of this ruling is related to the ongoing political crisis there, given the standing accusations against Evo Morales, the former President there, who is accused of abusing at least a minor.
Is the concurring sentence against the Jesuits a way to boost the case against Morales? Even if there is no rational reason for such a scenario, it is hard to dismiss the possibility that it is part of a larger political move to find a way to send Morales to jail.
Also, it is necessary to keep an eye on the ongoing trial in Málaga, Spain, of Francisco Javier Cuenca Villalba, a priest associated to the local diocese who, on top of being in a relatively stable “relationship” with one of his victims, abused at least three other women who sought his advice as a priest.
As he did with his “girlfriend,” Cuenca Villalba would drug his other three victims, rape them, record the sexual assault, and then go into editing and curating videos of his aggressions.
His modus operandi is reminiscent of the former husband of Giselle Pelicot, the French survivor whose husband drugged and “offered” her to other males, with some of the evidence being digitally recorded. It is also reminiscent of a Brazilian case told in detail in the story linked below.
It is still unknown the outcome in Cuenca Villalba’s case although the prosecutor is seeking a sentence of up to 72 years of prison and reparations for the victims.
His superior, the bishop of Málaga, José Antonio Satué Huerto, offered that, even if the judge was unwilling to ask for reparations, his diocese would pay for them.
Finally, up in France, a new debate about setting limits to the confession secret is emerging. Pope Leo XIV is scheduled to travel to the Basilica of Our Lady of Lourdes, near the border with Spain.
Survivors of the large-scale clergy sexual abuse practices at the now defunct Catholic school of Our Lady of Bétharram are asking the Pontiff to meet with them as are victims from other similar cases in France.
It is hard to know how far the French lawmakers will be willing to go on this issue. Similar attempts in the United States have failed, the most recent in Oregon, although only because of the intervention of the current federal government.
As a measure of how sensitive the issue is, one can see how, late on Friday, when usually the French Conference of Bishops’ social media accounts are at ease, CEF (after its French language acronym) published the statement, available only in French after this paragraph.
How willing is the French public to accept the bishops’ rationale against a law forcing them and their priests to immediately report abuse even if known within the context of confession is anybody’s guess at this time.
It is clear that CEF has been light-years ahead of any of its Latin American counterparts, but it is also clear that there is a certain fatigue with the inability of the French bishops to “read the room” when dealing with the pervasive effects of clergy sexual abuse.
More so as there is clear uncertainty about the future of the current French national government. The days where Emmanuel Macron’s charisma was able to seduce at least a working majority of the French electorate seem to be over.
Recent polling there gives Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s successor at the far-right National Rally, an overwhelming advantage in both a hypothetical snap Parliamentary election and in a presidential election scheduled for April 2027.
And as warm as Leo XIV has been recently when meeting survivors of clergy sexual abuse, in France his decision to appoint as member of Tutela Minorum a (former?) lawyer for some of the most predatory Catholic religious movements there is still the source of bitter commentary over French social media.
Back in April, Robert Prevost appointed French lawyer Laurent Delvolvé as member of Tutela Minorum. His appointment had a devastating effect in the French-speaking world, and even in the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds it was almost impossible to find a word of praise about the appointment.
On top of it, it eclipsed the appointment of Susan Lynn Bissell, a true expert on protecting minors and populations at risk, with more than 30 years of experience in leading roles at UNICEF.
Devolvé’s appointment is more troubling as Tutela Minorum’s official statement (available here) omitted his role as lawyer for French Catholic predatory movements.
Note on production: The text of this summary was written and edited solely by the author. The delivery of the audio summary was achieved using a high-quality, text-to-speech engine Microsoft Word for Web. The AI was used for voice generation only, not content creation.