Susana Lencina was the teenage servant of a family in Rosario when her employer put her in a car to take her to the Opus Dei servant school in Buenos Aires.
Tita Villamayor was picked up with her cousin in a rural town in Paraguay at the age of 15 with the promise of a school in the capital, Asunción, and soon they took her to Argentina and put her to work .
Beatriz Delgado managed to escape after serving 16 years without pay and in prison conditions, but she was found and forced to return against her will for nine more years.
Alicia Torancio was overmedicated with psychiatric pills and left in a room so none of her roommates could see her.
When her father died, Norma Martínez had no money for the funeral and they did not help her; He was told the same thing as when he asked to see his family: to practice detachment and that his family was the Work.
Those of Susana, Tita, Beatriz, Alicia and Norma are just five of the 44 stories that the Argentine justice system has heard over the past two years before presenting a historic accusation of human trafficking and labor exploitation against the regional authorities of the Prelature of Santa. Cruz and Opus Dei, which places on the bench the highest authorities of the organization of the Río de la Plata region.
Recruitment and recruiting
Some cases have prescribed, but the testimonies draw a modus operandi a recruitment which begins with the promise of a training school for hospitality or domestic work in which adolescent girls, between 13 and 17 years old, enter as boarders and are isolated from their families. For some, especially those sent from neighboring countries, the promise of school disappeared along the way and they arrived directly at “centers” – houses where single men and women live separately – to work.
This is what happened to Tita, who left her home and her nine siblings in hopes of studying and without speaking Spanish. “Every day I waited for school to start, but it never started. The only thing was to work, work and work. It was like this for almost a decade. He never received a salary. He has barely seen his family in years.
Under what conditions does a poor, immigrant and minor woman agree to “dedicate her life” to the service of other faithful? What is the legal value of this so-called “voluntariness”?, ask the prosecutors
Within the Institute of Domestic Studies Training (ICIED), justice describes a recruitment system based on spiritual control and isolation. Alicia describes it this way: “When you arrive, they start washing your head. You are told that you have a saintly vocation, that you can contribute to the world through your work. “I was very idealistic.” Those who resisted were convinced by threats: “When you don’t you saw “Your vocation, you were told that you could not go against the will of God,” adds Susana, who was hesitant to agree to become an auxiliary numerary of Opus Dei, the category created by the organization specifically for these poor women who, justice now says: “they were destined to be servants all their lives”.
“Under what conditions does a poor, immigrant and minor woman agree to “dedicate her life” to the service of other faithful? What is the legal value of this so-called “voluntary nature”? » ask the prosecutors Eduardo Taiano, head of the National Prosecutor’s Office No. 3, and the prosecutors of the Prosecutor’s Office against Trafficking and Exploitation (PROTEX), Alejandra Mángano and Marcelo Colombo of the Public Ministry. 116-page document which has been in the hands of Judge Daniel Rafecas for a month.
Traffic and exploitation
Delgado spent 24 years with Opus Dei as an auxiliary numerary. “They alternated tasks: a period in the ironing room, then in the laundry room, in the dining room to serve the table, another time in the kitchen and always cleaning, because as soon as we got up, without eat breakfast or anything, you had to be clean I scrubbed dirty bathrooms for cash until I damaged my knees and also ruined my spine lifting crates of vegetables: I left. working with a herniated disc in the lower back.
The story of this woman, born in Paraguay but who lived very young with her mother in Argentina, goes through an even worse stage: “They told you that you had to work until you were squeezed like a lemon, or They gave us the example of Noria’s donkey, which never stops. I had this on my mind so much that one day I got tuberculosis and I continued to work, coughing day and night, weak. Because they forced me and because I felt like I was betraying God if I left my position.
Alicia was 16 when they convinced her to leave her country home in Argentina’s Corrientes province for Buenos Aires. He studied and then went to work. At 22, he already ran a kitchen that fed around a hundred men of Opus Dei. This request made her sick, she said. Depression caused her to weigh 100 pounds, and she ended up being admitted to a neuropsychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt.
They didn’t say anything to their sister, who was also in Opus Dei. Nor to another sister who was outside and who was going to knock on the door to see how she was and they did not welcome her. Alicia explains why, even with this depression, she was only able to leave at the age of 30. “I wasn’t leaving because I was told that this suffering was my cross, that I had to offer it.”
Norma also suffered from severe depression and was given numerous medications. When she couldn’t take it anymore, she managed, with great insistence, to get permission to go to her mother’s house and from there, she announced that she would not return. Then they told her that they would no longer pay for her medication and that she would have to fend for herself. He was 38 years old, he had joined at 17. They never paid him a salary. He found a doctor who, little by little, got him to stop taking the medication. “I couldn’t believe what they made me drink.” She then found a psychologist who helped her move forward.
Lencina escaped in 1999, after seven years, from the headquarters of Opus Dei in Argentina, in the Recoleta neighborhood. There she operates, behind the main residence for numerary men and priests, the largest residence for servants in the country and all of the female plaintiffs have passed through there at some point in their lives. According to stories, it was one of the places where they worked the hardest, without rest, to maintain service 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The alarm went off before 6 a.m. and they had to jump out of bed to be active. After kneeling, kissing the ground, and saying “I will serve you,” a routine of work and prayer began that left them with only half an hour of conversation among themselves as each rest period, but even so, they could not do anything outside of the “Plan of Life.” During the meeting, one could only talk about “things concerning the Work and nothing personal,” said another of the 44.
What all the women remember most about this place is “the floorboards”, a room in the basement with large rollers for ironing dozens of sheets which was a sort of unbreathable sauna and where they spent hours standing, sometimes to the point of breaking down. Another thing they don’t forget is the caramel-colored sheet that covered the windows of the six-story tower and didn’t even let them see the Recoleta cemetery, located diagonally from the building. “We couldn’t see out and no one could see us,” they remember.
“They didn’t give you a choice in what tasks you did or where you lived,” Villamayor says, and the others agree. They all took turns visiting different Opus Dei residences in the country. Among the 44 women, some were sent to other countries without consultation: several were in Paraguay, Bolivia, Italy and even Kazakhstan. “Rotation” is precisely the central aspect of the judicial accusation for trafficking in human beings: “The reasons for the transfers were varied: to cover specific functions, to ensure good coexistence, health reasons, to avoid emotional ties and adapt to institutional needs. The press release published by the public prosecutor adds: “One of the most harmful consequences of this logic of transfers was to reinforce dependence on Opus Dei, by maintaining the auxiliary numeraires in mobility and isolation. constant”.
For the prosecution, it is important “to approach the case from a gender and human rights perspective, since all the victims are women, poor and in some cases immigrants, and according to the investigation, they were exploited through typical domestic activities such as cleaning.” , maintenance and support, among others.
Taiano, Mángano and Colombo also emphasize that “their identity was constituted from the subordinate tasks that they carried out for the highest layers of the structure of Opus Dei, notably for the benefit of the spiritual, professional and personal development of the men of the Prelature”. And finally, they add the perspective of children’s rights.
“I want justice for the adolescence and youth that were taken from us, for the family relationships that were damaged and for the deception that my parents and I suffered for wanting to study,” Tita told elDiario.es. And he adds a request to Pope Francis: “I ask you to give us a helping hand to move forward and so that we can all enjoy a dignified life as we deserve, for all that we have served them, as as machines, and for the way they played. with our consciousness. » “It marked each of us,” says the woman, who left “before the madness”.
Susana, for her part, says that her wish is that “Opus Dei pays for what it has done and ceases to exist”. Alicia joins us with an additional request: “I would like us all to be involved in this matter, beyond the legal deadlines, and for it to be truly investigated, for those responsible to respond and for ‘Opus not being able to use power has “obstructed the cause.”
If you have information or know of cases like these, write to us at pista@eldiario.es
