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	Mexican Officials Detain Lawyers, Activist Tied to Sex Abuse Case By Lisa J. Adams The Associated Press, carried in SignOnSanDiego September 20, 2006 http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20060920-1312-ca-cardinalssued.html Mexico City – Immigration authorities on Wednesday briefly detained two U.S. lawyers and an activist who represent a 25-year-old Mexican man in a lawsuit alleging that Roman Catholic church leaders in Los Angeles and Mexico protected a priest who raped him. The lawyers representing Joaquin Aguilar Mendez had just finished telling a news conference the accused priest, the Rev. Nicolas Aguilar, had been located in the central Mexican state of Puebla and celebrated a Mass there last Sunday. It was not clear if church authorities knew of his actions. Aguilar Mendez also told reporters he has feared for his life and that of his family since he first went public with his claims late last year. Eric Barragan, spokesman for the Chicago-based Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, told The Associated Press that authorities questioned lawyers Jeff Anderson and Michael Finnegan, as well as the network's national director, David Clohessy. "We just want to leave the country tonight legally," Barragan said. "Of course, we don't want to create any havoc." A person who answered the telephone at immigration offices said no one was immediately available to comment. Clohessy told the AP the immigration officials asked for their passports, plane tickets and Mexican immigration documents, and detained them at their hotel for an hour, then left. "It felt somewhat like harassment, but if that's the case nothing will stop us. Our efforts are to protect kids," Clohessy said. Aguilar Mendez's lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday, alleges that Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahoney and Mexican Cardinal Norberto Rivera conspired to protect Nicolas Aguilar. The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, accuses both cardinals of negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy and sexual battery. It charges Aguilar with sexual battery, said attorney Vance Owen, who works with a Texas law firm. Rivera, one of Mexico's most high-profile cardinals, heads the Mexico City archdiocese and was considered a candidate to replace Pope John Paul II when he died last year. Mahoney heads the United States' largest archdiocese. The lawsuit alleges Rivera helped cover up abuse involving 50 boys when Aguilar served as a parish priest in Mexico's central Puebla state in 1987. Rivera was bishop of Tehuacan in Puebla state at the time. Rivera, according to the suit, later helped in Aguilar's transfer to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Aguilar has been charged in California with 19 felony counts of committing lewd acts on a child. The suit said as many as 60 alleged victims from both Mexico and the U.S. have come forward with allegations against Aguilar. Mendez Aguilar, who is not related to the priest, said he was abused in 1994 when he was 12 According to the lawsuit, he had gone to the priest's room at the rectory to use a restroom when he was grabbed by Aguilar and sodomized. He said he was told to keep quiet or his siblings would suffer the same abuse. He said he contacted authorities, but they took no action against the priest. Instead, he said, his family was ostracized by both authorities and the people in their parish. The lawsuit gives a picture of a priest with sexual problems from the time he was a seminary student in the 1960s in Mexico. He allegedly attacked another student who, when he reported it, was thrown out of the seminary, according to the suit. Rivera, then bishop of Tehuacan, wrote to Mahoney, then archbishop of Los Angeles, in 1987, asking to transfer Aguilar there, according to the lawsuit. Rivera would later say he warned Mahoney in a letter that Aguilar had "homosexual problems," but Mahoney would say he never received the warning. "We do not admit priests with any homosexual problems," Mahoney wrote in one letter, according to the lawsuit. In another letter, dated March 4, 1988, Mahoney was quoted as saying, "It is almost impossible to determine precisely the number of young altar boys he has sexually molested, but the number is large." By then, the suit said, the priest had fled to Mexico and Mahoney was seeking his return to face criminal charges in Los Angeles.
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