P. Alfonso Pedrajas, S.J.

“Padre Pica.” Spanish. Taught as a seminarian 1961-1971 at schools in Bolivia, at Colegio Colombia in Lima, Peru, and in Ecuador. He settled into ministry in 1971 at a boarding school in Bolivia. Pedrajas died in September 2009. In 2023 El Pais reported that Pedrajas had admitted in a diary to sexually abusing dozens of children, mostly in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and that the Jesuits covered it up. Pedrajas’ nephew discovered the diary in an attic in 2021. He said he contacted the order in Bolivia but they did not want to take responsibility. The nephew then contacted the press. The Jesuit provincial told El Pais that it had opened a preliminary canonical investigation. An April 1964 entry in Pedrajas’ diary reveals that he made his “first mistake” in Miraflores, Lima, Peru. He confessed his abuses in 1978 to his Jesuit superior in Madrid, Spain, who told him to keep it quiet and not to give up teaching.