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Mexican officials detain lawyers, activist tied to sex abuse case


By Lisa J. Adams
ASSOCIATED PRESS

12:25 p.m. September 20, 2006

MEXICO CITY – Immigration authorities on Wednesday briefly detained two U.S. lawyers and an activist who are representing a 25-year-old Mexican man in a lawsuit alleging that Cardinal Norberto Rivera protected a priest who raped him.

The lawyers representing Joaquin Aguilar Mendez had just finished telling a news conference that the accused priest, the Rev. Nicolas Aguilar, had been located in the central Mexican state of Puebla and celebrated a Mass there just last Sunday.

Mendez also told reporters he has feared for his life and that of his family since he first went public with his claims late last year.

Eric Barragan, spokesman for the Chicago-based Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, told The Associated Press that authorities questioned lawyers Jeff Anderson and Michael Finnegan, as well as the network's national director, David Clohessy. The authorities ordered them to accompany them to their office but the three men refused.

“We just want to leave the country tonight legally,” Barragan said. “Of course, we don't want to create any havoc.”

Barragan said his network has been working on this case for more than a year and has held news conferences about it before in Mexico City without problems.

A person who answered the telephone at immigration offices said no one was immediately available to comment.

Clohessy told the AP that the migration officials asked for their passports, plane tickets and Mexican immigration documents, and detained them at their hotel for an hour. The agents left after police arrived, he said.

“It felt somewhat like harassment, but if that's the case nothing will stop us. Our efforts are to protect kids,” Clohessy said.

All members of the group planned to leave Mexico later Wednesday.

Aguilar Mendez called the news conference to release details of a civil lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday charging that Rivera and Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahoney conspired to protect Nicolas Aguilar.

The lawsuit, which aims to collect an unspecified amount of monetary damages, charges both cardinals with negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy, and sexual battery, and charges the Reverend Aguilar with sexual battery, said attorney Vance Owen.

Once the cardinals receive notification of the lawsuit, they will have 20 days to respond, said Owen, who works with a Texas lawfirm.

Rivera was considered a candidate to replace Pope John Paul II when he died last year, and Mahoney heads the United States' largest archdiocese.

The lawsuit alleges Rivera, one of Mexico's most high-profile cardinals, helped cover up abuse involving 50 boys when Aguilar served as a parish priest in Mexico's central Puebla state in 1987. Rivera was bishop of Tehuacan in Puebla state at the time.

Rivera, according to the suit, later helped in Aguilar's transfer to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Aguilar has been charged in California with 19 felony counts of committing lewd acts on a child.

The suit said as many as 60 alleged victims from both Mexico and the U.S. have come forward with cases against Aguilar.

Joaquin Aguilar said he was abused by Aguilar in 1994 when he was a teenager. He reported it to authorities, he said, but nothing was done.

Instead, he said, his family was ostracized by authorities and people in their parish.

The lawsuit gave an explicit account of the alleged rape in October 1994 in the priest's room at the rectory when the boy was about 12 years old. It said the boy had gone there to use a restroom, was grabbed by the priest and sodomized. It further said the boy was told by the priest to keep quiet about what happened or his siblings would suffer the same abuse.

The lawsuit painted a picture of a priest who had sexual problems from the time he was a seminary student in the 1960s in Mexico. He allegedly attacked another student who, when he reported it, was thrown out of the seminary, according to the suit.

Rivera, then the bishop of Tehuacan, wrote to Mahoney, then archbishop of Los Angeles, in 1987, asking to transfer Aguilar there, according to the lawsuit. Rivera would later say he warned Mahoney in a letter that Aguilar had “homosexual problems,” but Mahoney would say he never received the warning.

“We do not admit priests with any homosexual problems,” Mahoney wrote in one letter, according to the lawsuit.

In another letter, dated March 4, 1988, Mahoney was quoted as saying, “It is almost impossible to determine precisely the number of young altar boys he has sexually molested, but the number is large.”

By then, the suit said, the priest had fled to Mexico and Mahoney was seeking his return to face criminal charges in Los Angeles.



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Associated Press reporter Julie Watson in Mexico City and AP Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch contributed to this report.