Father Francesc Peris returned to Barcelona in 1984 after spending a year at the Juan XXIII school in Bolivia. There was a rumor in Casp’s Jesuits that he was an abuser. Enric knew this for a fact because he had been a victim of the priest in the 70s. During some social gatherings in Viladrau, Father Peris approached him in the pool, took off his swimsuit and abused him. Enric remembers that he almost drowned. “Since then I have suffered from an emotional disability,” he adds now that he is about to turn 60.
The Jesuits also knew that Peris was a pedophile. In 1983 they sent him to Bolivia to silence those rumors. There he “would go into the girls’ room when the light went out and touch their genitals,” explains one of the teachers at Juan XXIII, who reported the situation and got the priest to leave Bolivia.
The journalists Josep Morell, Guillem Sánchez and Marc M. Sarrado have traveled from Barcelona to Cochabamba and in both cities they have collected several testimonies from the victims of the Jesuits and have collected them in the documentary La fugida that premiered tonight at DocsBarcelona .
Testimonies like that of Laura, who was a victim of Peris in 1992 because, eight years after what happened in Bolivia, the priest was still active at the school on Casp Street. Alessandra also suffered something similar in 1992, but at the Jesuits of Sarrià. She was eight years old and Father Lluís Tó groped her every time she went to her office. The little girl told her parents, who took the priest to trial. He was sentenced to two years in prison, but did not go to prison. The order sent him to Cochabamba, to the Juan XXIII school.
The Bolivian witnesses who appear before the camera of The Fugida estimate that around 400 children were victims of sexual abuse by the Spanish Jesuits in their country. “There was a child who was abused by two Jesuits at the same time and there was also a fight between three priests who wanted to have relations with the same minor.”
Father Tó has already passed away. Father Peris still lives, in a residence of the order near Valladolid, but he has not been prosecuted because the crimes he committed have expired.
