The first time I met Santiago Schuler was at the restaurant El Toro, which he owned. A focus of Chilean night-life, this gay restaurant is in the district of Bellavista in Santiago. We got on well, and I saw him several times, including once in 2017, during my second stay in the country, when I interviewed him in the presence of my Chilean researcher, Andrés Herrera.
Santiago Schuler is something of a special case. He is a pro- Pinochet gay. He continues to have great admiration for the dictator.
‘I still have two portraits of Pinochet in my hallway,’ he told me without a hint of embarrassment.
At the age of 71, the manager of El Toro told me about his career, in which Catholicism, fascism and homosexuality produced a strange cocktail. Born in Chile to a family of French wine-growers and a father of Swiss origin, he grew up in the Christian faith, and close to Opus Dei. He was married and the father of nine children. ‘In the closet’ for a long time, he only belatedly ‘came out’ after the end of the dictatorship, when he was over sixty. Since then he has tried to make up for lost time. His gay restaurant, El Toro, tiny inside, but much larger when extended into the street on a terrace under an awning, represents the heart of Santiago’s gay life. And what a paradox! Chile’s emblematic LGBT venue is run by a fundamentalist ex-Catholic, an old personal friend of Pinochet’s!
‘Homosexuals weren’t very worried under Pinochet, even though the regime was indeed quite macho,’ Santiago Schuler suggests.
According to Schuler and other sources, Pinochet’s wife was both a practising Catholic and gay-friendly. The Pinochets even surrounded themselves with a veritable court of Catholic homosexuals. The presidential couple liked to be seen with certain local gay figures, at parties and gala dinners, just as Pinochet liked to be seen with the nuncio Angelo Sodano.
The historians and gay activists that I interviewed in Santiago don’t necessarily share that analysis. Many dispute the idea that the Chilean dictatorship was conciliatory towards homosexuals. But they all acknowledge that some places were tolerated by the regime.
‘I would say that the gay issue didn’t exist under Pinochet,’ the writer and activist Pablo Simonetti tells me. It’s true that in the documents that came out after the end of the dictatorship, nobody seems have been executed or tortured for their morals. Sodomy still remained a crime, however, until the end of the 1990s, and nothing was done to combat AIDS.
In fact, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, under the Pinochet dictatorship, there was even a ‘gay circuit’ in private clubs, discos and bars where ‘political ideas were usually left in the cloakroom’. Some bars were closed; some clubs were infiltrated by the police. There were also cases of persecution and murder, and homosexuals were tortured by the regime, but according to Óscar Contardo, Pablo Simonetti and other experts, the dictatorship didn’t persecute homosexuals as such, in a special or specific way (like Castro’s regime in Cuba, the previous socialist government, led by Allende, wasn’t very gay-friendly either).
What is strange, on the other hand, and to some extent startling, is the very existence of a real ‘gay court’ in Pinochet’s entourage. No one has ever described it in detail; I have to do it here, because it is at the heart of the subject of this book.
During another dinner, where he let me taste some vintage red wine of which he was the exclusive dealer in Chile, I questioned Santiago Schuler about Pinochet’s ‘homosexual court’. We mentioned a whole series of names and, each time, Schuler would pick up his telephone and, talking to other people who were close to Pinochet and with whom he stayed friends, reconstruct the dictator’s gay or gay-friendly entourage. Six names recur systematically. All are closely connected to the apostolic nuncio Angelo Sodano.
The most illustrious of these names is that of Fernando Karadima. He was a Catholic priest who, during the 1980s, ran the parish of El Bosque in the centre of Santiago, which I visited. Located in the smart district of Providencia, it is only a few hundred metres away from the nunciature: so Angelo Sodano was Karadima’s neighbour. He went to see him on foot.
It was also the church frequented by Pinochet’s entourage. The dictator had good relations with Karadima, whom he protected for a long time in spite of recurring rumours, from the 1980s onwards, about the sexual abuse that went on there. According to several sources, Karadima’s parish, like Sodano’s nunciature, was infiltrated by the regime’s security services. The homosexuality of the Chilean priest was therefore well known by this time and by all officials, as well as his sexual abuses.
‘Pinochet was fascinated by the information about homosexuals brought back to him by his informers and agents. He was particularly interested in the gay Catholic hierarchy,’ Schuler told me.
Ernesto Ottone, a former director of the Chilean Communist Party, and long exiled from the country, gave me an interesting analysis when I interviewed him.
‘At first, Pinochet was frowned upon by the Church. So he had to create a Church of his own from the ground up. He had to find pro-Pinochet priests, but also bishops. This recruitment and training campaign was the role of Karadima’s church. Sodano defended the strategy. And since the nuncio was a notorious anti-communist, as well as being extremely vain, the attraction of power did the rest. He was on the hard right. As far as I was concerned, Sodano was pro-Pinochet.’ (Another left-wing leader, Marco Enríquez-Ominami, who stood several times as a candidate in Chile’s presidential election, also confirmed Sodano’s ‘pro-Pinochet’ stance.)
The apostolic nuncio therefore became an unconditional devotee of Karadima, so much so that a room reserved for him in a wing of the vicariate of El Bosque was christened ‘la sala del nuncio’ (the nuncio’s drawing room). There he met many seminarians and young priests that Karadima personally introduced to him. The Chilean acted as an intermediary, a fixer, for the Italian, who was duly grateful for these kindnesses. The young men in question gravitated around the parish and its organization, the Priestly Union. This group, which consisted of five bishops and dozens of very conservative priests, was entirely devoted to Karadima, rather as the Legion of Christ would similarly be towards the priest Marcial Maciel.
‘It was a kind of sect of which Karadima was the boss,’ the lawyer Juan Pablo Hermosilla comments. ‘Neither Opus Dei nor the Legion of Christ had really taken root in Chile, so Karadima’s group assumed that role.’
Through that network of priests and his own personal homosexual connections, Karadima was kept well informed about the Chilean clergy.
‘Karadima worked hand in hand with Sodano,’ Hermosilla adds.
The priest would often tell his visitors that he was able to pull strings. And thanks to the attentions of the nuncio, he claimed to have strong connections with Rome, and to be under the direct protection of John Paul II, which is probably very much of an exaggeration.
‘He had the appearance of a saint, and the seminarians called him “el santo, el santito”. He said he would be canonized after his death,’ the lawyer Hermosilla adds.
Mónica González, a famous Chilean investigative journalist, agrees: ‘Karadima wanted to know everything about the private lives of the priests, he listened to all the gossip, all the rumours. He was interested in progressive priests, and zealously tried to find out if they were gay. He passed on all this information to the nuncio Sodano, with a view to blocking the careers of any who were on the left.’
In all likelihood, this information, whether it was passed on by Sodano to his fascist friends or communicated directly from Karadima to Pinochet, enabled the arrest of progressive priests. Several witnesses talked of confabulations between Sodano and Sergió Rillón, Pinochet’s right-hand man, and of files being swapped. So Sodano, who had Karadima’s ear, and was proud of his vast knowledge, could have shared confidences with the Chilean dictatorship.
Numerous army officers, many of Pinochet’s secret police and several of his personal advisers were also regular visitors to Karadima’s parish. Pinochet’s ministers and generals, good practising Catholics,
attended mass there.
We might even say that in the 1970s and 1980s, El Bosque became the parish church of the dictatorship, and a meeting point for fascists. There were so many of them, they had so many crimes and misdeeds requiring forgiveness, that one wonders how they could go on taking communion and hope to end up in Purgatory! Except that the priest Fernando Karadima seemed to promise them paradise, with the blessing of the nuncio.
Angelo Sodano was omnipresent in El Bosque, according to all witnesses, and constantly appeared in the company of Karadima, with whom he sometimes celebrated mass. The envoy of Pope John Paul II appeared beside Pinochet at certain events. He spent the rest of his time moving in pro-fascist and furiously anti-communist circles: he was in direct contact with Sergió Rillón, who personally followed religious affairs, as well as with Francisco Javier Cuadra, the dictator’s special adviser, then one of his ministers and finally his ambassador to the Vatican. (The declassified CIA archives confirm this information, as does Osvaldo Rivera, another close adviser to Pinochet, whom we interviewed.)
Sodano seemed at ease in this fascist milieu. Pinochet’s personal guard adopted the archbishop as one of their own because he was ideologically reliable and never talked. And since he had a connection with John Paul II and was believed to be a future cardinal, the nuncio became a precious pawn in an overall plan. He, in return, proud of attracting such envy, ramped up his toadyism and his appetite. As Roosevelt used to say, never under-estimate a man who over-estimates himself! The vainest of nuncios, the future ‘dean of cardinals’ was a man of limitless pride and extra-large ego.
The ambitious Sodano therefore navigated among multiple identities while trying to combine different networks and avoid making a mark. He compartmentalized his lives to the extent that it is difficult to decode his Chilean years. He took control freakery to an extreme. A reserved and even indecipherable figure, in Chile, and later in Rome, he would present himself as prudent, discreet and secretive – except when he wasn’t. For example, in his curious relationship with Rodrigo Serrano Bombal.
Bombal – what a name! What a pedigree! What a CV! A reserve naval officer and allegedly a member of Pinochet’s secret service, he was also an habitué of El Bosque. (The journalist Mónica González said that his membership of DINA, the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, Pinochet’s secret services, is attested by his appointment record, which she was able to consult.)
How do we know that any of this information is reliable? It is all accessible now in the items in the file and the witness statements given as part of the Karadima ‘affair’. Since at least 1984, Fernando Karadima had been denounced several times for sexual abuse. At the time when he was regularly visiting him, Angelo Sodano could not, in spite of his smile, have been unaware of these facts.
‘Fernando Karadima spotted boys with family problems, and won their loyalty to the parish. He gradually removed and separated them from their families, and finally abused them. His system was still risky, because these boys usually belonged to the families of the Chilean elite,’ I am told by the lawyer for several of the victims, Juan Pablo Hermosilla.
The priest’s actions caused outrage throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but Pinochet’s gay entourage and the Chilean episcopacy protected Karadima and brushed the whole case under the carpet. The Vatican, where Angelo Sodano had in the meantime become secretary of state, also covered up for Karadima, and even instructed the Chilean Church not to denounce him. (The official version is that the Vatican was not informed about the Karadima affair until 2010, when Sodano was no longer secretary of state. Only the Cardinal of Santiago, Francisco Javier Errázuriz, was said to have delayed sending the file to the holy see, keeping it to himself without acting for several years – for which he was personally indicted by the Chilean judiciary.)
The reasons that led Sodano (as well as Cardinal Errázuriz, who replaced Sodano as secretary of state in 2006) to protect this paedophile priest remain mysterious. Everything suggests that it was not just a matter of covering up for a priest accused of sexual abuse, but of a whole system in which the Church and Pinochet’s dictatorship were closely linked, and would have had a lot to lose if the priest had begun to talk. In any case, out of loyalty to the system, Sodano would always defend priests accused of sexual abuse, to preserve the institution, defend his friends, and perhaps also to protect himself.
According to the 14 witnesses in the trial and the 50 or so complaints registered, the sexual abuse began in the late 1960s and continued until 2010. For 50 years, Karadima abused dozens of boys between the ages of 12 and 17, most of them white and blond.
It was only after the fall of the dictatorship, in 2004, that a formal inquiry was held into his activities. It would not be until 2011 that four circumstantial complaints were judged to be admissible. It was then, once Cardinal Sodano had been removed by Pope Benedict XVI, that the Vatican ordered a trial under canon law. Father Karadima was found guilty of sexual abuse of minors and punished by the pope. According to my information, he still lives in Chile today, at the age of 80, without any religious responsibilities, in a secret and isolated location. (He was finally reduced to lay status by Pope Francis in September 2018.)
Since 2010 the Chilean Church has been largely ‘discredited’ and ‘stripped of credibility by this affair’, in the words of Pablo Simonetti. The number of believers has collapsed, and the level of trust in Catholicism has dropped from 50 per cent to less than 22 per cent.
Pope Francis’s visit in 2018 reopened old wounds: Francis appeared to have protected a priest close to Karadima, and we must probably see that mistake less as an error – alas – than as a desperate attempt to ensure that Karadima’s entire system, and his connivances reaching all the way to Cardinals Sodano and Franciso Javier Errázuriz, did not literally collapse. After an extended investigation, the pope finally apologized in a public letter for ‘committing serious errors of judgement … in [his] perception of the situation, especially due to a lack of reliable and balanced information’. He was referring explicitly to those who had kept him badly informed: according to the Chilean press, these were the nuncio Ivo Scapolo, and the cardinals Ricardo Ezzati and Francisco Javier Errázuriz – all three close to Angelo Sodano. Since then, all Chilean bishops have resigned, and the case has assumed international proportions. Several cardinals, including Ezzati and Errázuriz, have been investigated by the Chilean courts in connection with sexual abuse allegations made against other priests. Many revelations are yet to come. (In this chapter I use the evidence from the trial and witness statements, including Juan Carlos Cruz, whom I have interviewed, as well as the documents communicated to me by their chief lawyer, Juan Pablo Hermosilla, who helped me with my inquiry. A priest close to Karadima, Samuel Fernández, who repented, also agreed to speak.)
So, during his years in Chile, Angelo Sodano socialized assiduously with Pinochet and the parish of El Bosque. What did he know exactly? What were his motivations?
Here we should make clear that at no point, either during the Karadima trial, or in the course of dozens of interviews that I had in Santiago, was Sodano ever himself suspected of involvement in the sexual abuse of minors that was committed in El Bosque. This is clearly confirmed by Juan Pablo Hermosilla. ‘We carried out an in-depth investigation, based on the relationship between Karadima and nuncio Sodano, about Sodano’s personal involvement in Karadima’s sexual abuse, and we found no evidence or witness statements to indicate that he took part in these crimes. I have never heard anyone say that Sodano was present when Karadima committed acts of sexual abuse. I think it didn’t happen. because we would definitely know after all these years.’
But the victims’ lawyer adds: ‘On the other hand, it’s almost impossible, taking into account the extent of Karadima’s sexual crimes, their frequency and the rumours that had been circulating for a long time, and given that most of the victims were seminarians, that Sodano was unaware of what was happening.’
But one last mystery remains: the cl
oseness of the nuncio to Pinochet’s entourage. This connection, these relationships with a real gay mafia, remain strange at the very least, when we are aware of the position of the Catholic Church on homosexuality during the 1980s.
This unnatural connivance with Pinochet even meant that the nuncio was given a nickname: ‘Pinochette’ (according to several people I interviewed). In favour of Angelo Sodano, his defenders – who included the nuncio François Bacqué – point out to me that it was difficult for a Vatican diplomat to act as a dissident under the dictatorship. Associating with Pinochet’s entourage was indispensable, and opposing him would have led to a cessation of diplomatic relations with the Vatican, the expulsion of the nuncio and perhaps to the arrest of priests. This argument holds some water.
Similarly, the cardinals I interviewed in Rome point to Sodano’s major diplomatic success since his arrival in Chile in 1978. According to them he played a crucial part in mediation between Chile and Argentina during the conflict between the two Catholic countries concerning their border at the southern end of South America, near Tierra del Fuego. (But according to other reliable witnesses, Sodano was initially hostile to the mediation of the Vatican, which was initially the work of Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez and the Italian nuncio Antonio Samorè, whom the pope sent to the country as mediators in the conflict.)
They also stress that John Paul II wasn’t shy about criticizing Pinochet, not least in a public speech that proved to be crucial. In his 1987 trip, during the mass that he celebrated, the pope allowed political opponents and dissidents to speak up beside him to criticize the regime of censorship, torture and political assassinations. This trip would have a lasting impact on the evolution of the country towards democracy from 1990 onwards.
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 28