Ever since he was abused, Fredo Killing found the thought of attending school unbearable. He started skipping classes and then went away forever. When I was in the fifth year of high school, the Spanish priest Jesús Andrés Vela began the siege. First she flattered him with gifts and then ordered him on slips of paper to leave the class and report to his room. If he were alive, Jesús Andrés Vela would be tried as mandated by law, but he died in 2017. Fifty-five years ago, the priest sporadically visited Santiago de Chile and took the opportunity to abuse minors. The Society of Jesus has just verified five cases of rape by the priest.
Fredo had tried to run away from his memories, but with each footstep on the earth they reappeared. He studied at San Ignacio Alonso Ovalle, a Jesuit school in Santiago; He was between 15 and 16 years old. One day, in the middle of class, the priest Jesús Andrés Vela sent a message to Fredo. He wanted me to come to his room to, supposedly, give him spiritual guidance. He had gained their trust: every time the priest returned from Colombia, he brought him souvenirs and invited him so that both of them, in the company of other young people, could attend spiritual retreats on nearby farms. On one occasion, the priest asked him to look at some engravings on the desk. Standing up, the priest came so close to him, from behind, that Fredo felt very uncomfortable and got out of there as soon as he could. He went to the room a second time and, although he does not remember the words of the priest, the abuse he suffered knows nothing of forgetting: Jesús Andrés Vela left a book on the desk and asked Fredo to leaf through it. She stood behind him, leaving him no chance to break free, and began to rub herself against Fredo's body.
"I felt like the guy got an erection, it was obvious. At one point, he pressed me tighter against the desk and had an orgasm. I was frightened," he recalls.
She went out and never returned to the room of the man, whom she considered "a good person" until the day of the abuse. He was confused, his performance in school began to drop, he lied to avoid going to class and, in the middle of the school year, he decided to withdraw permanently so as not to return to that or any other school. He was only a year away from finishing high school. His parents hired private tutors for him to complete his studies and he attended free exams. However, he revealed his ulterior motives to no one. He first talked about it with his brother after a long time.
"You feel ashamed. One says, "How could this happen?" I felt violated, my trust in him was violated," she says by phone from Colorado, where she currently lives.
Fredo is now 71 years old and is not the only victim. The first whistleblower made his case known to EL PAÍS last June. In identical circumstances, the same priest Jesús Andrés Vela abused Felipe Cáceres Pizarro. No one had publicly hinted even a suspicion against the cleric who died at the age of 93 in Colombia, where he was director of the Ignatian Youth House in Bogotá and professor of theology at the Javeriana University. A guru in pastoral and missionary matters of the church, he had published eight books. He was born in 1924 in Salamanca and settled in Colombia, although he had previously studied in Brazil. When I visited Chile, I gave workshops to parents, students, and other priests.
Father Jesus Andres Vela, in an image posted on the website of the Jesuits in Colombia on July 16, 2015.
Felipe Cáceres had denounced his abuse in 2019 to the Chilean Jesuits, but years passed and his case remained shelved. In 2022 he traveled to Colombia to speak with the provincial of the Jesuits and that's when he learned that Jesús Andrés Vela had already died.
The investigation by the Society of Jesus in Chile began on July 26, a month after EL PAÍS denounced it. It was entrusted to Waldo Bown, a criminal lawyer hired by the Chilean Jesuits. Bown received testimony from six male accusers, but determined the plausibility of sexual abuse in five cases. One of them, according to the statement issued by the Jesuits, "could not be corroborated because there was insufficient information." The findings of the investigation ratify the accusations of rape that occurred between 1965 and 1969 denounced by this newspaper last June with the case of Felipe Cáceres.
Bown had investigated the priest Renato Poblete, who was also dead, and found him guilty of abusing 22 women, including four minors. Father Poblete was a celebrity in Chile: there was a statue of him in a river park named after him and, in 2009, he was decorated by President Michelle Bachelet with the Bicentennial Award. Following the complaints, the Chilean government withdrew the award, the bronze statue, the plaques and the name of the park. The lay lawyer also investigated and found responsible for sexual abuse the priest Jaime Guzmán Astaburuaga, who was expelled from the congregation.
The result of the investigation into the case of Jesús Andrés Vela was sent to the Province of Colombia, where it should also be investigated. "We are deeply saddened by the occurrence of events like these, even more so when they have occurred within our institutions. We express our sorrow and condemn any kind of abuse," reads the statement from the Chilean Jesuits.
So far, the Society of Jesus of Chile has not paid the victims any compensation, only offering them free "psychological therapies" for a period of two years. For Cáceres, it is satisfactory that they have found more cases. "I had the suspicion that he wasn't the only one, but it was more than I thought," says Felipe, who stresses that there are other victims who did not want to testify.
At the time of the incident, the victims were between 13 and 15 years old. Today, they are men between the ages of 68 and 72. Fredo Killing says he'll never forget that bitter moment until the day he dies. "For me, the important thing is that the truth is known, that this priest does not appear as an eminence, as a saint, because he is not. He's a pedophile," she said.