Quotes of the Day
When a powerful politician was ar-rested last week in connection with the child-abuse scandal that has rocked Portugal since last November, it brought hope that the country's creaky, excruciatingly slow justice system was finally getting into gear. The detention of Paulo Pedroso, Socialist M.P. and former minister, was hailed by lawyers and commentators as a sign that the wealthy and influential were no longer untouchable. And so what if the police used investigating techniques that might be deemed unacceptable in other countries? Although not commenting on the merits of particular arrests, Lisbon lawyer Francisco O'Neill Marques says, "Rich and powerful people have been detained. It makes me proud to be a lawyer."
Pedroso's was one of several high-profile arrests after an interminable, eight-month police investigation into a pedophile network operating in state-run children's homes known as Casa Pia. Also placed in preventive detention was Jorge Ritto, a former ambassador to South Africa, along with a doctor, a lawyer and a TV anchorman.
The arrests came after police used controversial powers to tap the cellular phones of prominent opposition politicians, including Pedroso's mentor, Socialist leader Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, and Antonio Costa, head of the party's parliamentary delegation. Under Portuguese law, the police are allowed to listen in on anyone's phone conversations with special judicial permission, if they believe doing so will help solve a serious crime. The Socialists smell a witch-hunt: Ferro Rodrigues said he had learned of plans to implicate him in the scandal, although Attorney General José Souto de Moura insists he is not a suspect. Party spokesman Manuel Alegre said there could be no democracy if "everyone is listening in on everyone else." Francisco Louça, spokesman for the minority Left Bloc Party, described the phone tapping as Portugal's "judicial Watergate." But the Attorney General maintained that the police had acted within their powers. He told reporters: "I myself could be [tapped] whether or not I was under suspicion, if the conversation would help discover the truth."
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Pedroso, 38, protests that he's a victim of a wicked calumny. "I have never participated in any act of pedophilia or any similar act," he told a press conference shortly before his arrest, which came after parliament lifted his immunity at his own request. As Secretary of State for Labor and Training from 1999 to 2001, Pedroso was responsible for the Casa Pia homes, which care for some 4,600 children at 10 centers around Portugal. He is suspected of 15 cases of sexual violence against minors, which allegedly took place between 1999 and 2000.
Ritto, 67, who retired last year, also denied allegations of abusing children and accused the media of conducting a "lynching." His name has featured prominently in the Casa Pia scandal for decades. In 1981, police accused the caretaker of a Casa Pia home of raping dozens of children over a period of 30 years, and supplying children to Ritto and others. The police even had photographs taken by one of four men pictured sexually abusing young children. Ritto denied any involvement, and the pictures inexplicably disappeared from the police files. The case against the caretaker was dropped.
The scandal resurfaced last November, as more than a score of former Casa Pia children came forward to publicly accuse Ritto of sexual abuse. The weekly magazine Visão reported in March that in 1970 Ritto was removed from his post as consul in Stuttgart after German authorities complained to Lisbon about his involvement with an under-age boy in a public park. Ritto denied the allegation.
At this point, no one in charge denies that horrible things happened to Casa Pia kids. Several senior staff have been sacked in recent months, but the new director, Catalina Pestana, told parliament that there may still be pedophiles in the Casa Pia system. Officials estimate that more than 100 boys and girls, some of them deaf and mute, may have been sexually abused.
The government has promised to let Pestana take a broom to Casa Pia. Doing so would help Prime Minister José Manuel Durão Barroso, whose Social Democratic Party ousted the Socialists in March last year, make good on his vow to bring life and honor back into Portugal's public institutions. The Casa Pia scandal should give him plenty of ideas about where to begin.
- ROD USHER
- A pedohile scandal ensares a well-known politician