Marcela Aranda, theologist who was the first whistleblower of the priest Renato Poblete, accepted the reparative economic agreement proposed by the Society of Jesus, although she was “disappointed” by how she was approached by the order-
To reach this agreement, there were negotiations for more than a year with a commission formed by the Jesuits, where Aranda was represented by lawyer Juan Pablo Hermosilla, and which began after the investigation of the Company that verified the abuses of Poblete, who died in 2010.
According to the newspaper La Tercera, the first approach was in October 2019, when she asked the Jesuits to pay various medical expenses, such as gynecological, dental, therapies and medications, but the order was denied.
“We had several conversations, about ten times, to try to make understandable what the sense of what I was asking was, but there were a number of excuses, that the company can’t take over someone’s lifetime. I felt revictimized, like I was getting paid, like they were doing me a favor,” she recalled.
The order offered him, as a counterproposal, an amount drawn up in tranches, a kind of “standardized” scale of amounts of money that depend on the severity of the abuses. Aranda was offered the highest.
In June he decided to accept the agreement, but “It was a terrible disappointment, I was distressed. Money doesn’t make up your life, no matter how important the figure is, because the feeling you have is, ‘Look, I give you this, don’t bother anymore.’ It’s a sense of abandonment.”
“I’d rather not say it, because this cataloguing that was made of abuse left people badly damaged, by abuses classified as mild,” he said.
