Bolivian Survivors Urge Leo XIV on Abuse Cases
An open letter asks for a meeting during his South America trip and demands a final Church response to long-unresolved Jesuit-linked abuse.
On Saturday, November 7, 2026, the Bolivian Community of Survivors (CBS) sent an open letter to Pope Leo XIV asking for a “just and definitive institutional response” to the sexual abuse of minors in Bolivia, chiefly cases involving Jesuits in various missions.
The appeal comes ahead of the Pope’s planned visit to Uruguay, Argentina, and Peru. The group asked him to “include a space” during the journey to hear Bolivian victims of clerical abuse.
What the letter alleges
CBS states that “the Bolivian abuse crisis has not found an adequate institutional response,” even after formal complaints to the Bolivian Episcopal Conference (CEB), the Apostolic Nunciature, and Cardinal Toribio Ticona. The letter says impunity reigned “in all cases” involving Jesuits because of an “institutional framework that facilitated their crimes and protected them,” and it implicates the Society of Jesus in Spain and Bolivia as well as the order’s Curia General in Rome.
The text describes several “serious” and “documented” cases spanning decades. Most of the accused Jesuits are now deceased. At the Tacata home for orphaned children in Cochabamba, CBS cites “nearly 150 victims” allegedly abused by at least five Jesuits. At Colonia Piraí in Santa Cruz, it identifies “another 150 victims” of priests and lay people in alleged “serial rape.” It also cites 35 victims linked to the NGO Defensa de Niños Internacional, whose former director, a priest, is accused.
The most widely discussed file concerns the Juan XXIII school in Cochabamba. CBS says it has identified “400 victims” of five Jesuits who served as directors, educators, nurses, and spiritual guides, including the Spaniard Alfonso Pedrajas, who died in 2009. A diary attributed to Pedrajas has been described as recounting alleged abuse of dozens of children while he led the school from 1971. Former Spanish Jesuit provincials Marcos Recolons and Ramón Alaix were sentenced to one year in prison for covering up Pedrajas’s abuse. CBS recently asked the Archdiocese of Cochabamba to excommunicate both men; the archdiocese replied that it “has no competence” to handle the demand.
The letter also names the Spanish priest Luis Roma, who died in 2019 and is accused of abusing “more than 75 indigenous Guaraní girls.” Four former senior Jesuit officials are under investigation for “aggravated rape cover-up.” The order has acknowledged that the abuse was “plausible.” Early public accounts of the Roma case drew on a complaint by a former member of the order who sought anonymity and on about thirty photographs said to show the priest in sexualized scenes with children aged 6 to 12.
Church context
The survivors’ request is framed as an appeal for justice and pastoral listening under the Pope’s authority, not as a judgment already rendered by Rome. Catholic teaching insists on the dignity of every person, the protection of minors, truth-seeking processes, and care for victims, while due process and the presumption of innocence remain for living persons still under investigation or without final conviction.
CBS presents its letter as a call for the Holy See and local Church authorities to complete unfinished institutional responses in Bolivia so that survivors are heard and remaining cases are not left in silence.