Argentine justice accuses Opus Dei of trafficking in women and labour exploitation

From September 2024

After two years of an unprecedented, secret investigation, the indictment targets the organization's highest local authorities over the past 40 years and opens the door to similar cases in other countries such as Spain.

A structure that recruited at least 44 poor women, most of them as children and adolescents, to be subjected to "living conditions comparable to servitude." This is how the Argentine federal court defines the actions carried out by the Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei in that country for more than four decades, between 1972 and 2015, in an accusation of human trafficking directed at six high-ranking religious members of the organization. Never before have the leaders of an Opus Dei region been summoned for questioning for such serious crimes.

The investigation began in September 2022 by the Argentine Prosecutor's Office against Trafficking in Persons (PROTEX). In June 2023, this specialized agency filed a complaint with the federal court, which was submitted to the Third National Criminal and Correctional Prosecutor's Office, headed by Eduardo Taiano. This complaint now leads to a joint request for the summons for questioning of five defendants: former regional vicars Carlos Nannei (1991-2000), Patricio Olmos (2000-2010), Víctor Urrestarazu (2014-2022), and the numerary priest who led the organization's women's branch for almost all these decades, Gabriel Dondo.

There is a fifth former regional vicar, Mariano Fazio, who is not named in the indictment, but whom the plaintiff requested be included, as he was the highest authority of the institution between 2010 and 2014. Fazio currently serves on the global government of Opus Dei and lives in Rome. Some have suggested that he could be a possible candidate to succeed the organization's highest authority, the Prelate. Urrestarazu, the last of the accused former vicars, is also out of the country. He was removed from his position when the scandal erupted over the former auxiliaries' complaint to the Vatican in 2021. He has been in Paraguay ever since.

A detail from the court ruling.

The investigation submitted to Judge Daniel Rafecas, who is processing the inquiries, speaks of 44 cases of exploitation, but he assesses that only four could fall under the Human Trafficking Law, which came into force in May 2008, because the vast majority of the complainants left the organization before that date. Of the four cases being investigated by the Prosecutor's Office and PROTEX to accuse Opus Dei, three have a statute of limitations that could be at stake because they are within the limit of or exceed 12 years from the date the reported events occurred, which is the time period established by law. In this way, only one woman would remain. This is M.I.E.

The case of M.I.E., 31 years subjected to Opus Dei

M.I.E. “discovered” Opus Dei on a bus. She was 17 years old, it was 1984, and she was traveling with an older sister from her native Bolivia to Buenos Aires. In the Argentine capital, an aunt was waiting for them and offered them the opportunity to study. Neither of them had completed more than elementary school and their wish was to attend secondary school there. This was what they told the woman who approached them during the trip, who immediately told them she knew a place where they could live and study. They told the same thing to the teenagers' aunt when she accompanied them to see the place, a large house in the Belgrano neighborhood called “Los Aleros.” And with that promise, they entered, but it never happened.

Instead, they were forced to work domestically while being forced to attend Mass, confess, and converse with the directors. They insisted they wanted to "study, study, and study," M.I.E. recounted in her statement. Their first attempt to leave occurred after a year of being there. They managed to leave, but they were sought out again and taken to another residence, called "La Ciudadela," in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Recoleta. The same thing happened again, while the spiritual persecution intensified: they were told they had a vocation to be auxiliary numeraries—the lowest category in the organization, which is domestic service—and that God wanted them for the Work. They refused, but their will was no excuse. Eventually, the two ended up making commitments to chastity, poverty, and obedience. From there, they were sent to Laya, a residence next to Opus Dei's headquarters in Argentina, where the religious hierarchy and lay members of the organization live. Among the evidence available to the courts, the information gathered by the Argentine Federal Police's Federal Investigation Unit on Human Trafficking is key. They spent a year observing various Opus Dei houses.

In the following years, the sisters followed different paths. Each was moved around the country. Both tried to leave several times, but were repeatedly sought out. On one occasion, M.I.E. was allowed to visit her family in Bolivia, and once there, she decided to stay and not return. But they were sought out in Bolivia. In 1993, they took her to Rome, where she served the international hierarchy of the Prelature under the same precarious conditions, without pay or health insurance, and without communication with her family. She returned in 2000, already struggling to cope with a major mental health crisis. The following year, her sister managed to leave permanently, but she was not. She didn't succeed until 2015, when she was already 47 years old and had suffered a decade of depression, which Opus Dei treated with its own psychiatrist and a mountain of pills.

M.I.E.'s case could be the first in the world to require Opus Dei to face justice in a country accused of human trafficking for servitude. This story could advance the investigation into what dozens of women from Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia reported in 2021, first in the Argentine press and then in a presentation to the Vatican's Tribunal for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has yet to receive a response.

The Modus Operandi

PROTEX and the Prosecutor's Office describe the existence of a deceptive, planned, and deliberate recruitment system aimed at providing male members with domestic service comparable to that of servitude, as it did not include any payment for the task or basic labor rights. According to the accusation, Opus Dei's modus operandi for subjugating women consisted of a multi-stage plan: recruiting girls and adolescents between the ages of 12 and 16 through a deceptive recruitment process, which "involved presenting a false proposal related to the possibility of continuing and completing their primary and secondary education, as well as receiving vocational training to obtain job opportunities, all within a context of religious instruction."

In addition to the dynamics of entering Opus Dei, the investigation lists and describes the victims' situation within the organization's "centers," the practices of psychological manipulation, the belief system, the "disciplinary control through elements of punishment," and a series of "rules of life" that the women were required to follow. These included a system of conversations, confessions, and prayers, in addition to the obligation of chastity, isolation from family ties, restrictions on communications and any contact with the outside world, psychological control and behavioral conditioning, as well as monitoring of their physical and mental health through supervised medical visits and the provision of psychiatric pills. All of these were experienced by the 44 women included in the complaint. All of these were proven in the four cases analyzed. All of these were proven in the case of M.I.E.

Among the evidence available to the courts, the information gathered by the Argentine Federal Police's Federal Investigation Unit on the Crime of Human Trafficking is key. They spent a year observing various Opus Dei houses in Buenos Aires and other provinces and were able to confirm that there are women there who still serve as assistants. Furthermore, the courts worked with the National Program for the Rescue and Support of Persons Affected by the Crime of Human Trafficking of the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights of the Nation. Furthermore, they have taken into account the information contained in a series of newspaper articles published by the author of this article, who also provided testimony in the case. These are in addition to internal documents from the organization provided by the plaintiffs' lawyer and the accounts of the victims' families and several former Opus Dei numeraries—high-ranking female members—who knew and lived with most of them. Maid Schools in More Than 50 Countries

Since the media report by 43 women in Argentina exploded, the organization repeatedly denied the accusations and attempted to reduce the complainants' experiences to "bad experiences." Opus Dei even launched a website telling the story of the Instituto de Capacitación Integral en Estudios Domésticos (ICIED), the so-called "maid school" through which—according to official information—more than 1,000 adolescents passed between 1972 and 2017, and from which most of that army of female maids emerged.

Event at the ICIED in the early 1980s.

"Opus Dei did this systematically in the countries where it is present. This is just the first of many accusations that are beginning to emerge around the world," a source close to the investigation told eldiario.es. Following Argentina's groundbreaking complaint, a lawsuit has already been filed in Ireland, and complaints are expected in various countries across Europe and Latin America.

In 2023, the story of a former auxiliary in Spain was first reported on the podcast "Un tema al día" (A Topic of a Day) by elDiario.es. The reality of women enslaved as servants in the country can be confirmed by Agustina López de los Mozos, journalist, former numerary, and creator of OpusLibros.org, where she has been gathering testimonies from former members of the Work from around the world for more than two decades.

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