Ignoring religions as if they were purely private activities and had no serious repercussions in the public sphere prevents the State from anticipating the emergence of dangerous sects, which facilitates phenomena like narco-pentecostalism.
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What if I told you that in a certain place, a group of heavily armed drug traffickers governs a territory with approximately 200,000 inhabitants, is led by a priest, has their weapons blessed in temples, and justifies their criminal activities with speeches and narratives taken from a holy book?
You would probably think that I am talking about some place in the Middle East or Africa governed by another salafi-wahhabi terrorist group, which would have found its main source of funding in drug trafficking.
But if I told you that I am referring to a supposedly Christian group, then you would say it must be the plot of a new movie. And if I said that it is a group of neopentecostal evangelical drug traffickers led by a pastor who named his territory the “Complex of Israel,” then you would say I am delirious.
Yet, this group and this place exist right in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The project of the “Complex of Israel” did not arise now. It is the result of the concentrated effort of one of the leaders of the Third Pure Command (one of the main criminal factions in Rio de Janeiro), Álvaro Malaquias Santa Rosa, also known by the nicknames “Aarão” (Aaron) and “Peixão” (Big Fish), the first as a reference to the Hebrew patriarch of the Old Testament and the second as a reference to one of the most important symbols of Christianity, the fish. The project in question begins in the favela of Parada de Lucas, from there to annex the favelas of Vigário Geral, Cidade Alta, Pica-Pau, and Cinco Bocas. And if the region in question has already passed through the hands of countless different criminal leaders, most of whom are already dead, “Peixão” has commanded this fraction of the TPC since 2015, gradually becoming stronger.
This territory controlled by drug trafficking follows the typical logic of similar models: terror and violence against those who resist the criminals’ rule, bribery, and co-optation of corrupt police officers to ignore the gang’s actions, and social assistance so that the “community” tolerates or even appreciates the criminals.
What is innovative here is the overtly religious dimension given to the criminal action.
The first evidence of something that we could call “narco-pentecostalism” involving the same actors also appeared in 2019, with the so-called “Band of Jesus,” a group of traffickers who carried out attacks on Afro-Brazilian religious temples. The group, led by “Peixão” himself, identified simultaneously as the “narco boss” and “evangelical pastor,” went from temple to temple ordering closures, vandalizing, and threatening the worshippers and leaders with death.
It was common in these actions for the criminals to specifically destroy the statues and images of the entities worshipped in these temples. Before that, such situations were only seen sporadically, also coming from fanatic neopentecostals against even Catholic saints’ images.
This iconoclasm immediately brings to mind images of salafist iconoclasm in some countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, such as the tragic case of the destruction of the Buddha statues in Afghanistan.
The church where “Peixão” is a pastor is the Assembleia de Deus Ministério de Portas Abertas, one among thousands of different Christian denominations existing in Brazil, as the State does not regulate or even supervise the activity of religions and sects, making it possible for anyone to create a new religion, sect, or religious denomination, which implies access to various benefits, such as tax exemption for their “religious” activities.
In 2020, then, “Peixão” announced the creation of the Complex of Israel, starting from the favelas of Parada de Lucas, Cidade Alta, and Vigário Geral, with the aim of expanding to other neighboring favelas. In this quest for expansion, the rhetoric is of a “holy war”. During the invasion of the favela of “Cidade Alta,” for example, the rhetoric was that they were going to “liberate the people of Cidade Alta”.
Pastor “Peixão’s” forces also have their own nicknames, besides the temporary and already surpassed “Band of Jesus”. His men, numbering in the hundreds, also call themselves “Army of the Living God,” “Troops of Aaron”, and “Band of Kabbalah”. Israeli flags are hoisted in various places in the Complex of Israel, as well as graffiti on the walls in homage to the Zionist state.
It is not known if there are direct links between this phenomenon and the Zionist lobby in Brazil, but as we have already pointed out in another article for the Strategic Culture Foundation, the diffusion of neopentecostalism in Brazil originates from an American project to soften the natural Brazilian rejection of neoliberalism, Atlantism, and Zionism.
In a sense, perhaps this phenomenon should be considered an inevitability. The disordered demographic growth in Brazil in peripheral urban areas, the favelas, occurred precisely at a time of “vocational” crisis in the Catholic Church (the most traditional religion in Brazilian cultural formation), with the Church struggling to train priests in sufficient numbers to handle the population growth.
But since humans have spiritual yearnings that need to be satisfied (and in this sense, man is also “homo religiosus”), someone would fill this void, and it was precisely the neopentecostal Protestantism that was best prepared to fill it. With shorter training time and fewer formalities, evangelical churches can produce pastors in much greater quantities to occupy the space left by the Catholic Church.
How this managed to mix with violence is something more complex. Churches have always had to have some degree of connivance and tolerance regarding criminality to actually operate in these territories. Pastors have also made prisons a place of preaching, aiming to convert prisoners. Many certainly converted to religion; certainly, some of them really changed their lives. But many neopentecostal prisoners returned to a life of crime without abandoning their new-found belief.
With both crime and neopentecostalism already normalized and coexisting for decades in the same space, perhaps it was only a matter of time until they converged into a figure playing both a criminal and religious leadership role. This is what allowed the emergence of the Complex of Israel.
And perhaps it was also only a matter of time until this dangerous formula resulted in religious persecution against Catholics, just as years ago it had already affected followers of Afro-Brazilian religions.
This month, however, it happened, with the evangelical narco boss ordering the closure and end of activities of the Catholic parishes that still operated in the Complex of Israel, prohibiting the celebration of masses, baptisms, weddings, and holidays. Three Catholic parishes were affected: those of Santa Edwiges, Santa Cecília, and Nossa Senhora da Conceição e Justino, whose priests and faithful were threatened with death.
The police responded in recent days with a large-scale police operation in the region. But considering Brazil’s history of combating organized crime, it is hard to believe that these measures will permanently eliminate the Complex of Israel.
Bizarre phenomena like this narco-pentecostalism may be facilitated by the fact that Brazil still does not have any specific public policy or state agency specialized in supervising religious activities.
Ignoring religions as if they were purely private activities and had no serious repercussions in the public sphere prevents the State from anticipating the emergence of dangerous sects, which facilitates phenomena like narco-pentecostalism. In the same sense, there are concerns about recent news indicating that there may also be a certain growth, albeit modest, of Salafism in Brazilian favelas.
