EL PAÍS launched an investigation into clerical child sexual abuse in the Spanish Church in 2018 and maintains an updated database with all known cases. If you know of a case that has not come to light, you can write to us at: abusos@elpais.es. If it is a case in Latin America, the address is: abusosamerica@elpais.es.

───────────

Pope Leo XIV arrives in Peru on Wednesday, returning to the country where, as a bishop, he waged his most significant battle against clerical abuse within the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, one of Latin America’s most powerful ultraconservative Catholic groups.

Founded in Peru in 1971 and inspired by Spain’s Falange fascist organization, the group became the focus of a campaign that earned him many enemies, some of whom sought to discredit him during the most recent conclave. After Pope Francis dissolved the group in January 2025, Leo XIV took up the task of securing redress for victims. In May, he dispatched a special commissioner, Spanish priest Jordi Bertomeu, who opened a listening office in Lima for a month to receive testimony from those affected.

The Vatican investigation has identified around 250 victims, far more than were previously known, revealing the full scale of abuses within an organization that displayed cult-like characteristics. The abuses extended beyond sexual misconduct, including the abuse of power, as well as psychological, physical and spiritual abuse.

The most serious cases involved the medical and gynecological monitoring of young female members. According to two sources from the listening office team and testimonies gathered by EL PAÍS, at least 20 women underwent procedures to remove their ovaries. In the case of male members, those who showed signs of homosexuality were treated with psychotropic drugs and later paired in arranged marriages with women from the organization’s female branches.

The flood of new testimonies, and the severity of the accounts, has overwhelmed the listening office. Until now, the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae had acknowledged only 83 victims, both minors and adults, and says it has paid $5.3 million in compensation.

“It has been very difficult work. We have encountered people who are utterly broken. I have experience speaking with victims of human rights violations, but this was different. Their spiritual identity had been destroyed,” says one of the experts who worked on the team assisting victims.

“They entered the Sodalitium at a very young age, at 13 or 14. One pattern was to erase their emotional personality, and another was to separate them from their families,” adds the expert. “Inside it was like living in the 16th century, with a military discipline designed to break their will and a pattern of psychological and sexual abuse.”

Within the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, which was led by the charismatic layman Luis Fernando Figari, who has been accused of numerous acts of sexual abuse, there were two women’s branches: the Servants of the Plan of God and the Marian Community of Reconciliation.

In those communities, physical and psychological abuse caused menstrual problems, but superiors denied members medical treatment and, in some cases, pushed them toward having their ovaries removed.

“I knew a case directly: one of the girls had gynecological problems and they told her, ‘You already gave your life to God, what does it matter, take everything out,’” says Camila Bustamante, a Chilean journalist who belonged to the Servant of God’s Plan. “Years later she left, and now she cannot have children. For them you could only be a nun or a mother, and now she is neither.”

After speaking with 30 victims and their families, Bustamante published the book Siervas (Servants) in Chile in 2022, which exposed the abuses in this organization.

Bustamante says the scales fell from her eyes in 2015, when the scandal erupted in Peru following the publication of Mitad monjes, mitad soldados (Half Monks, Half Soldiers), by journalists Paola Ugaz and Pedro Salinas. At the time, she had just married a member of the Sodalitium, in keeping with another common practice within the group: internally arranged marriages.

“Love was secondary; the important thing was to fulfill God’s plan,” she recalls. She and her husband eventually came to realize that they, too, had been victims. Bustamante says she suffered spiritual abuse, manipulation and psychological mistreatment.

‘It is the tip of the iceberg’

“I think the Servants [of the Plan of God] were the cruelest of all the organizations within the Sodalitium,” says Bustamante.

The journalist describes sexual abuse between women, physical punishments, young women being “kidnapped” and locked in rooms for weeks, and offenses against their health, as superiors decided whether members would be allowed to see a doctor. She also recounts untreated accidents that left some women with permanent disabilities.

“There were many nervous breakdowns, panic, which trusted psychiatrists treated with medication at levels that left people drugged, unable to move,” she says. Bustamante says one girl was disabled because she was forced to go down a staircase without basic safety conditions, and others attempted suicide.

Bustamante recalls that many of these women returned to their families in their thirties after years of separation. Relatives who had not seen them since they were 18 found them emotionally devastated.

In her view, only “the tip of the iceberg” has so far emerged about the abuses committed within the Servants of the Plan of God and the wider Sodalitium Christianae Vitae. She believes women are more reluctant to report abuse and often fear that speaking out could harm the Catholic Church.

As for the men’s branches of the organization, the Vatican investigation uncovered a pattern of medical treatment involving the intensive use of psychiatric drugs.

“Yes, the famous Sodalitium psychiatrists, there were two of them,” recounts Renzo Orbegozo, another survivor of the organization. “They controlled promiscuity and homosexuality. A friend of mine was gay and they sent him to a psychiatrist to ‘cure’ it with medication. I also went to the psychiatrist; life in the Sodalitium caused anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts. When someone gave in, they drugged them. We were lab rats.”

One of the experts on the listening team confirms that the Sodalitium’s two trusted psychiatrists prescribed extremely powerful medications for years, drugs that are in fact intended to treat serious disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. “A young man who left later saw a psychiatrist and was astonished by all the medicines he had been taking, because after examining him, he was told he had nothing,” says the expert.

The Vatican’s investigation, however, has run into difficulties in tracing the vast financial empire of the Sodalitium in order to compensate victims, because the organization concealed its assets before it was dissolved, through a network of companies and offshore entities, according to press investigations.

In an unusual move that underscored Leo XIV’s commitment to the clean-up effort he has pursued in Peru, the Holy See sent a dossier to the Peruvian Attorney General’s Office in January over suspicions of possible money laundering and financial irregularities following the privatization of Church assets without Vatican authorization. The Attorney General’s Office nevertheless closed the case last month, a decision that associations representing Sodalitium victims have sharply criticized.

“We cannot accept that an investigation of this magnitude be closed without the public receiving sufficient explanations,” the groups said in a statement two weeks ago.

The organization’s abuses were not limited to sexual misconduct; they were also financial. The rural community of Catacaos, in Piura, has for years alleged that the Sodalitium stole its land through fraudulent documents and mafia-style methods. In an unprecedented gesture, cardinals and archbishops from Peru knelt before local residents last May to ask for forgiveness during a Mass celebrated in the community.

Criticism of Pope’s visit arrangements

Meanwhile, the media and legal harassment of the journalists who exposed the scandal, Pedro Salinas and Paola Ugaz, continues. The Vatican’s envoy, Jordi Bertomeu, has also been the target of a smear campaign, including through far-right Spanish digital media outlets.

Even so, victims say they are concerned that former Sodalitium leaders still wield influence in the country’s highest circles and that, in reality, it is the ultraconservative milieu aligned with the organization that is overseeing the Pope’s visit. The most conservative wing of the Peruvian Church dominates the Peruvian Bishops’ Conference, which long protected the Sodalitium, while the far-right government of President Keiko Fujimori appointed former minister and businessman Raúl Diez Canseco, who is regarded as close to that sector, to coordinate the visit.

Victims of sexual abuse within the Sodalitium fear they may be sidelined and denied a meeting with the Pope, despite having formally requested one. The same has happened to the rural community of Catacaos, which has received no response to its own request. Victims of political violence from Peru’s past also say that the Cardinal of Lima, Carlos Castillo, acting in line with Leo XIV, informed them that they would meet the Pope, only for the meeting to be dropped from the program.

The Vatican has confirmed that the pontiff will meet victims of clerical sexual abuse in Peru, but has provided no further details. “We have only our voice and the Pope’s support,” says Renzo Orbegozo. “We hope that in Peru he will deliver an explicit message of condemnation. We need to bring this process to a close. The Vatican has more powerful documentation that it could use. It should act.”

When he was a bishop in Peru, Leo XIV supported Sodalitium victims and the journalists investigating the organization. They now hope he will do the same as Pope when he arrives in Peru.

Paola Ugaz, the journalist who uncovered the scandal alongside Pedro Salinas, is pessimistic, though she still hopes the Pope’s visit can make a difference. “The outlook is worrying because they want to sweep the Sodalitium case under the rug,” she says. “Although it no longer exists in the Church, it is alive and well. One of the companies linked to them sued me again in October, which gives me the sad record of being a journalist facing legal proceedings for eight consecutive years.”

Ugaz continues: “My colleague Pedro Salinas could face 11 years in prison over a case that is a sham of lies. We find ourselves in a moment similar to others in the past: an organization bent on revenge, a tax system taken over by them and a media blackout around us. It is like living through Groundhog Day.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition

In November 2023, Grupo Vázquez, a business conglomerate with interests spanning virtually every sector of Paraguay’s economy, unveiled a new online bank intended to replicate the success of neobanks such as Revolut.

The venture, Ueno, grew at an extraordinary pace. In just three years, it went from being a complete unknown to becoming the institution where nearly three million Paraguayans, 60% of the adult population, deposited their money. That was the case until last Tuesday, when it suddenly collapsed.

Its rapid growth was fueled by an aggressive customer-acquisition strategy that at one point offered cashback of up to 40% on all purchases made with its credit card, as well as sports sponsorship deals that helped make the brand a household name. The model was entirely unsustainable. “It is the classic case of a disaster waiting to happen,” says former Paraguayan finance minister Dionisio Borda.

Ueno Bank was taken over by the Central Bank of Paraguay (BCP) last Tuesday. The regulator announced that it would immediately begin liquidation proceedings, and customers’ savings were frozen. Funds held in savings and deposit accounts will be covered by Paraguay’s Deposit Guarantee Fund, which insures up to 75 monthly minimum wages, equivalent to around 228.3 million guaraníes (about $38,000) per depositor. Repayment of deposits has already begun, although the process will be gradual. The bank held roughly $2.84 billion in deposits

The biggest challenge now, Borda tells EL PAÍS, is recovering the public funds deposited in Ueno. The bank’s growth was fueled by support from the central government, a scandal that led to the removal of president Santiago Peña last week after news of the collapse became public. The Paraguayan state had deposited as much as $850 million in public funds in the bank, including money from institutions such as the Social Security Institute (IPS), which administers the country’s social security system and pays pensions to 32,000 retirees. But the support Peña’s administration, an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, provided to the company went far beyond that.

The bank’s major breakthrough came in 2024 with its acquisition of Visión Banco. The takeover, which allowed Ueno to expand from a purely digital operation into a physical banking network, severely undermined its solvency. “It was bought without having the necessary funds,” says Manuel Ferreira, who served as Paraguay’s finance minister from 2012 to 2013.

The Central Bank of Paraguay allowed the lender to spread the losses from the acquisition across its balance sheet over a 20-year period. Until then, the maximum period permitted for such operations had been five years. Both Ferreira and Borda directly accuse the regulator of negligence and complicity for failing to warn about the hole in the bank’s finances.

“There is an obvious conflict of interest,” says Borda, referring to Carlos Carvallo, the president of the BCP.

Carvallo went from being chairman of Ueno Bank to leading the country’s central bank. He has now been forced to resign, along with Peña, who appointed him and is currently being held in pretrial detention. Paraguay’s former president owned shares in Ueno until 2025, when he gave them up amid public pressure. Both men are now facing intense public scrutiny.

“Both Peña and the BCP executives must be replaced; it is the only way to gradually restore confidence in the system,” says Borda, who served two terms as minister, from 2003 to 2008 and from 2008 to 2012. “It was impossible not to see what was happening.”

Sources at the Paraguayan Banking Association (Asoban) said they had repeatedly raised concerns with the BCP throughout 2025 and 2026, urging regulators to examine practices that could pose risks to the financial system. Their main concern was allegedly irregular lending to affiliated companies.

The crisis extends beyond Ueno itself. According to a BCP investigation leaked to the media and known as the Rivarola Report, the bank granted loans to companies within the same business group without adequate guarantees and failed to properly account for them on its balance sheet.

“A furniture store that might generate $1 million in revenue was given a $60 million loan,” explains Ferreira.

The central bank ordered Ueno to restate its accounts. Once those adjustments were made, the bank’s solvency ratios fell below the required minimum, forcing regulators to intervene. The collapse has not only brought down Ueno Bank but has also dragged a number of affiliated companies into the crisis.

For Carolina Arévalo, Tuesday was doubly devastating: she lost not only part of her savings but also her job. Arévalo worked as a journalist for VMedia, a media group owned by Grupo Vázquez. That morning, she received a message warning that she would no longer be able to withdraw money from her Ueno accounts. A few hours later, the company informed employees that it was imposing a temporary suspension of contracts and salaries for an initial period of 90 days. According to Arévalo, the group’s headquarters was effectively emptied out that same day.

Asoban insists that Paraguay’s financial system remains sound and has ample liquidity. “The problem is contained,” it says. The industry group adds that other financial institutions are working with the BCP to fund advances from the deposit guarantee scheme. As for public funds deposited in the bank, it cautions that “it is still not possible to determine how much will be recovered.” According to Asoban, “that will depend on the results of the bank resolution process, which is still in its early stages.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition

Rafael “R2″ Álvarez Ayala, one of the top leaders of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), was arrested on Sunday in Zapopan, part of the metropolitan area surrounding the Mexican city of Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco. Alongside him, 19 other people were detained following a shootout outside a restaurant, in which both the cartel leader and a member of the Mexican Navy were wounded. R2 remained hospitalized on Monday after the operation, which forms part of a broader campaign targeting senior figures within the CJNG, including the death of its founder and leader, Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, in February 2026.

Security analysts consulted by EL PAÍS argue that, for a Mexican government facing mounting pressure from the United States, the criminal organization has become the country’s top target.

Sources involved in the operation told EL PAÍS that R2 and his associates had been partying for hours inside a restaurant that had been closed to the public for their private event, with a live banda band performing. Authorities accuse R2 of serving as the CJNG’s chief in the area. He underwent surgery for gunshot wounds at a hospital in Guadalajara, while members of the Navy and the National Guard guarded the surrounding area.

“Mexican and U.S. agencies are completely focused on the Jalisco New Generation Cartel because it is the largest criminal organization in Mexico and poses the greatest risks,” says Eduardo Guerrero, a security analyst and director of the consultancy Lantia Intelligence.

After Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration spent its first year “trying to contain and stabilize the violence in Sinaloa,” he says, its second year saw priorities shift decisively toward the cartel. According to Lantia’s data, the organization has “around 122 subordinate or allied groups that answer to the cartel’s leadership.”

Although authorities had been targeting the CJNG for months, the February 2026 capture of El Mencho was the first major breakthrough of the security strategy pursued by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Security Minister Omar García Harfuch.

After a six-year administration defined by former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” approach, the arrest of a drug lord who had eluded justice for decades during an operation in the mountains of Jalisco, carried out by Mexican authorities with U.S. intelligence support, was a stark and widely applauded contrast.

The arrests continued. In April, authorities captured Audias Flores Silva, known as “El Jardinero,” one of El Mencho’s trusted lieutenants. In July, they detained Ramón Álvarez Ayala, alias “R1,” the alleged mastermind behind the killing of politician Carlos Manzo. September brought the arrest of Manuel Alejandro Rendón Aguilar, known as “El Señor de la T,” the cartel’s alleged regional coordinator in Michoacán.

A month later, authorities captured Iván Cazarín Molina, alias “El Tanque,” who allegedly oversaw the group’s operations in the states of Veracruz, Oaxaca, Tabasco and Puebla, as well as dismantling the entire network of Iván Sánchez Santiago, known as “El Cromo,” in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel is widely regarded as Mexico’s most powerful criminal organization, particularly since the internal war within the Sinaloa Cartel weakened its longtime rival. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) describes the CJNG as one of the world’s “most powerful, influential and ruthless” criminal organizations. According to Mexican authorities, intelligence provided by the DEA played a key role in locating R2.

According to Manuel Balcázar, a security consultant and associate researcher at the Center for Studies on Security, Intelligence and Governance at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM), “These arrests are the result of binational cooperation, since in every case there has been a continuous exchange of information and intelligence with U.S. agencies, a joint effort that responds to the cartel’s active expansion of operations beyond the American continent.”

Balcázar points to recent operations in Spain, Ecuador, Nigeria and South Africa as evidence of what he calls “Crime 4.0”: “By that I mean that crime no longer operates as a transnational criminal group but as a company, a global criminal holding that allows it to keep functioning like a franchise even when leaders fall.”

According to the 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment published by the DEA, “The franchise model permits each semi-independent group to customize its operations according to specific areas of expertise (for example, running clandestine methamphetamine labs) or market demands, provided they comply with naming, branding, and organizational structure requirements, and follow the general direction handed down by Jalisco Cartel leadership.” The report adds that the cartel “does not pay the operating costs of its franchises but does collect a percentage of overall profits.”

R2 inherited leadership of the CJNG’s “Los R’s” cell after his brother, Ramón Ángel Álvarez Ayala, was arrested for allegedly masterminding the murder of Carlos Manzo, the mayor of Uruapan. The brothers had previously been arrested in Guadalajara in 2012, when authorities identified them as senior figures within the criminal organization. Both reportedly received orders directly from El Mencho and oversaw the group’s operations in Michoacán and parts of Jalisco.

Guerrero argues that Michoacán has become a top priority for the United States because of its importance to U.S. food supply chains, particularly for products such as avocados, limes and berries, and that it has turned into a testing ground for new security strategies.

According to Guerrero, “In this state, Mexican and U.S. authorities are testing a comprehensive strategy aimed at systematically weakening criminal organizations on multiple fronts — financial, logistical and human — in an effort to prevent them from regenerating so quickly. The goal is no longer temporary disruption, but the permanent dismantling of a cell or an organization.” Whether that strategy will ultimately succeed, he cautions, remains uncertain.

That uncertainty is, in the end, the central question. For Balcázar, significantly weakening the CJNG, given its quasi-corporate structure, requires action on three fronts. The first is to sustain the current operational pressure over time: “to continue for another two years before we can truly say its capabilities have been affected.” The second is to target the cartel’s finances by “working in parallel through financial intelligence, because behind all this criminal activity there are undoubtedly bank accounts, investments and tax havens.” The third is to go after its political connections.

On this last point, Guerrero agrees. “Without links between the criminal world and the political world, it is very difficult for organized crime to be as successful as it is in Mexico,” he explains. “The United States has pressured Mexico heavily, and Mexico has responded well to that pressure, except when it comes to politicians linked to [the governing party] Morena who are also connected to some criminal organization. And there is a group of politicians in the inner circle of the former president [Andrés Manuel López Obrador] who are untouchable.”

Guerrero notes that when lower-level officials, such as mayors, are involved, authorities will sometimes allow investigations to proceed. But when the figures are more influential, “such as sitting governors or politicians seeking governor’s offices,” he says, that is where the line is drawn.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition