Abuses in a La Salle seminary in Mexico: "It completely destroyed me, I was a living dead"

Jorge Flores Silva in Mexico City.Alejandra Rajal

For years depression was the common factor in the life of Jorge Flores Silva.

He had anxiety attacks, used alcohol or drugs daily, had unprotected sex, and even attempted suicide.

He had immersed himself in self-destructive behaviors and didn't know why.

One day he found out that he had had sex with an HIV positive person and ended up facing the paralyzing fear of getting tested.

"I came out negative, but it was devastating because I began to wonder why there was so much chaos, at that moment I threw myself on a post and I remembered everything," he says in an interview with EL PAÍS.

After years of mentally blocking out his ordeal, Flores, 35, recalled that he had been sexually abused at age 14 by Francisco Serrano Limón, a religious from the La Salle seminary in Mexico City.

“All my dreams, all the illusions, fell.

From a very Catholic family, Jorge always wanted to become a priest.

Like someone who crosses off earrings to achieve a goal, at the age of seven he was already an acolyte, at the same time he entered the Lasallian school and later he enrolled in the aspirancy.

There he was brought by a member of the congregation that he had met at school.

Charismatic and youthful, Serrano Limón —brother of a famous pro-life activist accused of embezzlement— became his friend and great confessor.

In confidence, Jorge told her that he had been abused by a family member when he was a child and that this had sparked doubts about his sexuality.

"I told him my whole life and he took advantage," recalls the now professor and activist.

Serrano Limón had infinite contact with children: he was in charge of the camps held by all the La Salle schools in the southern area of ​​the Mexican capital.

The abuse of Jorge began between 2000 and 2001, during the first retreat the young man attended.

“He touched Me since he had the possibility”, he assures.

“First he caressed me and hugged me as if he were my father, but he did it with another intention and I began to see him little by little.

He told me things like 'it's normal, we're brothers, right?'

or 'I am the body of Christ'.

With psychological help, he has managed to count at least 11 situations of abuse during a semester with this religious.

In some cases he told her that he did it to help him heal from the first sexual abuse, in others, that it was a therapy to check if he was gay, and in a few,

Telling what had happened to him became "a problem," he recalls.

“They tell you forget it, hold your carnitas, men don't cry.

Between taboos and fears, they leave it hidden”.

The precedent of complaints in Mexico indicates that doing so often implies rising up against the entire Catholic institution.

In the case of Flores, the challenge was twofold: on the one hand, he had to face the weight of the entire Church, and on the other, he had to face the risks that could be involved in going against El Yunque, a far-right organization of which his aggressor was a member. and designated as a parastatal group with violent roots.

"I knew that these gentlemen were very reactionary, that is, I was never going to file a complaint," he says with accelerated diction.

But he was finally encouraged to do it in 2018, at a conference on clerical pederasty.

"I filed a complaint because I found out that he was abusing others and that they had moved him, but he was really hiding or they moved him so they wouldn't find him."

After recounting his ordeal, he decided not to speak publicly again, his priority was to resolve the case before the two justices, civil and ecclesiastical.

In the first he could not, the crime had prescribed.

In the second, they promised him that they would check him, but nothing happened.

"They told me they were going to investigate it, but they never called me," he says, "I was left very alone, I felt abandoned, without God, without anything."

What happened behind the walls of La Salle, he assures, was an open secret.

“When I file a complaint, they tell me that they didn't know anything, but many victims approached me and I have their messages,” says Jorge, who has numbered around twenty.

“I did not know it, I did not measure it, then I said: this is hell.

He spent 40 years doing that, ”he laments.

The abuses were committed even in full view of everyone.

According to what he remembers, they said the forensics that were done in civil justice before the case was closed by prescription, “some boys touched them in the games and in front of everyone, even in front of the brothers and the authorities.

And so they said: 'they are playing'.

Maybe they saw it as normal."

It wasn't the only thing that happened in broad daylight.

The ideology of El Yunque also slipped through the doors of the school, as Jorge recalls.

“[Serrano Limón] pulled his favorites, manipulated them, made them think like him, gave them far-right books by Hitler or Salvador Borrego to read.

And he was putting completely fascist thoughts into their heads.”

The process of denouncing it was "very exhausting and painful," says Jorge, who still has a hard time talking about it.

The path included even death threats, he assures, of those who he believes were part of El Yunque.

Four years after speaking for the first time, on February 15 he received a pardon from the La Salle authorities in a private event, an unprecedented event for the Mexican Church, which has suspended at least 152 priests for pederasty.

He has also managed to get Serrano Limón removed from the institution and for the congregation to prepare protocols to attend to possible future victims.

Although he has achieved it by pressing at every step:

"Is the Church changing?"

-No.

Most priests continue to say that the abuse does not happen.

The thing about the Church, is teeth out.

Although there have been months of talks to be able to reach agreements with La Salle, he recognizes the good intentions of some members of the congregation to carry out the changes and carry out the ceremony in which he was asked for forgiveness.

Jorge does not rule out that talking about what he experienced ends up uncovering a pressure cooker: "I think cases will continue to come out, there were many abuses."

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