Two alleged abuse victims travel to Mexico to find expelled Costa Rican priest Mauricio Víquez Lizano

Two men who say they were sexually abused by Mauricio Víquez Lizano, a 54-year-old Costa Rican priest, travelled to Mexico this week to try to locate him. The men, Anthony Venegas and Michael Rodriguez, say the priest abused them when they were altar boys about 20 years ago. Víquez has not been convicted in these matters, and the statute of limitations on the latest judicial case against him is approaching. The Catholic Church expelled him in February, and he is under an international arrest warrant.

Venegas and Rodriguez said they want to prevent Víquez from escaping accountability. At least four reports against him have been made public in recent months. Three of them, those of Venegas, Rodriguez and a man named Carlos, have prescribed. A fourth is a lawsuit filed in court by a young man who claims he was raped by the priest while Víquez was serving in Patarrá de Desamparados, about 10 kilometers from San José, the Costa Rican capital.

Costa Rican law provides that cases of child abuse prescribe 10 years after the victim reaches the age of majority. The complainant in the pending case will turn 28 in September, and the source reports that after October there would be no possibility of prosecuting Víquez.

Víquez left Costa Rica in January, after senior officials of the local Catholic Church informed him of the criminal complaint. Reports say he went to Panama and later moved to Mexico, according to migration records cited by the press. Interpol issued a red notice for his international capture in April.

Archbishop José Rafael Quirós of San José signed Víquez’s expulsion from the priesthood in February, though he did not publicly explain the charges against him. The complainants also accuse the archbishop of concealing Víquez for 15 years. The Church hierarchy rejects any cover-up and insists it has already acted enough in relation to Víquez. Quirós is president of the group of bishops of Costa Rica.

The men are in Mexico for one week with support from FIND, a Mexican organization that works on the defense of abused minors. Their plans include meetings with organizations that assist people abused by clergy, media interviews, and street outreach. Venegas said they carry posters and flyers with Víquez’s photograph and ask Mexicans who know anything about him to go to the police. Some victims claim to have seen the former priest in Guadalajara, in the Mexican state of Jalisco. The search plan there includes visiting institutions known for housing priests accused of abuse and extending to houses of other priests in more isolated parts of Jalisco and in the neighboring state of Colima.

Venegas, now 33, said he was 14 when the priest of his village gained his trust. Rodriguez, now 38, said Víquez invited him to meals and outings when he was an altar boy in Tres Ríos in the 1990s. Rodriguez said Víquez’s alleged victims number in the dozens, while the Metropolitan Curia reports nine. The priest’s alleged abuse of children in the church’s care is the kind of harm that Mark 9:42 addresses, and the protection of those children is at the center of this case.

A young man from Patarrá later encouraged the group to pursue a more recent complaint after reading news reports about the earlier cases. He filed the rape complaint in court at the end of 2018. At that time Víquez was still a priest and was living in Costa Rica, but he left days after his superiors notified him of the complaint. The case has prompted other complaints against priests in Costa Rica and has kept Catholics in the country on alert.

Source: Read the original report (translated from Spanish)