A tweet was the trigger for the scandal of sexual exploitation of minors that is shaking Uruguay and that on Wednesday caused the impeachment of an important pro-government senator, Gustavo Penadés.
“In a video I am going to talk about a pedophile that we have been involved in politics for 30 years,” Romina Celeste Papasso, a trans militant from the same political party as Penadés, announced on social networks in March. “When I was only 13 years old, he would get up from Batlle Park and take me to the motel, he likes children.”
Papasso, now 30, avoided naming Penadés in that message. But later publicly identified him and affirmed that he was the first man who paid her for sex, before she began her gender transition.
Penadés, 57, immediately denied the accusation and has denied having committed any crime.
Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou said as soon as the complaint emerged that he believed Penadés, whom he has known for three decades as a member of the center-right National Party that he leads. “I would be a bad friend if I don’t believe him,” he later told reporters.
But after Papasso’s statements, the Attorney General’s Office officially launched an investigation in which at least eight victims They declared that they had suffered sexual exploitation by Penadés when they were minors, according to the request for impeachment.
And the details of the case that are becoming known now disturb a country that used to see scandals of this type as something foreign.
The Prosecutor’s report
The Uruguayan prosecutor for sexual crimes that is investigating the case, Alicia Ghione, indicated that Penadés is accused of paying adolescents “for erotic and sexual acts.”
Of the eight complainants, the majority were 13 or 14 years old when the abuses occurred, specifies the document that Ghione sent to Parliament and which was accessed by BBC Mundo. Others were 15 and 16 years old.
“In all cases are or were minors and males“he points out. He adds that the victims came from “highly vulnerable social contexts” and that several remain minors.
“In an old case, the victim was just a child in a soccer team, which Penadés himself organized, when he was still a teenager,” he says.
The prosecutor observes in the text that Penadés’ way of proceeding “has been sustained over the years.”
“From the statements obtained, there are similar ways to convince adolescents to agree to have sexual acts, how to access their bodies, get them to undress, kiss them, touch them, ask them to ‘masturbate’ and have ‘sex’ orally’, to finally in some cases achieve something more”, he affirms.
He adds that on some occasions there were “violent actions to compel ‘oral sex’ or ‘sexual penetration’”.
The document includes verbatim passages of the testimonies given to the Prosecutor’s Office.
In one of them, the victim remembers that when she met Penadés, she told him she was a minor, but he replied: “If there are hairs, there is no crime.”
In another testimony, the complainant points out that Penadés told him that he could help him find a job.
Ghione informed the legislators that some of the victims declared that a history teacher who is also being investigated acted as a “recruiter” or “intermediary” for the politician with the minors and charged for that role.
The Prosecutor’s Office had identified at least four other victims until Penadés’s request for immunity, but warned that they avoided giving their testimony “for fear of the ‘power’ of the accused” or “because they have allegedly received threats from the accused.”
The consequences
Given the information provided by the prosecutor, the Uruguayan Senate unanimously approved on Wednesday the impeachment of Penadés, who had asked for speed in the process to respond to Justice.
“I don’t regret anything because I didn’t commit any crime,” Penadés told the press succinctly after testifying at the Prosecutor’s Office last month, still protected by his legislative privileges.
Before, when the scandal arose, expressed pride in his “sexual orientation” and denied that because of her they can accuse him of being a pedophile.
Papasso has said that she denounced Penadés this year because she recalled her meetings with him when the senator criticized a protest by her over the visit to Montevideo of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which ended with her being arrested and sentenced for an attack after spitting on a city official.
Penadés also resigned from the National Party and some opponents warn that, with his fall, the government has lost a key interlocutor.
“Curiously, Penadés in the Senate was the best representative of the government, with whom a high-level dialogue could be held,” said former President José “Pepe” Mujica and avoided judging the case.
Others on the left have criticized Lacalle Pou and Interior Minister Luis Alberto Heber for backing Penadés when the accusations against him surfaced.
In recent days, the president seemed to qualify his position on Penadés. “The complaints are many (and) from what I have been able to find out, they are serious,” he declared on Friday.
In the absence of a conclusion to the investigation and a ruling by Justice, the case leaves several open questions for now.
One of them is whether Uruguay adequately protects its minors from the danger of sexual abuse.
Cases of sexual exploitation of children and adolescents have more than doubled since 2019when 240 were registered, up to a record of 529 last year, according to the committee in charge of eradicating them.
Another question is how, in a small country where it is said that “everyone knows each other,” Penadés spent so much time in the political kitchen without the complaints he now faces arose.
The scandal, like other recent ones, could have an electoral cost for the government coalition and especially for the National Party, says political scientist Adolfo Garcé to BBC Mundo.
But he warns that there is also a risk of erosion of a democracy that, despite being considered the best in the region, suffers from “all kinds of problems”, from institutional to political ethics.
“The most important thing in political terms is how much this case, added to other cases that have occurred in this government and also in previous governments, ends up undermining the credibility of citizens in democracy and in the parties,” he concludes.
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See original article on BBC