This story was originally published in Spanish by Nómada and No-Ficción.
The first clue was a body lying on the floor in the basement of a Guatemala City shopping mall.
On September 15, 2010, during a police operation to capture Mauro Salomón Ramírez, a major drug trafficker wanted in the United States for cocaine smuggling, something happened that has still not been fully explained.
That day, two teams of police attempted to arrest Ramírez as he left the parking lot of Tikal Futura, an upscale shopping and hotel complex in Guatemala City. The narco and his multiple escorts managed to escape, shooting their way out. But in the shopping mall’s underground parking garage, a man lay bleeding to death on the ground.
The man had sought shelter from the shootout by hiding under his car — a shiny new silver Land Rover — but the vehicle had been riddled with bullets, and some of them had hit the man. Why the officers fired on this particular vehicle remains unclear. Perhaps they had information that the man was with the narcos, or perhaps, noting that he drove a luxury SUV, they jumped to conclusions. Maybe it was just an accident.
Adding even more confusion to the incident was the dead man’s identity. His name was Obed Benshalom López, founder and leader of Casa del Alfarero, a major evangelical church with thousands of adherents throughout Guatemala’s Pacific coast region.
López was one of a handful of pastors from Guatemala’s Pentacostal movement — an ultra-religious leader known for his fiery sermons about the power of the Holy Spirit.
The pastor had just returned from a trip to the United States and was staying in a hotel located inside the Tikal Futura shopping complex. Ramírez was staying in the same hotel.
There is no hard evidence that López and Ramírez ever met, but according to the Interior Minister at the time, Carlos Menocal, when the authorities began investigating López, they noticed certain suspicious evidence pointing to the possibility that the two men had been in the parking lot together during the shooting.
The pastor had returned from his trip to the United States a day early. Security camera footage later revealed that instead of going home, he had spent the day wandering around the shopping center, as if waiting for someone. A police search of López’s vehicle, Menocal explained, found various “caletas,” secret compartments. Both men, the narco and the pastor, operated in the same part of the city. In fact, when Ramirez was captured a month later, police found him in a house located only seven kilometers from López's main church.
Most surprising and suspicious of all, however, was the story of the pastor’s rise to fame. López started out preaching in a modest neighborhood in San Francisco Zapotitlán, a town of 22,000 people where 60 percent of residents are considered poor.
In less than two decades, and despite facing considerable competition from other similar churches in the area, López had managed to build a huge temple in Mazatenango, the capital city of Suchitepéquez Department, and had started other affiliate churches along Guatemala’s Pacific coast, eventually establishing branches in the United States, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Casa del Alfarero’s website claimed to have 33 churches in Mexico alone. “When Guatemalan Civil Intelligence profiled the church, they noted its impressive growth and also found that the church was making large money transfers to Tamaulipas and other areas of Mexico in the narco corridor,' Menocal explained.
Some former officials interviewed for this investigation argue that the entire incident was just an unfortunate accident — that the pastor was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the events were never fully investigated. Because López died, and Ramirez was extradited to the United States shortly thereafter, the whole incident was soon forgotten.
The notion that these two ostensibly separate worlds — narcotrafficking organizations and evangelical religious institutions — had any kind of relationship with each other was initially just speculation.
The death of Pastor López was the first indication that these connections not only exist, but are not uncommon. In fact, Guatemala has a number of qualities that encourage such relationships.
Thousands of tons of cocaine pass through the country every year on their way to the United States, and drug trafficking is the main economic activity in several border areas.
At the same time, there are officially 3,200 different evangelical churches in the country — each with many, sometimes hundreds, of individual houses of worship. Roughly 40 percent of the population identifies with these Pentecostal-style cults, which demand adherents maintain socially conservative lifestyles and promise miracles, prosperity, and the privilege of feeling the constant presence of God.
Research for this multi-part investigation — itself part of the larger transnational investigative series Paraísos de Dinero y Fé (Paradises of Money and Faith), a project of the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística, or CLIP) — found that in the nearly 10 years since the 2010 shootout at Tikal Futura, the U.S. justice system has prosecuted at least four drug traffickers with close ties to evangelical pastors and churches.
In this four-part series, we explore the relationship between narcotraffickers and religious institutions.
Part one focuses on the high-level narco Juan Órtiz, alias Chamalé, and the role of Noé Mazariegos, a pastor at Torre Fuerte Ministries, an evangelical church in San Marcos, in Chamalé’s criminal organization.
Part two examines the links between the Bethania Church in Quetzaltenango and Erik Suñiga, alias Pocho, the former mayor of Ayutla and a known drug trafficker, as well as another narco in the region, Nery Manfredo Natareno, alias Pastor.
Part three tells the story of Jorge René García Noguera, alias JR, an organized crime boss in Zacapa who posed as a businessman and evangelist, with ties to the Lluvias de Gracia church in Guatemala City.
Religion has proven useful to the drug trade in several ways. By bankrolling churches and associated charity projects, narcotraffickers garner social support and gain greater control over their territories. For some, becoming an evangelical worshipper or even a pastor has served as cover for interacting with and influencing politicians and businessmen, or as part of legal defense arguments in U.S. courts. Others have directly exploited church members, using them as front men or scapegoats, or integrating them into their organizational structure in other ways.
Organized crime’s interest in infiltrating evangelical churches, and especially churches with an international presence, suggests something else as well: The possibility that criminal organizations are using religious institutions to launder money or transfer funds between countries.
Doing so is made easier by the fact that churches in Guatemala are subject to very limited regulation. Until 2013, churches were not subject to any anti-laundering oversight, and only a very small percentage currently provide information to the Intendencia de Verificación Especial (IVE), the government agency tasked with preventing such crimes.
Moreover, since churches rely largely on donations, their income can be highly variable and easy to account for, making it difficult for banks to determine whether transactions are suspicious enough to warrant being reported to the IVE.
'Churches function as a giant shield, because there's no way to follow the money trail. They can be used as a means of protecting financial activity [from government scrutiny],' said anti-drug prosecutor Gerson Alegría.
But in Guatemala, whether such activity occurs has yet to be investigated — itself a testament to the benefits organized religion has to offer organized crime.
In a country with one of the largest evangelical populations in the world, serving as a pastor, reciting verses from the Bible, and showing oneself to be obedient to and fearful of God is, for many Guatemalans, synonymous with being an honorable person.
Politicians have often used religion to signify honesty, and to win votes. Drug traffickers have likewise sought protection in religion, using it to dispel suspicions about them or their financial affairs.
When Pastor López was killed on September 15, 2010, the notion that an evangelical pastor — a preacher of the Gospel (“el Evangelio”) — would accept money from someone involved in murdering, kidnapping, and drug trafficking was inconceivable to many Guatemalans. The mere fact of being a pastor was his best defense.
In 2012, Mario Ponce, a powerful Guatemalan drug trafficker from Izabal, stood trial in Miami, Florida. Ponce called numerous witnesses to his defense. One witness was a man named Reginaldo Archila, pastor of the Príncipe de Paz church, one of the country’s first evangelical churches, now well-established throughout Guatemala as well as in the United States.
Archila explained that Ponce regularly attended his church, and even organized services at his own mansion in the town of Playitas, on the border with Honduras. He described Ponce as an honorable man who had prospered by raising cattle and buying and selling land, according to the transcript of the court hearing.
“Sir, you never made any drug deal with Mario Ponce, did you?” asked U.S. prosecutor Adam Fels.
“No. Never,” replied Archila, adding, “I’m an evangelical pastor,” as if mentioning this fact alone would serve as a sufficient answer to Fels’ question.
And yet, on occasion, even evangelical pastors traffic drugs, or help traffic them.
*Translated by Max Granger
Paraísos de dinero y fe (Paradises of Money and Faith) is produced in collaboration with Columbia Journalism Investigation, Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística, Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad (Mexico), Nómada (Guatemala), Canal 13 Noticias (Costa Rica), IDL-Reporteros (Peru), Infobae (Argentina), Agencia Publica (Brazil), Folha Sao Pablo (Brazil), La Diaria (Uruguay), El Tiempo (Colombia), and OCCRP (Europa), with the support of Seattle International Foundation.
Asier Andrés is a Spanish journalist who worked in Guatemala for many years, reporting for El Periódico and ContraPoder. He is the co-author, with Pilar Crespo, of El coronel, el rector y el último dean comunista (Plaza Pública), a three-year investigation into Guatemala’s National Police Archive.
