Over the last year and a half, the Colombian media outlet Casa Macondo has run a series of articles on accusations of sexual abuse in the Catholic church – and the ways in which it has been covered up – under the collective title “El Archivo Secreto” (the secret archive – in reference to the private curial archives of each diocese of the Catholic church, as well as the Vatican’s own secret archive).
Some of the articles in the series connect to international, cross-border investigations, conducted alongside El País from Spain, The Boston Globe in the United States, Observador in Portugal and Correctiv in Germany. (One article, from March 19 this year, goes into the details of Joseph Ratzinger, describing him as the “encubridor” – that is, the “abettor” to sexual abuse – who became Pope as Benedict XVI). As one might expect, the fight to reveal the extent of abuse across any global institution, particularly one as complex as the Catholic church, has many fronts; Colombia is just one.
Most of Casa Macondo’s articles are penned by Juan Pablo Barrientos, the head of the publication’s investigations unit.
Overall, they paint a disturbing – and disturbingly familiar – picture of what happened in Colombia: of priests moved around once accused of paedophilia, of protection from higher-ups, of stonewalling by church authorities when faced with requests for information, and even of priests being whitewashed in church-led outreach efforts intended to improve its image.
One of the earliest articles in the series, from November 2024, refers to a forum organised by the Jesuit order at the Javierian university (a church institution in the Colombian capital Bogotá) that year, where – the article says – questions from survivors about paedophile priest Darío Chavarriaga were “censored”. Another panellist at the same forum, Monsignor Francisco Antonio Niño Súa, advertising at length the measures taken by the Catholic church to prevent sexual abuse had, the article states, been himself responsible for protecting thirty-eight priests in a scandal the Colombian city of Villavicencio some years before, going so far as dismissing two female investigators in the case when they refused to toe the line of the church hierarchy.
Another much more recent article, published only this March, details the case of Father Mario Hernando Reyes Zambrano, an Ecuadorian-born priest who worked in both Colombia and Bolivia, in schools. There had been rumours and complaints for some years, Casa Macondo reports, but the way they were dealt with (or not) revlealed a pattern repeated with “mechanical precision”: a complaint, a temporary suspension (if that), transfer and re-instatement. Zambrano was eventually arrested on the basis of predatory sexual WhatsApp audio messages sent to a student at risk of failing his school year. Zambrano was rector of a school in Duitama at the time. (The article notes that Zambrano did not accept the charges).
A third article – and the most moving in the series (by Tatiana Escárraga this time) – is written in the first person, detailing the story of a man, now a surgeon, recalling his experiences as an altar boy to the parish priests who he once looked upon as father figures. His disturbing account details the arrival of a new priest who lured boys to stay behind by putting fish in the church fountain – which he asked them to look after – and then abused them in a nearby (deliberately secluded) private room. It also details the way in which another trusted priest, confronted with this account, became an abuser in turn. The victim – who at this point still aspired to become a priest himself – was in a situation of psychological torment and confusion. As he puts it in the article, “I lived trapped, condemned” in a hall of mirrors, caught between “guilt, manipulation, promises of help, vulnerability, an authority figure, and a commitment to absolute obedience”. At one point, the victim is told: “Don’t tell anyone, so as to avoid a scandal for the church”. The article is a study in psychological manipulation – Spanish readers should read it in full. It is available here.
At the core of the series is the intention to give voice to victims of clerical abuse (as above) and unmask those priests who have benefited from their positions of power (and those of the clerical hierarchy) to escape identification or punishment – but also a long running legal battle to ensure that the once secret archives of the church are made public, for good.
That battle, as Casa Macondo’s most recent article in the series shows, is achieving considerable success, a milestone in Colombian journalism. In 2023, Barrientos and another journalist (Miguel Ángel Estupiñán Medina) sent requests to 137 dioceses in Colombia, asking for whatever information they had on allegations it had received about priestly misconduct and what had been passed on (as required by law) to the public prosecutor. Only 17 dioceses replied, leading Casa Macondo to launch legal action against the others, based on earlier rulings of the Supreme Court. In May 2025, Casa Macondo achieved a legal victory in front of the full bench of the court, leading to a so-called “unification ruling” last month – in effect, pulling the various separate cases together into one.
It’s a remarkable achievement, and a reminder of the public importance of journalism. As the article notes, it makes Colombia “one of the few countries where the court has formally forced the world’s most powerful church to open up the records it has kept under lock and key for centuries”. The extensiveness of the final ruling means that it covers not only fifty dioceses, but also a range of church orders across the country and, in a new development, mandates information be provided to journalists – even of priests where there is no accusation of wrong-doing – in order to allow for patterns to be established which might suggest an institutional cover-up.
To date, Casa Macondo has received 13 per cent of the data originally requested, and yet has been able to build a database of some 800 priests accused of sexual abuse. If the proportions hold for the remaining 87 per cent of data as yet withheld, then the names of as many as 4,000 priests may ultimately be revealed. Once the information is there, Casa Macondo promises to publish a “complete X-ray of clerical abuse in Colombia, built with the same archives that the bishops have protected for decades.”
The private and secret will be made public. Into the darkness, light.
This summary draws in several articles from an extensive series by Casa Macondo. The specific articles referred to in the summary are linked above, and also listed below.
‘Los jesuitas encubrieron a siete sacerdotes denunciados por abusos sexuales’, by Juan Pablo Barrientos, November 3, 2024. Available here.
‘“No le digas a nadie para evitarle un escándalo a la Iglesia”’, by Tatiana Escárraga, June 14, 2025. Available here.
‘Joseph Ratzinger protegió a curas pederastas: la doble vida del encubridor al que nombraron Papa’, by Juan Pablo Barrientos, March 19, 2026. Available here.
‘“Quisiera estar a tu lado, ir tocando todo tu cuerpo”: los audios que hundieron al sacerdote salesiano Mario Reyes’, by Juan Pablo Barrientos, March 26, 2026. Available here.
‘La Corte Constitucional ordena a la Iglesia católica abrir sus archivos secretos de sacerdotes denunciados por abuso sexual’, by Juan Pablo Barrientos, April 17, 2026. Available her e.
Casa Macondo is a Colombian media outlet combining investigative, environmental, and cultural journalism with a strong social justice angle. It’s tagline is “Somos historias” – “We are stories”.
