A Brazilian Murder, Narco Evangelists and Holy Warfare: The Gangsters of the Global Pentecostal Movement
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Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. June 15, 2019. An evangelical megastars Anderson Ducamo de Souza and his wife, Flor Delish dos Santos, are taking in an evening drive along Rio's famous Copacabana Beach.

They need it. It's been almost a year since Flordeliche, a glamorous and mysterious, singer-cum-star of Brazil's blossoming Pentecostal movement, leveraged her flock to win a spot in Congress on a tough, on-crime ticket under the country's hard-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro. And strange things have been happening ever since. A spate of attempted robberies has hit the couple's home in the high-end neighbourhood of Niteroi, and one of their dogs has been poisoned.

Anderson, a slick-haired sermonizer, some 16 years his wife's junior, claims he's been the victim of no fewer than six attempted assassinations himself. Some point fingers at the couple's 50-odd adopted children. Others are worried about old friends Anderson left behind to hop into the religious limelight. And in Rio, you can never quite rule out all-powerful and violent gangs.

Niteroi might be something of an ivory tower, but it's just a stone's throw from the boneyard of the Red Command, a terrifying new force swallowing up the city's narcotics industry. That beachy drive, therefore, is a chance to leave those worries behind, get some sea air and, as it turns out, a little bit of marital fun. Anderson and Fleur de Liche park up between a row of cars and begin kissing.

"He kissed me a lot," she later says. "I sat on the hood of the car and we had intercourse." "Love," Fleur de Liche asks her husband afterwards. "Tomorrow we'll wake up early, right?" As the couple head home, Fleur de Liche worries they're being tailed by a motorcycle. But after a half-hour ride across the Guanabara Bay, they're home. Fleur de Liche goes inside to check on the 22 kids still living in the couple's mansion.

Anderson, meanwhile, hangs back in the car's driver's seat and clears up some late-night emails. Around 3 a.m., gunfire breaks out in the property's front lot. Fleur de Liche hears six shots in total. She rushes downstairs, but it's too late. Her husband, the mega-pasta, is dead, his body riddled with 30 bullets. Many of them appear to have been directed at his groin.

Flordelich is stunned into silent grief. At this moment, reads a family statement issued soon after, we hold the hand of God and beg for his comfort. Pastor Anderson was fulfilling a marvelous ministry, redeeming souls in the fight against hate due to an absence of God. Brazil's Pentecostal movement, one of the biggest and fastest growing on earth, is shocked.

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hey guys and welcome to another episode of the show that dives into the darkest corners of global organized crime. I'm your host in New Zealand, Sean Williams, and I'm joined today by Australian author and journalist Elle Hardy, whose 2021 book Beyond Belief gets into the incredible rise of Pentecostalism and megachurches worldwide and all the crazy grifts and crime and violence and of course tongue-speaking salvation that comes with it.

So welcome to the show, Elle. I guess we should start by telling listeners what Pentecostalism actually is and kind of why you chose to write your book when you wrote it. How big is this thing around the world? Sure. So it's about a third of the world's two billion Christians. But in 1980, it was only about 6% of global Christians were Pentecostals. So to have expanded that much in 40 years is really substantial.

And it's particularly expanding in the developing world. So sub-Saharan Africa, but also Latin America. And in Latin America, it's really converting Catholics, existing Catholics. And so you're really undoing 500 years of Catholicism in 40.

And so that's having really, really profound effects on politics, culture, society. It's leading to people like Bolsonaro, really, who came to power on this evangelical wave. And I think something like 40% of the...

um of the parliament in in bolsonaro's term was in the evangelical caucus uh so so yeah it's had this really really um profound effect so so we're talking probably i mean i say in my book about 600 million that's a very conservative figure i think it's more likely to be closer to 700 million now and they're converting about 35 000 people a day so that's two madison square gardens that's

That's the capacity of lords if you're in England and change. So yeah, it's just really, really massive. And what the Pentecostal faith is, so it's a branch of the evangelical faith. So most evangelicals, you're born again, you get dunked in water, you take Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Pentecostals go a step further and say that you then need to be born again in the Holy Spirit. And that's what's really profound about the faith. So the Holy Spirit

winds up filling you with the nine gifts of the spirit. So it's things like wisdom, knowledge,

You can put me in Guantanamo, I'd never get online. Healing, miracles, and speaking in tongues, which is how a lot of people know Pentecostals, even though it's not as common anymore. And what it has really meant, in effect, is that it kind of becomes like a populist religion.

It looks and feels like the local culture. It's really, really authentic. It's not being brought down from Rome. And this is why it has real resonance in places like Brazil. So it's the faith of the favelas now. You know, in the old days, yeah, your local priest is educated in Spain or Portugal. They're white and they just dropped into your favela on the edge of the Amazon or in Rio. Now they're a kid that grew up on the streets with you. They're the most charming guy in the village. Yeah.

They're mixed race. They look and sound like you. They're not educated, but they're

They speak from the streets, they speak from the heart, they give sermons that are meaningful to people's lives. I sat through some really profound sermons where they're talking about people are spending too much time on Facebook and things like that. So they're really contextualizing faith in people's lives. And they're offering... So the big three things that they're offering are health, wealth, and authenticity. So healthcare by way of Miracle.

wealth by way of prosperity gospel and then this authenticity. And so that's why it's having this really, really profound effect and it's changing the global religious landscape. I guess American listeners will be familiar with your sort of high-digit televangelist guys on at weird times of the day sort of trying to sell you stuff and, I don't know, Jim Backer style selling stuff.

What does he sell like survival buckets of sludge or whatever that guy does? But it definitely has like a different color in other parts of the world, right? And like you say, it's kind of more like grassroots up sort of religion. Yeah, very much so. I mean, the guy who brought Pentecostalism basically to Brazil, Ege Macedo, is a billionaire and owns one of the big TV stations.

and he has the universal church of the kingdom of God. If you walk around London where I am now, you see it everywhere. It's all in America as well. But they're kind of outliers and they're equivalent like Joel Osteen or someone in the US who was recently found to be hiding money in his walls and has that horribly plastic smile and that sort of soft focus look to him.

um they still are probably kind of the outliers i mean the even in the u.s the pentecostal preacher is is more like a paula white cane who until she became trump's advisor you know people at southern baptists and stuff like that looked down on people like her she was from mississippi she was poor she was speaking in a particular vernacular she was doing the you know would break into tongues and things like that and and and really rapturous and

ecstatic form of worship that yeah, a lot of other evangelical Christians sort of look down on. But yeah, they're very much, you know, this is mainstream global Christianity now. And more often than not the preachers are, yeah, not necessarily the little guys because they always seem to do fairly well for themselves, but not everyone is eight figures wealthy and flying around in private jets.

So let's get to the killing that we went into in the cold open of this show. This sort of mega celebrity death in Brazil. You've got Anderson da Cama de Souza and Flor de Viz dos Santos de Souza. I'm butchering horribly Portuguese, the language.

Tell us a bit more about these two people, how they came to be so prominent and their celebrity in the favelas and in the various echelons of society in Brazil. Sure. So, Flor Delish, again, apologies for my pronunciation.

was a gospel singer who came up through her favela, grew up shockingly poor. I think her father and brother died in a car accident. That was when she found God and converted to Pentecostalism. And she was a gospel singer. And she had this incredible sort of rasping, sort of Bonnie Tyler kind of voice. And

She sort of got into the movement at the right time and I think they you know They were doing some break dancing and sorts of things like that at her church and and just once again contextualizing, you know wasn't just these boring hymns in Latin or whatever and And developed a real following for herself and she was she was married and had three kids and then at some which she went through some sort of divorce and then

wound up remarrying Anderson and he's 20 years younger than her. And in time when they were sort of young newlyweds, they wound up adopting 51 children. The story goes, as she tells it, that one night they were lying in bed and heard this commotion outside and all these kids had run away, I think from a group home or there'd been some sort of

been some sort of incident and all these kids were sort of on her doorstep, I think 30-odd kids, and she took them in. And then she kept taking in more and more kids. And she sort of became famous for this, for this act. You know, she was Brazil's Mother Teresa. They made a biopic about her and a lot of actors refused to be paid because, you know, they thought it was, you know, it was doing service and helping her do the Lord's work. And these were quite prominent Brazilian actors as well.

And so they became, you know, sort of, yeah, famous for this act. Their church was really, really growing. I think they'd expanded to – so Anderson had become a preacher during this time as well. So they'd started this small church in their favela and were really growing it. I think they had five branches around Rio.

And they were sort of moving up in the world, you know, they'd sort of got out of the favela and had this house where, you know, somehow there were 55 people living in it. And on the back of her fame, I think from the biopic, she decided to enter politics.

and she ran for federal parliament in the Bolsonaro election in 2018 and she sort of rode the tide of that evangelical wave that I mentioned earlier so something like nearly 200 of the 500 deputies I think they're called were on this evangelical caucus and

it's quite famously actually how, why WhatsApp had to change their policy of how many messages you can forward. Cause everyone in Brazil uses WhatsApp and it used to be unlimited forwards. And so there was just all this misinformation going around that, you know, they're going to make you a little boy where I dress to school and things like that. And because he's basically sort of rigged the election for the evangelicals and, and Bolsonaro, they WhatsApp changed the policy. So I think it's only 32 or 64 people you can forward a message to now. Uh, but that's just by the by.

And anyway, so she's entered politics. They're really capitalizing on their fame. They're really quite adored. You know, they're a success story. They pulled themselves up from out of the favela using God. This is this was the you know, this is the Bolsonaro image of how Brazil should be.

Anderson was rapidly growing his church and starting to fall out with old friends, with a lot of people in the congregation who'd help him grow the church, who'd been volunteers and stuff. I think they felt that he was getting a bit money hungry.

and just sort of obsessively growing the church and really sort of micromanaging Flordelisha's career in politics. I think they really saw this window to capitalize on their fame and they really wanted to do something and become even more prominent in Brazil. Around this time, sort of 2018 to the early 2019,

something started happening to Anderson. He'd been poisoned probably more than once, some of the family dogs. There'd been a couple of failed robberies which, you know, aren't exactly uncommon in wealthy areas of places like Rio de Janeiro. There was all sorts of stuff happening and it was very suspicious. The police had given him some warnings, he was a bit reticent to heed them about who they were, you know, who might have been behind some of this stuff.

Then in June 2019, he and Flood Relationist went out on a date one night, they're at Copacabana Beach. And they were on their way home at 2:00, 3:00 a.m. And they drove into their garage in quite a nice area, quite a nice house. And she went inside the house. He was sitting in the front seat, sort of half getting out and just saying, "I'm just sending a few emails."

And he was attacked and shot multiple times. Flood alert ran downstairs, you know, saw what had happened, called the police. Very hysterical front page news in Brazil. Yeah, it was a really big deal. And around this time, I actually went to Brazil to start looking into this whole murder. And what started happening was it was...

it sort of just started unfolding on the front pages of the newspapers. And from the start, the police were pretty sus. When you start a robbers, traditionally, if they shoot in panic, they don't tend to shoot 30 times and they don't tend to aim so many bullets at the groin. If you are lying in wait in someone's garage to rob them, the family dogs don't tend to stay quiet. And what happened is this was unfolding.

was that some of the kids started to be implicated in what had happened. And at this time, I probably should say that Anderson was actually once one of the adopted kids.

So I wondered when we were going to get to that. To build the network. Flordelisha's daughter, Simone, from her first marriage, was in a relationship with Anderson when they were teenagers. And he wound up coming into the family home and then getting into a relationship with her mother once she'd adopted him. And then they wound up getting married. So it's a bit crazy and complex. So she was 20 years older than him.

And he was, yeah, he was a very strict disciplinarian. You know, it turned out there was a lot of resentment from the kids.

Things were pretty awful for all the glowing movies and stuff about them. There were basically tears in the household of how the kids were treated. So the actual biological children were the highest. They had a secret language. They lived in a very different way. There were some other kids who were able to be promoted to that level, but

But most of them, you know, lived basically in squalor in one floor of this three-story house. They were only allowed to eat things like macaroni and hot dogs. Some said that they were beaten with baseball bats if they weren't well-behaved. And there was also all sorts of weird sex freak stuff going on between...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Between Anderson, some of the adopted kids, between Flordelais and some of the adopted kids. It was all, yeah, it was all very, very weird and horrible. And various guests in the house had, yeah, were involved. And it was just all pretty unsorted and horrible. So in the end, five of the children were arrested. And that's when they really started squealing.

And so the police launched an operation called "Luke 12" and it's from a line in the Bible where Jesus tells his disciples "There's nothing concealed that will not be disclosed or hidden that will not be made known. What you said in the dark will be heard in the daylight and what you have whispered in the air of the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs."

And what that was alluding to, I much prefer that to like some sort of operation, like hardened edge or something boring like that. This actually means something. This has got something to do with the actual crime and the church. It's cool. I like it.

Yeah, yeah. There's something kind of charming about it. Yeah. But like, yeah, but in the US it'd be like Operation Bald Eagle or something. Yeah. And this is just very, yeah, Brazil around this was, it was all just kind of one giant telenovela and it was kind of there as it was unfolding. Yeah.

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And what this is alluding to was that they were closing in on the real perpetrator, which was bloodless. She had she'd put the kids up to it, basically. In the end, 10 members of the family were implicated. So that's 20 percent for those keeping score.

It appears that Flavio, which was one of her biological kids, did the shooting. They had... Her biological kids in particular had real resentment about all the adopted kids, you know, they kind of felt as though they'd sort of lost their mum and... But I mean, it was a pretty bloody strange upbringing anyway. And, you know, various kids, you know, one of the adopted kids had bought the gun, people had disposed of stuff. Simone, her biological daughter, Anderson's ex-girlfriend, as we might remember,

had one of those great moments when police took her phone and her computer to look into things. There were, you know, a million Google searches of poison, how to do, and, you know, gun, where to find all of those, all of those great things that, yeah, you guys, you guys can get made into a t-shirt, right? She's, I mean, she's got, she's got a pretty good, she's got a pretty good motive of all of those involved. I mean, I've, I've got the most sympathy for Simone to be honest.

Yeah, I mean, she was still loyal to her mother to the end, as far as I'm aware. And her mother was actually convicted in November and sentenced to 50 years after sort of quite a protracted legal case and a lot of Instagramming about her innocence and whatnot. And as it sort of turns out, the police had long suspected that

So she, the incidents, you know, the poisonings and everything started happening to Anderson a few months after she entered parliament. And the police have always suspected that she found out about parliamentary immunity, which is offered in Brazil because there's so many, you know, crooks in parliament, basically. And so you can basically, and there's so much poor barreling and things like that that has to be done that you can get away with anything, basically, once you're in parliament. Yeah.

And it's long been suspected that whatever was going on with her and Anderson and that, you know, seemed to be a lot of issues of control and sex freakery and money and all those sorts of things that she'd entered parliament thinking that, you know, she was going to commit the perfect murder and get away with it by virtue of being in parliament. So...

And that's, yeah, that's the story. So it's only just still winding up in Brazil and it's sort of captivated the country for, gosh, the best part of four years. What was it like to report out there? Like how were you, how close were you able to get to the case? Who were the sort of more colourful characters you were able to get a hold of?

Yeah, so it was during the pandemic. So it was really tough because Brazil had very strict laws about, I mean, just even getting in and having to wear masks everywhere and things like that. So I wasn't able to get to the family because there was, yeah, the investigation was underway. At least 20% of them were in jail. But I was able to speak to a lot of people who'd been

in the church and knew the couple fairly well. So I mean, most of my story is sort of sourced from then and what was going on, but also just the, I mean, the whole media circus around it was just crazy. And just sort of following it day in, day out, it was on the front pages, you

And everyone in Brazil was kind of talking about it. So, I mean, it was, you know, just kind of fun to be fun, I guess. I don't know if that makes me sound like a sicko, but you know what it's like as a journalist. No, we can say that on this show. I think people know what we're all about.

but yeah, just watching something, uh, unfolding in real time when it was pretty crazy. And I've actually just found out, I think HBO max has made a series about it. Oh really? Okay. Well, yeah, I was just, I was just catching myself up on it yesterday and, uh, yeah, it looks like they have. Um, but I don't think it's much good from looking at the right. I mean, I think we can just tell people to ignore that and read your book instead. That's far better. Um, yeah, well,

Look, as I always say, you don't have to read the book. You just have to buy it. So in Latin America, Central America, Brazil, all over the region, there is a kind of link between sort of organized crime and the church, the evangelical Pentecostal church rather. Yeah.

Danny actually has done a, he did a documentary a while back about how the Pentecostal church in El Salvador is kind of lifting people away from the gangs. Is that something that you've seen in your reporting quite a lot as well? Like this kind of nexus between a church and gangs trying to, I don't know, some, some in it, some out of it and, and this kind of world.

Yeah, so in places like El Salvador, it's, yeah, you kind of go into prison and it's kind of, you know, given two options. And it's, yeah, getting with the churchy guys or getting with the gangs. In Brazil, it's much more blurred inside and out. So since 2016, there's been this phenomenon in Rio of Pentecostal drug dealers. I think Evangelico Narcos, I think they're more traditional. Yeah, that phrase did, that pricked my ears up when I was reading it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, I was trying to speak to some of those guys, but wasn't able to and was kind of limited on how long I could stay there and try. But yeah, there's one guy in particular called, and apologies again, Pachiel. Pachiel? It means big fish. And he's a really, really well-known basically drug lord in Rio, but he's kind of got franchises in cities all over the country now, for want of a better word.

And he's been very prominent in this evangelical drug dealer movement. And so what's been happening? So say in Peshawar's kind of part of, you know, the favelas, you know, that they'll sort of have a block of, you know, an area that they control. They control the drug trade. They, you know, have lookouts everywhere everywhere.

And what one of the things he does is that he won't allow people in his areas to practice traditional African religions, which are still often practiced by a lot of a lot of people who came over in the slave trade. So candomblé and mbanda. And so it's, you know, sort of...

similar in origin to kind of what you think of as voodoo religions. And yeah, they're West African and still practiced by a lot of people. And these groups that are loyal to Peshawar and other similarly minded kind of guys think, yeah, his foot soldiers are called the army of the living God. Like this guy is a true believer. Yeah.

And so they go around attacking people who are doing these ceremonies and, you know, sort of driven a lot of stuff underground. But then they'll even go around and attack priests. You know, some of them are old women that they've been going around and just just attacking and destroying their temples and their offerings and things like that and beating the crap out of them and telling them, you know, this isn't going to happen here.

And Pat Sheow, you know, he writes psalms, you know, they'll sort of just be some sort of, you know, street building and he'll have, you know, the text written up of psalms and stuff. They actually rated his hideout in, I think, 2021. Yeah.

And he calls it the Israel Complex. And yeah, they sort of, you know, they stumbled on his lair, basically, in one of the favelas in Rio. And it's filled with Israeli flags, which is sort of like a totem of the Pentecostal movement. It's quite bizarre. Yeah. And all sorts of Star of David iconography. Yeah.

They found this bunker with all his ammo, bulletproof vests, a copy of the Torah. He had this like gigantic fresco of the old city of Jerusalem around the outside of his swimming pool.

And yeah, this is a real phenomenon that's going on now. And yeah, I think his guy's called the Jesus Crew. And in 2019 alone, and this was kind of riding the rave of Bolsonaro where everyone sort of had license to be a prick and do whatever he wanted. It seems like there was at least 100 of these attacks on the Candomblé and Mbatha faith people. Wow.

So that's what, like one every three days. So it was a pretty big phenomenon. Yeah. Sorry, go on. No, I mean, you mentioned in the book, which is really, really fascinating, that this is not confined to Brazil, right? This attack on indigenous or animist religion practices. I think you mentioned in Papua New Guinea, there's been a big wave of sort of desecrations of traditional religious sites and things like this by, I mean, essentially Pentecostal gangs running around and beating,

beating the crap out of people, which is pretty crazy. I mean, it kind of makes sense, I guess, in a certain way, but it's kind of nuts how this is transferred in such opposite sides of the world. Yeah, it's happening in so many places. So, yeah, there was in Brazil, actually, the Speaker of Parliament wound up attacking some traditional...

masks, I think, that were hanging in Parliament. In Outback Australia, there is a Zimbabwean male preacher and a Tongan female preacher who have converted a lot of people in an Aboriginal community, yeah, I think a couple of Aboriginal communities, and they've started, you know, the own Aboriginal people have started desecrating their own traditional sort of meeting spots and totems and things like that.

Um, in Angola, there's been a lot of, um, anti-Catholic kind of stuff going on, you know, Portuguese country. Um, yeah. And so it's a lot of people traditionally, um, turning on symbols of traditional culture and, um,

There is just something about the evangelical movement that it is, you know, they say the zeal of a convert. That really just sort of seems to sharpen the mind and for people to want to dispense with the old stuff. And the reason why, I mean, when traditionally Catholicism and other faiths like that have been able to sort of be syncretic with traditional beliefs and the traditional communities, but evangelicals are, you know, Pentecostals particularly just...

just won't have it and a lot of it is you know it's just infringing on the business model if you have a traditional faith healer or you know an old lady who says oh okay i'm just gonna you know i'm gonna light some candles and do some traditional healing on you that infringes on on the you know the health and wealth promise of the pentecostals that i was mentioning earlier in brazil

But yeah, I think just going back to the drug dealers, yeah, because it does sound like such a contradiction of terms, but I was speaking to people in Brazil about it and they were sort of explaining that, yeah, you've got to think about these guys, you know, they're essentially militia leaders. They are, you know, in their corner of the favela, they are running the streets. They are, you know, they're the biggest employer.

They are, you know, they're essentially political figures. They, you know, Percival sort of tries to say that he's a bit of a Robin Hood figure, that he's providing the services, he's looking after the people. The streets in his area, he's, you know, quite famously is always saying, my streets are clean. They're all swept, you know, there's no rubbish around. And so they're kind of, you know, these guys are, they think that they're like Elon Musk. And...

And, you know, they say, oh, I'm the biggest employer around here. I'm the person who's got everything together. And, you know, they put their dicks on the table for a living. They're going to have pretty strident moral and social views. And so when you kind of think about it in that regard, like it actually does make quite a deal of sense. And, I mean, there is a lot of conflict with some of these guys. You know, some of them will say, you know,

that they're trying to stop torturing people, that they'll offer them a way out or they do it in the most humane way possible and I'm sure that there is probably a fair bit of psychology going on there but yeah, it's real and it's happening and like I said, this is mainstream Christianity now and I guess this is just one expression of

It all feels so sort of near apocalyptic reading your book as well. Like it's all sort of like eschatological iconography and end times. I mean, you know, Holy Roller drug dealers is quite the image in its own right. I guess like to move on to another part of your book as well. There's another part that references Guatemala, which is another country that's kind of gone through this whole thing

well phase series of phase shifts in its recent past, including a really bloody civil war. Do you want to just tell us a bit more about that, that chapter in the book and kind of how that, that ties into to kind of the rest of the movement, I guess, in the region. Sure. So in June, 2020, there was a video that went viral online of a man, of a catchy, an elder from the catchy people called Tata Domingo Chokchei.

He was set on fire by people in his village and it's a 28 second video, don't recommend watching it. It's just sort of this fireball of running through on this sort of football field and no one helping him and he'd been accused of witchcraft and dousing gasoline.

So I went out there to investigate it because Guatemala is, I mean, if Brazil by sheer numbers is the most Pentecostal nation on earth, by percentage, Guatemala is. So something like at least 60% of Guatemalans are Pentecostal. The faith didn't really come to the country until 1976 when there was an earthquake that left a quarter of the population homeless. So once again, this has just been this huge rupture in population

500 years of you know sort of syncretic catholicism with traditional mayan beliefs and stuff and and it's having this this incredible effect um so tata domingo was a quite a prominent traditional healer he was really renowned throughout the country he was working with um local people at uh university with international scholars on on you know bringing back traditional medicine and traditional ways of life um and he lived in in a small town called kuchime

Um, there was a lot of local stuff going on. Um, so I went out there amusingly, but the guy who took me out, there was a local part-time reporter and part-time clown for hire. Um, and, and he took, took me out to the town and there was, there was a lot of, a lot of competing narratives, um, shall we say, and there was, um,

It seems like Tata Domingo was maybe struggling a bit with the booze and he had been involved in a dispute with a local family. But the way that that escalated was by them saying that he was witchcraft. He was a witch doctor and he was practicing witchcraft. And in the middle of the night, sort of a local vigilante group went down to the cemetery, found some guy there and said,

depending on who you speak to, probably tortured him, got him to confess that he was doing the work of Tata Domingo, who was doing something at midnight around the graves.

And so the community called a town meeting at the football pitch for 5.30 the next morning. They had some people come over from a local village to mediate. They still sort of... This is a very remote village, sort of near the Belizean border, but it's, you know, really, really out in the sticks. And so there is some sort of...

So his local traditional sort of legal mechanisms and things like that. So, so this is how village disputes are sorted. So they had some elders from another village come in to preside over, over his witchcraft trial and whatever happened, it had been agreed that he would leave town. Um, and that was, you know, it was all supposed to be resolved. And then some people, um, who were the children of the man who was having the dispute with, uh, threw gasoline over him and lit the match. Um,

And so, yeah, it was, you know, absolutely horrific death. And I mean, what...

What's interesting, for want of a better word, is that these sorts of assassinations, broad daylight more often than not, for reasons of, you know, to terrorize people, have been happening all throughout Guatemala over the last few years. They've been targeting traditional priests and traditional faith healers. One guy, I think six months before Tata Domingo was killed, was, you know, executed in the head, walking down the street in the middle of the day.

There was another really cool young rapper that I spoke to, Tuzor Khan, who had his house set on fire because he put up some traditional narwhals or snakes, which are particularly...

seen as a symbol of evil by Pentecostals. And so, yeah, there's sort of been this slow campaign of assassinations of people practicing local cultures that are really terrifying a lot of people. And it's really bringing back a lot of memories of the Guatemalan Civil War, which was the dirtiest of Latin America's dirty wars. Yeah, and that war in itself was kind of tinged with...

sort of evangelical religious seal, right? Because you had Ephraim Rias Montt, who was the, it's kind of like incredibly violent military leader who was briefly leader of the country in the early eighties. Um, the quote, the quote that I pulled from that chapter is just incredibly says a Christian should carry his Bible and a machine gun. Um, so sort of like, you know, sending people out into holy warfare. Um,

And that really, it was kind of like a, it was very kind of end timesy as well, right? It was, this is the old world. Let's kind of install a new religious and sort of theocratic regime almost. And it seems to have, is that, is that kind of carried over into this sort of trend or is it a continuation or is it something completely different?

Yeah, so it really started with the 76 earthquake. The only people who were really able to get into the country to help provide aid was a Californian Pentecostal group that became known locally as El Verbo or The Word. And they had a lot of connections to prominent American evangelicals and the Reagan administration. And so, yeah, there's some talk that, you know, people in high places were kind of pulling the strings. So they arrived with a little bit of aid and a lot of Bibles and started converting people.

But then it was Rios Montt, he was known locally as Dios Montt because he used to give a Sunday sermon on TV. And when he came to power in 1982, he had converted to Pentecostalism after actually having an election stolen from him in the 70s. He went to the US and converted to Pentecostalism and came back.

But he'd also trained at the other great American institution, which was the School of the Americas that pretty much any horrific dictator in Latin America in those decades had trained at. And I think most of his administration had as well. So, yeah, there's some pretty nasty ties there.

But yeah, he came to power and basically presided over the bloodiest nadir of that war. So there were about 200,000 people killed over, I think it was 36 years of the civil war. It was kind of, you know, obviously much more compressed into the middle. And 43,000 of those were killed in Rios Montt's 17 months in power.

So it was horrific. There's a truth and reconciliation report that I think was done in the 90s. And just the... It is horrific. Once again, I don't recommend reading it unless you absolutely have to because it's kind of, yeah, I kind of had a dead-eyed stare for a few days afterwards. I mean, there were 69 massacres in his first 100 days in office. Um...

He wiped 626 villages off the map. They just don't exist anymore. There was babies having their heads caved in, villages basically all being sent into a church and having it set on fire. It was absolutely horrific. And one of the things that was happening and one of the reasons why it's still in such a religious element was that sort of fighting the right-wing governments that had been put in there by American coups that started in the 50s

There became a coalition of left-wing militias and activists, students, some indigenous people, and eventually the Catholic Church had come in with liberation theology in the 60s after Vatican II.

And so the Catholic Church was seen as communist, as part of the opposition. And so when, you know, this new Pentecostal faith came in, they were seen as directly opposed to each other. And I spoke to an American nun who's been there, who's been living in Guatemala, in rural Guatemala since that time, and she said, yeah, people just said to her that they were, you know, militias were coming door to door and saying, Catholics don't get killed. Sorry, Catholics get killed, evangelicals don't. Which one are you?

And most people, quite understandably, converted. And so, yeah, it has that incredibly blood soaked history that a lot of Indigenous people are feeling like is returning now. You know, in the last 10, 20 years, people have been able to return to their Indigenous faith.

They're, you know, there's often syncretic with Catholicism. They've been able to start practicing indigenous medicine again. People liked how to Domingo. And that was why he was seen as such a trailblazer was he was one of the guys really sticking his head up and saying, it's okay now. Let's remember this in our lifetimes because we don't want to lose this knowledge. Hmm.

And so it's, yeah, it's, you know, it's really terrifying people. It's sort of a low-key terror campaign that's going on in broad daylight. And, you know, I spoke to a very brave villager who had me out to his house, Pedro, in Chimay. And, you know, the whole town was looking because, you know, a strange car had come in and they just knew that we, you know, someone from out of town was there. And he very bravely spoke to us. And he was a, he'd been a mind priest and someone who, you know, was a guardian of traditional language. And,

And he wasn't practicing anymore. He said, you know, everyone's practicing Pentecostalism since Domingo got killed out here. But yeah, he said, you know, I'd love to go to the Pentecostal church and remind them that in the new constitution, since the Civil War, I'm allowed to practice any religion I want. But I think that they'd kill me. Wow.

Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, it's interesting just thinking about my own reporting in the Philippines as well with the drug war that's been going on for the last, what, seven years now, maybe eight years. The Catholic Church there has played such a key role in trying to oppose it because of Vatican II and liberation and everything that went on back in the, what was that, the mid-60s? Was it Vatican II or something? Yeah.

And there as well, there has been a kind of evangelical backlash against the Catholics as well to sort of support the drug war. But even by the, you know, by the kind of 4D chess that goes on with the drug war there, it's sort of often the people who are actually ferrying the drugs that are for the drug war because they can eliminate their rivals and therefore they're against the Catholic Church who are trying to hold back this wave of killing. It's really...

There's such an interesting kind of confluence with the different denominations and various kind of criminal waves that are going across the world. I mean, is that something that you've seen? I mean, you went all over the world for this book, and you've been all over the world. I mean, you're usually on the move somewhere. Where was it? Ethiopia last, and that sounded like a fascinating trip. But yeah, I mean, where else have you seen this kind of mix of

crime and Pentecostalism and where these two worlds collide. Yeah, so the Philippines is interesting. I think that's potentially the next Brazil in terms of just rapid mass conversion of Catholics to Pentecostalism. It's sort of underway at the moment. I didn't get a chance to go there for my book. It was somewhere that I had to scrap because of the pandemic because it was closed down for so long.

But, I mean, one of the really prominent guys who helped bring Duterte to power was Apollo Quimby. He's a prominent preacher from Southern part, one of the Southern islands. Mindanao? Mindanao. Yeah. I don't know if it's Mindanao, but anyway, you know, he said he once stopped an earthquake by yelling at it. Okay. And as recently... We've all done that, yeah. Yeah, well...

I think he's recently been convicted of some child sex offences. So he's not as prominent anymore. See how he fights those charges then if he's got superpowers. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, speaking of the Catholic Church, and that is something that has helped drive some people to conversion as well away from the Catholic Church was a lot of these sex abuse scandals. But as we're finding out at the moment, they're certainly not confined to the Catholic Church, unfortunately. Yeah.

So, yeah, the Philippines is really happening in terms of conversion. And, yeah, there always is just that very political worldview that really aligns with that sort of radical right, with the Duterte's, the Trump's, the Bolsonaro's of the world, which is just, you know, more police, lock these guys up, you know, no social intervention, those sorts of things. Yeah. And, yeah, it's...

So in Ethiopia as well, that's another rapidly Pentecostalizing place. So that's why I've spent a fair bit of time there lately. The president, your mate, Abiy Ahmed, is a Pentecostal convert. So he's kind of a classic, actually a very sort of African case. I think he had a Christian mother and an Orthodox Christian mother and a Muslim father. And he converted when he was a young man at university, I think. And that's quite a common path.

And I mean, he's probably the most prominent Pentecostal leader in the world today. And he's currently presiding over five civil wars in his country. And they've been horrific and bloody as anything.

And, you know, yeah, he's, you know, Ethiopia's, again, just rapidly Pentecostalizing. It's about a third Pentecostal now, a third Orthodox Christian. Wow, that's crazy. And a third Muslim. Yeah, and once again, this is, I mean, you could literally count on your fingers the amount of Pentecostals that were in the country in 1950 because there was a family of Finnish missionaries. And now it's just, yeah, it's just this incredible, just this incredible force. And it's, you know, all about, you know,

uh not drinking which pentecostals and ethiopians really really like a beer as you might have yeah yeah yeah breakfast beers um have done me in more than once and um yeah so there's a real thing yeah pentecostals won't drink they're sort of becoming quite prominent in the business community um they

you know, sort of overturning traditional ways of, you know, if you come into some money, giving it out into your community. And now it's just sort of like, no, no, no, this is, you know, this is all mine. I, God, you know, God bestowed this blessing on me.

And, yeah, so I mean, there's this huge revolution happening there and it's led by, you know, the preacher in chief. And he's really about sort of bringing sort of turning prosperity theology into into politics. And, you know, he's kind of coined this sort of like prosperity gospel, but also like politically positive.

non-aligned almost. It's like he wants it to walk the line between capitalism and communism or something like this. And it's kind of his own unique path that's really, really...

like, riven through with religion the whole time. Yeah, I tried to get my hands on a copy of his, yeah, sort of, it's like your green book or your red book or whatever, that's his philosophical tracts there. It's never been translated into English and it's widely rumoured that that's because it's heavily borrowed from some English texts. Yeah, so...

But yeah, he's got this real sort of, I think is he the prosperity party? Is his political party? I think that sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really just, again, it's just all that, you know, pull yourself up by the bootstraps.

get your shit together go to a church yeah lay off the drink you know these are just all the simple things that you can do to make your life better and i mean kind of the annoying thing for someone like me who you know sort of believes that yeah you know government should help people do that kind of stuff is that it actually kind of tends to work there was some really fascinating research out of out of brazil actually that um yeah people get their lives together when they go to a church you know they might stop you know your idiot husband stops gambling or whatever um

You're not drinking on Saturday night because you're getting up to go to church in the morning. Churches are offering, you know, some basic forms of childcare. So if you're out there working three jobs or whatever, your kids aren't running around on the streets. And yeah, people just tend to get their lives together and they sort of wind up forming solidarity networks and your local preacher will sort of be more like a mentor. And they'll say, you know, oh, you hate your job at the factory, you know, go open that little fruit juice store you've always been talking about. Yeah.

And, you know, and then it'll tell the whole congregation to go and buy their stuff there. And so, yeah, and, you know, so they sort of have this thriving business all of a sudden, you know, they're, you know, not they're not losing half the family and come to gambling. Everyone's happy. And yet people do tend to get their lives together. And one of the things that this research in Brazil found was that, yeah, when the economy goes down, church attendance goes up.

So people obviously need these solidarity networks and these church networks for material reasons as well as spiritual reasons. And so that's why the Abiyamids and the Bolsonaros of the world can just sort of point to this and say, yeah, you don't need social programs, just get your ass to church. So that's why it's really joining with sort of the right wing of the world. Yeah, I mean, it's similar to the kind of way that young people

people join gangs as well right and the cartels i mean especially in south america i mean people a lot of like cartel leaders have openly advocated for people going to church and kind of having a set routine and not going out and getting pissed all the time it seems to go hand in hand in many places um yeah it's interesting kind of confluence

Yeah, I mean, it's bad for business. And like I said, yeah, when you sort of think of these, you know, cartel leaders or local militia leaders as the biggest employer, as, you know, the sort of political figure around there, yeah, they're behaving like an Elon Musk or someone like that. They're not a, yeah, they're not sort of a, you know, cartoon godfather kind of figure.

So we're openly saying on the podcast that Elon Musk is a cartel leader. Yeah, that's fine. Well, yeah, if you're in business in America, baby, you probably are. I mean, no one he hangs around has got the attention span for a 45-minute show anyway, so they won't be listening. That's right. The defamation law doesn't exist in America. No, no, no. Elle, where are you off to next then? What's next up on your agenda?

I'm actually in the process of moving back to New Orleans in America. And yeah, I'm doing a story on the gang war down there, actually, which is quite interesting. It's the murder capital of America now. So yeah, going back there to do some interesting stuff and also working on a podcast on the Vatican financial scandal.

Oh, right. That's really interesting. Yeah. They invested a lot of money. There's a big trial going on in the Vatican at the moment, and they invested a heap of money in some shady London property deals. This is about $725 million in all, as well as a bit of oil in Angola, all the sorts of things we like to do to diversify our portfolios.

But yeah, there was a $400 million US property deal involving a property in Chelsea in London that went south with some, you know, all the good stuff that gets our attention, some shady middlemen, some corrupt cardinals.

A lot of people clipping the ticket, all the good stuff. Well, we'll look out for that. Thanks for joining us, Elle. People should go out and buy your book and then chuck it in the bin and buy a second one maybe or buy a third one. I don't know. But definitely make sure you read one of them. That's right. Thanks for having me, man. Cheers. Cheers. At your job, do you ever have to deal with a nose roller? How about a snub pulley?

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