Everything began to be discovered in the girls’ bathroom of a school in Cancun in 1993. Four or five elementary school students secretly whispered with tearful faces.
Beatriz Sánchez, then an English teacher at the Cumbres school, governed by the Legionaries of Christ, realized that something happened when one of the oldest entered and left the bathroom. “When I approached he said: miss, every time the father is making it stronger for the little ones and we no longer want that to happen with them, please help us.”
As they dared not say more, Sanchez, now 63, urged them to do so in a letter for her and another teacher.
Biani López-Antúnez, one of those little ones, wrote a clear incriminating document against the priest Fernando Martínez that had not been disclosed until now, when the order is once again at the center of a scandal about abuse and cover-up.
The TV presenter Ana Lucia de Salazar revealed in May the abuses she had suffered from Martinez at the Cancun school, as well as the efforts of the hierarchy of the Legion of Christ to hide the aggressions. The revelations have hit the order in their traditional fief, Mexico, and cast a shadow over the prestigious private schools that are their main source of income.
Its history, which has made headlines in Mexico, led Mexican Catholic authorities to condemn the abuse and cover-up of crimes.
He also encouraged other victims, such as López-Antúnez, to speak that on May 14, 1993, he had concluded his letter with a petition that showed fear of revealing what was happening to them: “P.S. It’s a secret between miss Lorena and me. ”
“The father began to take us confidence and thought we were very dumb and could do what he wanted with us,” can be read from the handwriting of a 10-year-old girl. It also tells how Martinez started kissing them and carrying them between his legs. “When it came to our mouth we worried seriously.”
The girl told her mother, Irma Hassey, what happened with Martinez. He did not give many details and Hassey did not dare to ask too much, but he knew enough to call the superior of the legionaries who, the next day, appeared in his house asking for forgiveness, begging for his silence and offering to take the priest from Cancun the next day .
He also asked if there was a letter she did not know then. “Then I discovered that he was interested in knowing if there were any written documents left as evidence,” he said.
More than 25 years later, Hassey understood that the speed in getting Martinez out of school was due to the fact that many complaints had already accumulated, including Ana Lucía Salazar’s, and that his was only the straw that broke the glass. Hassey said he was ashamed to have accepted the apologies of Martínez’s superior and, above all, to have accepted his pact of silence.
Only when Salazar spoke publicly, Hassey knew that his secret wounds were not unique. Salazar’s testimony made his daughter and another Cumbres student, Belén Márquez, also speak publicly in November at a press conference.
“I suffered abuse from 8 to 10 years. They were gradual, continuous abuses and not only abused me, but I was also forced to witness the abuses of other girls, ”López-Antúnez said before the cameras with a trembling voice. Only then did his mother, sitting in the press, know that it had not been a punctual horror, but that for more than two years “I was leaving my daughter at the door of a rapist.”
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