Episcopal successor of Pope accused of covering up for priests accused of trafficking children

In 2009, a group of victims asked for the investigation of Bishop Mario Aurelio Poli for "covering up" crimes of trafficking, reduced to servitude and fraud in connection with an event that affected at least 64 children and young people. In August of 2009, a group of victims asked the Instructional Court 3 in Santa Rosa to prosecute the Spanish priests Antonio Martínez and Ricardo Latorre. At the same time, it called for the summoning of two bishops to make depositions in the context of a case in which were investigated, among others, the crimes of human trafficking, fraud, extortion and reduced to servitude in a religious institute called Servi Trinitatis.

It was a story that hit the front pages of almost all daily newspapers in Argentina by the rawness of the story of those who passed through the Institute. Everyone talks about psychological and physical abuse: "I have suffered humiliation, yelling and hitting," said, for instance, Sergio Juarez in 2009. The Servi Trinitatis complaint was made by the lawyer from the pampas, Omar Gebruers , who said publicly what nobody was ready to listen: 64 children and young people were "enslaved and 17 subjected to the crime of human trafficking." Both of the main accused were priests Antonio Martínez and Ricardo Latorre, officiating in those days in the Cathedral in Santa Rosa and the Trinitatis Servi Secular Institute, where, again according to the very serious accusation, numerous crimes were said to have been committed.

 And there appears an unpleasant surprise: Besides making allegations against the two priests, the lawsuit representing victims called for a probe of alleged " cover-up" by Mario Aurelio Poli, blessed by the hand of Pope Francis as his successor in the archbishopric of Buenos Aires. But there is more: in 2006, before the criminal complaint, a group of girls who were interned in the Cenacle in Santa Rosa sent a letter to the then Bishop Miguel Brédice and his boss, then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio. According to these girls , they were never met and had only sensed "total inaction or cover-up ...". Finally ... although the priests Latorre and Martinez were eventually dismissed, suspicion never faded and complainants never failed to mention that it is an "international criminal organization" that works to attract young people and keep their goods and money .

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