Rio's 'narco-pentecostal' gangs accused of ordering Catholic churches to close

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Rio’s ‘narco-pentecostal’ gangs accused of ordering Catholic churches to close

Bible-bashing drug boss accused of targeting Afro-Brazilian religions and Catholic congregations

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Wed 10 Jul 2024 10.00 BST
Last modified on Thu 11 Jul 2024 02.30 BST

Reports that a powerful Rio drug lord known for his extremist religious beliefs ordered Catholic churches near his stronghold to close have spooked worshipers and security experts and exposed the advent of a “narco-pentecostal” movement made up of heavily armed evangelical drug traffickers.

Claims emerged in the Brazilian press over the weekend that Álvaro Malaquias Santa Rosa – a notorious gang boss known as Peixão (Big Fish) – had determined that three places of worship should shut down in and around the agglomeration of favelas that he controls in northern Rio.

Since Peixão – whose nickname comes from the ichthys “Jesus” fish – took power in 2016 of five favelas that have become known as the Complexo de Israel, an allusion to the evangelical belief that the return of Jews to the Holy Land is a step towards the second coming of Christ and Armageddon.

A neon Star of David has been erected at the top of the complex and at night can be seen for miles around – an unmissable symbol of Peixão’s force and his faith. The roofs of the favelas’ redbrick houses are dotted with blue and white Israel flags demarcating the territory the gangster controls. When police raided one of his hideouts in 2021 they found a swimming pool framed by a mural of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem and the words: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/10/brazil-gang-boss-drug-trafficking-closing-churches

[Judi Lynn]

1. Good grief! I guess it follows: death squads in Central America during Reagan's time were rabid racist

right-winger Pentecostals, too. The bloody butcher Efraín Ríos Montt, in addition to being a Reagan lapdog, was a holy roller preacher, as well! He had the fervent support of all US televangelists of the time, as well.

The things those death squads did went far beyond everyday sadism. They were insanely vicious, designed to paralyze the indigenous people with unbearable fear. One of their special accomplishments was to murder an indigenous family, arrange their headless bodies at their table, with their heads on the table before them. It was meant to devastate the neighbors who found them in that condition, who spread the word immediately.


Here's a quick Google grab which leaped out in a search a moment ago:

Ríos Montt, the Evangelist
Part of a roundtable reflecting on the death and legacy of dictator Ríos Montt. Read the rest here.

April 24, 2018

Rachel Nolan
Like many other Latin American dictators, Efraín Ríos Montt counted on the training and support of the United States. In 1951, he attended the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. (In 2001, the school changed its name to try to escape its reputation as finishing school for dictators and death squad leaders.) But Ríos Montt’s most profound connection to the United States was through evangelical Christianity.

After a destructive earthquake struck Guatemala in 1976, two-dozen missionaries from a Eureka, California-based Pentecostal group traveled to Guatemala to spread the gospel and build houses. They converted a prominent general named Ríos Montt, who seemed to have won the presidency in 1974 only to have it stolen through electoral manipulation by his rival. Ríos Montt converted from Catholicism to become a preacher for the U.S.-based church and dropped out of politics for several years. He preached the gospel.

In 1982, Ríos Montt’s staged a political comeback and seized power in a coup. Jim Durkin, the leader of the Pentecostal church, traveled to Guatemala and said the dictator’s ascension was a “miracle” aided by God. As Virginia Garrard-Burnett chronicled in her book, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit, during his dictatorship Ríos Montt appeared on television each Sunday to give “Sunday sermons” on morality, even as he directed scorched earth campaigns in the highlands. In just one year, at least 10,000 people were murdered, most of them indigenous. More than 400 towns were wiped off the map. In 2013, a trial against Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity revealed he had ordered the massacres.

More:
https://nacla.org/news/2018/04/24/r%C3%ADos-montt-evangelist

[cbabe]

2. My previous post from yesterday:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219130050