P. Emeterio Castañeda Muñoz

Emeterio Marcial Castañeda Muñoz, a diocesan priest of the prelature of Huamachuco in northern Peru, is accused of taking part in parties in Trujillo in the late 1990s at which priests had sex with teenage boys for money. Allegations against him were reported to the congressional commission as well as to the media outlet Connectas, which in July 2020 published a blockbuster investigative piece on abuse and cover-up in the prelature of Huamachuco and the archdiocese of Trujillo.

A man who spoke to Connectas as “Andrés” said that between 1996 and 1998, when he was 16, Castañeda and four other priests organized or attended weekend night parties in Trujillo parishes and in a private house where they had sex with minors for money. The congressional commission on sexual abuse, as summarized by the website Sudaca, named a complainant, J.M.B.R., whose account matches that of “Andrés:” it said that Castañeda and three other priests invited him at age 15 to parties of alcohol, cigarettes and sex, held from 1996 to 1998 at the parish of El Buen Pastor in El Porvenir, at other places near Trujillo and at the private house, where priests met boys aged 15 to 17.

Fr Á.C.M. told ACI Prensa that Castañeda and Tulio Montenegro were the most frequent visitors to a house Bishop Sebastián Ramis Torrens bought in Trujillo for travelling clergy, where, he said, many atrocities were committed. According to Connectas, Castañeda’s alleged victims had already told their story to La República‘s magazine Domingo in 2000. In a letter of March 18, 2019 to the journalist Melissa Goytizolo, Huamachuco priests who had formed a commission to listen to victims named Castañeda among the priests they said were implicated in sexual crimes.

On January 2, 2016, a group of Huamachuco priests had written to Bishop Ramis objecting to what they said was the favorable treatment he gave to Castañeda and four other priests against whom there were already accusations of sexual crimes. Ramis, a Franciscan of the Third Order Regular, had been the prelate since 1991. After a television report on abuse in the prelature in February 2016, Ramis set up a commission of inquiry; the prelature later said it suspended the priests involved on March 1, 2016 and sent its findings to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which directed that administrative penal processes be opened.

ACI Prensa reported in August 2020 that both church and civil authorities had acquitted Castañeda and three other accused diocesan priests for lack of evidence. Sudaca, drawing on the congressional report, says the cases of the five victims it examined, J.M.B.R.’s among them, were closed by prosecutors as time-barred or for lack of evidence. In August 2020, Castañeda reportedly was still serving as a priest in the prelature of Huamachuco. His current status is not publicly known.