Diario De Tabasco
[translation]
Yoga School, the NXIVM-like cult of horror discovered in Argentina
5/08/2022
Pablo Salum was 14 years old when he made the first complaint about the aberrations that were hidden behind the activity of the Buenos Aires Yoga School in Argentina, the sect disrupted over the weekend.
Pablo Salum was 14 years old when he made the first complaint about the aberrations that were hidden behind the activity of the Buenos Aires Yoga School in Argentina, the sect disrupted over the weekend in a mega-operation that the Superintendence of Federal Investigations baptized “Sect Anonymous Society”. He knows who are many of the 19 arrested and the five who are under international arrest warrants as members of the organization based in Argentina, but which also operated in the United States.
Federal Judge Ariel Lijo and prosecutor Alejandra Mangano are expected today to begin investigating Juan Percowicz, the leader of the sect, the 84-year-old man who called himself “Master” or “Angel”, the man who believed himself to be above the rest of mortals. The sect bears some resemblance to Nxivm, the organization dismantled in the United States with strong links to Mexico and whose leader, Keith Raniere, was sentenced to 120 years in prison.
The Argentine organization is accused, among other crimes, of human trafficking with reduction to servitude through coercion. They recruited people with the argument that they had remedies for “the evils of AIDS and drugs” and that they worked for “the development of happiness”.
Of course, they recruited the faithful, “students”, initiated them and charged them to give them access to the leader's word, to the promise of happiness and well-being, to belong to the “circle”. They forced them to cut family ties, but also to give up goods and property, and even to pay by selling their bodies for money. Even children were co-opted and forced to awaken sexually in the hands of their own parents. That is what the accusations say; that is what the Justice tries to prove.
As it is common in the activity of the sects: it is about building and accumulating power, and making money, a lot of money. This money captured by abject means was channeled into the legal circuit, for example, through local foundations and those created abroad.
The story
Today Salum is 44 years old and, in a conversation with La Nación, he assures that he is not only burdened with his own story, with having lost his family, who were co-opted by that organization, with having spent part of his childhood trapped in that network. “It is also the pain of seeing parents who lost their children there; many of the detainees were now children when they entered. Many parents died in the struggle, without being able to recover them. There is no worse pain than having a child stolen from you”.
A year ago -with 30 years of struggle behind him- Salum made a new denunciation: “So many years have passed that this had to happen sometime, but for Justice I no longer exist. I provided testimonies, I added evidence, but I do not exist because that case has already been judged. I feel violated; I am one of the victims”. The case against Percowicz and the bosses of the Buenos Aires Yoga School that he filed when he managed to escape from their yoke, in 1993, was closed years ago.
He was eight years old when his mother, due to a health problem, approached what was then a school of philosophy, yoga, New Age culture. It was the Yoga School of Buenos Aires (EYBA). Two clients of the family business told her about the entity and Carmen Graciela Alarcón went there. She took him to Pablo, who was the youngest of her three children, with whom, at the time, she lived in the neighborhood of Núñez.
“They promised to heal him; science could not find an answer to my mother's problems,” she says. He recalls that he was the first child to join. At the first meeting there were five people. The group grew quickly,” he continues. They added the family because they said that everyone had negative energy, that you had to follow the leader to cleanse yourself. Because if you didn't you could get sick, have a bad time, die.”
The family went from living in Núñez to living in an apartment of the organization. Andrea and Germán, Pablo's older siblings, were also co-opted. He no longer has any relationship with his family. “They stayed there. They destroyed my family. Victims end up being victimizers,” he summarizes.
He reviews that he himself came to have “students” and that his mother was “ascending” and also having other people in charge. “There were more than a thousand of us and the first ones went up the ranks”, in a perverse pyramid. Salum points out that Juan Percowicz, leader of the organization, called himself “the angel” and claimed that “he had been sent to add a thousand more angels to save humanity”.
Percowicz told his mother that “instead of being” with her partner [Salum's stepfather, who had also become a member of the EYBA] “she had to be with someone else”; that “she did not have to continue with her work because it was something minor and she was a 'leader'”. And so began the disarticulation of the family; he even forced her to give away a pet she had had since she was very young.
Money and sex
Salum details that they were given “tasks”, such as “generating money”, and that, in addition, they were asked to set up the “geishado”, which implied adding other people, as in the coaching of pyramid schemes. To all this they added the “sexual chakra”, which implied going “against everything we had been taught on the outside”.
“How did you realize that the situation was anomalous?” asks La Nación. “When pornographic material began to circulate; when we saw that there was sex. At that age, I was a kid, I rejected all that, it disgusted me.”
“Everyone greeted each other with a kiss on the mouth; there was groping, they were forced to have orgies with pictures of the leader behind,” he details. “There were cases where children were ordered to have sex with their parents,” he adds. Friends Salum had told him that they had had to do this “homework.”
“I saw my mom and my sister, who would have been about 22 years old, being sex slaves; my sister was used to seduce the older ones, the powerful ones,” he emphasizes. Nobody told me about it. I saw it firsthand. As I was the son of a 'hierarchy', the photos and videos passed through my house. Seeing them affected me a lot.
Salum assures that Percowicz and his stepson Marcelo Guerra, added “well-known people, businessmen, politicians” from the early 90's, the times of Menemism. But when he became a teenager, he got scared.
“I was a kid, but I had a big life. I didn't go to school,” he notes. “They started telling me that I was 'rebellious' because I didn't want to accept the leader's guidelines,” he adds. My family supported the punishments; they took away my food, they wouldn't buy me clothes. I had no one to support me; I was alone”.
In desperation, he stole one of the envelopes with money that the members of the sect were obliged to hand over. His mother told the leader, who asked her to take Salum to a meeting where he had to publicly confess what he had done. He was beaten in front of his mother and taken to work cleaning tiles at the organization's headquarters, on the property at 4457 Estado de Israel.
Faced with his refusal to return, his mother warned the leader. “They sent lawyers to tell me that they would take me to a boarding school; upon my refusal, the next day my brother, who was dark-skinned, dragged me to the building where the organization's people lived so that I could work for free in the kitchen.” He escaped in an oversight; he ran ten blocks, as if escaping from hell. He called his father, who had started another family and lived in Lomas de Zamora. He took him to make the report.
I was the first boy to go in and the first to escape and report it,” he recalls. They sent me to the hospital to check the beatings. I remember all that: the lack of training of those who listened to me… They laughed”.
“Without political color”.
In 1993, the Buenos Aires Yoga School began to be investigated. During six years, the case went through three judges: Mariano Bergés, who excused himself after the defendants filed for his impeachment, Roberto Murature, and Julio Corvalán de la Colina.
The court held that there was no merit to prosecute or dismiss the defendants for the crimes of swindling, theft and abuse of adults for which they were investigated, although the case remained open for the crime of reduction to servitude.
The case was reactivated in 1999, when Corvalán de la Colina admitted as plaintiffs the parents of two students of the Yoga School: María Verónica Cané and María Valeria Llamas. The judge had decreed the incapacity of the girls and gave new impetus to the investigation, which led to a redoubling of pressure on EYBA. However, the case did not move forward.
After a process with many controversial alternatives – including a letter sent in May 1999 by a group of 28 U.S. congressmen to then President Carlos Menem to denounce alleged human rights violations and judicial harassment against Percowicz and other EYBA members – and a letter sent in 2002 to the U.S. Congress to denounce the alleged human rights violations and judicial harassment against Percowicz and other EYBA members, and a letter sent in 2002 to the government of former President Eduardo Duhalde by Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and other well-known figures of the Argentine human rights organizations, the case began to languish, despite the fact that the file treasured strong statements, such as, precisely, that of Pablo Salum.
In his twitter @leyantisectas (that name also has its website and its Facebook and Instagram user), Salum -who dedicates his life to ask the State to advance in the fight against these organizations and works to unmask them from the organization Librementes, said in 2018 that Judge Berges “had never imagined meeting such powerful people linked to a pedophile sect: ministers of the national government, judges, trade unionists, all exposed”, and that “there the pressures began to circulate”.
He added: “The #Secta moved its contacts in the United States, where it had powerful contacts, and managed to get the US Congress to send several congressmen to pressure them to close the case; even its president, Bill Clinton, sent a memo to Menem”.
After an episode in which a group of victims' relatives insulted and assaulted Percowicz and his wife in a restaurant in Belgrano, several human rights organizations mobilized to support him and ask for him.
“Immediately afterwards, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Pérez Esquivel, called the police chief in desperation and went to the police station demanding the release of the pedophile “teacher”, the same one who ordered us to be abused”, added Salum in his Twitter thread.
In dialogue with La Nación, Salum emphasized that his fight is “non-partisan; without political color”. “It is not intentional. I am a victim who was robbed of his family, of his life in a coercive organization. And that organization continued to operate with impunity with the complicity of the powerful; because they finance campaigns, because they lend places for meetings, because they make their followers vote.”
“Alone, without means, I fought an unequal battle -he synthesizes-. I lost my family. The State must intervene, it must take responsibility for this struggle”.
https://www.diariodetabasco.mx/mundo/2022/08/15/escuela-de-yoga-la-secta-del-horror-parecida-a-nxivm-descubierta-en-argentina/
MK10ART's recent panting of the NXIVM 5
MK10ART's painting of Kristin Snyder kayaking
Kirsten GIllibrand with her father, former NXIVM consultant Douglas Rutnik.
When you have a couple of rascals posing as victims, who've positioned themselves as the lead plaintiffs, and they're suing people who had no managerial authority in the organization, people who should be suing the plaintiffs, it waters down the case and diminishes those who were legitimately victimized.
Anyone is welcome to hate me, to hate my comments, to say anything they want. And that's fine. But I know a con when I see one. And so many of the commenters here have been completely conned by two of the worst people involved in this whole thing. Because they tell you what you want to hear, using the same ESP manipulation tactics that you claim to stand against.
Also, what is 10C? It was bad when we knew that Allison and Nicki were involved. But when Nicki revealed that Sarah was also a part of 10C, and outranked the two other women, all of a sudden everyone forgot what 10C was. Interesting.