Death threats, families destroyed and harassment in the name of the apostle: surviving La Luz del Mundo

Faithful of La Luz del Mundo pray for their leader Naasón Joaquín García, in Guadalajara (Mexico). FERNANDO CARRANZA (REUTERS)

Elisa Flores' brothers were convinced that what was happening was the work of the devil.

The pastors of the church had told him every day.

Naasón Joaquín García had been disgraced by the forces of Satan on Earth.

Those same forces had taken over Elisa, who after spending a lifetime in La Luz del Mundo, suddenly stopped believing in the innocence of the apostle of Jesus Christ, as the faithful call her religious leader.

"They told me that she was possessed," says Flores.

After a few days, five siblings, her partners, her children, uncles, aunts, cousins ​​and an entire community turned their backs on her.

She ceased to exist for them.

"I lost everything," she says.

It all started at the end of 2020. Elisa Flores planned to celebrate the New Year with her family and contacted one of her eight siblings to organize the party.

“What do you think about everything that is happening with Naason?” She asked him.

He had been away from the congregation for some time, she was still inside.

He told her that Naasón Joaquín García had been arrested in June 2019 for more than thirty crimes related to child abuse: rape, human trafficking, possession of child pornography.

She replied that it was not true.

He shared a cascade of links for her to see with her own eyes.

She still believed in the church: it was all a big lie.

Until then, Elisa had been instructed by the pastors of her church in the small Texas town of Luling to pray 24 hours a day for the salvation of the servant of God.

In fact, she was at one of her daily services when she found out about her arrest.

“They told us that the apostle was fine, not to worry, to pray with all our might,” she recalls.

At first, she thought that maybe it was a mess with immigration or perhaps a misunderstanding in the payment of taxes.

What else could a saint be accused of?

Before the arrest of the apostle Naasón, the church insisted to the parishioners that the internet was good and that they should take advantage of it to be better Christians.

From one day to the next, they were ordered to stop using it.

That conversation with his brother, however, planted a seed of curiosity.

And he eventually saw it all.

“The world came crashing down on me,” he says.

The church that his parents helped build as missionaries and preaching the gospel from modest temples installed in modest garages, the community where he had learned to speak Spanish, the organization to which he had given his life was accused of covering up a machinery of child exploitation.

Things

in his head.

When she was a teenager, she was chosen to serve in one of the houses of Samuel Joaquín, Naasón's father, who was in charge of the institution for more than 50 years.

Often the apostle Samuel would take one of his female companions, no older than 15, to attend to him privately.

One day, the girl became pregnant and they ordered her to have an abortion, Flores says.

They took my

, they took my baby away from me”, confessed her friend.

“If you say something about what happened here, no one is going to believe you because I am God's apostle,” Samuel told them.

The girl's parents kicked her out of her house, she was an embarrassment to her family.

"I couldn't say anything," laments Flores, "obeying the apostle was a blessing, because he doesn't sin, because he is God."

“The scriptures were read to us to justify it,” she recalls.

"If he had told me to take my clothes off, he would have done it, he is god on earth," she acknowledges.

Go with the police?

"Many of the members in the United States did not have papers, they were afraid to speak."

The story was repeated decades later: “How could what Naasón had done not be true, if I myself saw what her father was doing?”

“We women had to be submissive, we were there to serve,” says Karen Aguilera, the granddaughter of a church pastor.

“We always came second, you always had to say yes, you always had to be available, it was very frustrating,” she explains.

When she was 13 years old, one of her friends was overwhelmed with emotion: she had been chosen to serve in the house of the apostle Samuel.

She told them that she had gone to her bedroom and that they had allowed him to rub her feet and her back.

He was so pleased that he planned to appoint her as her personal masseuse.

"Shut up, don't say that again," another girl who had been in the "apostolic house" told her: "What happens in the house of the servant of God is not discussed with anyone."

The case against Naasón Joaquín García was built on the story of five girls, almost all minors, who were selected as part of a group of "maidens."

Another group of women, assistants to the apostle's service, taught them that their work was not limited to domestic tasks and instructed them to please him with suggestive dances, lingerie photographs, touching and sexual encounters.

People who have raised their voices against the organization say that the chain of abuse extends to hundreds of victims over decades.

"The church is a façade, we are talking about a sect, a criminal organization," explains Daniel Mendoza, husband of Karen Aguilera.

In 1997 the denunciations against Samuel Joaquín emerged in the press, but they never reached the courts.

Before, Eusebio Joaquín, Naasón's grandfather, also faced accusations of a sexual nature, but they were never resolved in court.

"Of course there were suspicions, you saw girls come in and out and then you didn't see them again," says Aguilera.

"But nobody told you Samuel raped me and that overshadowed the cry of your conscience," adds Mendoza.

EL PAÍS contacted spokespersons for La Luz del Mundo last week to conduct an interview, but received no response.

Despite the fact that Naasón Joaquín confessed to having abused at least two minors, the institution maintains his innocence.

"It's part of brainwashing," says Mendoza.

He and his wife worked for years in the church's social communication and propaganda apparatus and explain how the information barrier that prevails in La Luz del Mundo works: everything that comes from outside the church and everything that is told is controlled. of what happens inside.

"There is talk of five million faithful, but in reality there are less than a million," says Mendoza, "the church camouflages information, inflates figures, manipulates people with lies and only with what they want them to see."

Still this week, thousands of parishioners prayed outside the temples for the liberation of their leader, they did not know that he had already confessed.

“It's like living in a bubble,” says Francisco Espinoza, a former member who left the congregation upon learning of the case against Naasón Joaquín.

Every time the church has been at the center of scandals, the bet is redoubled: the accusations against Samuel Joaquín meant an authoritarian and personalist turn within the church at the end of the 1990s.

His son continued the trend.

"The apostle was everything, everything... he was God," says Elisa Flores, a single mother who could not make ends meet, but at some point fell into debt to give more than 1,000 dollars a month in offerings, tithes and gifts for the apostle. .

"They made you believe that without him you were nothing."

Daniel Mendoza and Karen Aguilera left the church almost as soon as Naasón began his "apostolate" in late 2014. They disagreed with the direction the church was taking, but they couldn't be too vocal about it: members are obligated to accuse anyone who speaks ill of the apostle, whether they are their husbands, children, brothers or friends.

"In a matter of days we went from being respected members of the church to scapegoats, dogs that deserved death," says the couple.

“All those people, the worst of the community, stayed in front of everything,” he adds.

"They broke the windows of our house, they left messages under our door, they scratched our car, they sent us death threats on social media," says Mendoza.

Gradually, the intimidation escalated.

"They stoned my daughter, they signaled us to shut up with a gun, sometimes they just showed their weapons so we wouldn't say anything," he narrates.

"That's when we knew we had to go," she says.

They moved to another part of Mexico and found them.

Now they are in the United States, where the threats did not stop, even with the religious leader in jail.

“They have told me that they already know where I live, that they are going to make me pay, that I am a traitor,” says Espinoza, who has also lost contact with his parents and two brothers.

"At least seven women I know have told me in a very raw way the things they experienced, but most don't want to talk," she says.

"They are afraid."

Despite everything, Espinoza could no longer stay inside.

"On one occasion, before he was an apostle, Naason masturbated in front of me," he says.

"He was like a father to me, the whole image I had of him fell apart."

When the accusations were made public he left the community.

"What hurts me the most is that my dad and mom are crying for someone who committed all these crimes," he laments.

"This religion is like a drug, it is very difficult to leave."

Naasón Joaquín was sentenced to a reduced sentence after reaching a controversial agreement with the Prosecutor's Office, which freed him from spending the rest of his life in prison.

In the last hearing, the testimonies of the victims once again brought to light the count of the expansive wave of damage from the latest La Luz del Mundo scandal: abused boys and girls, separated families, humble people who gave everything, complainants who they have been lynched on social media and threatened by the community they adored.

"There is not a single day that I do not feel ashamed and guilty of having belonged to and defended this sect, it is something I have had to live with all my life," admits Mendoza, who is working on a book about his departure from the organization. .

"It hurts me a lot, especially for the people who are still there and for those who will leave and feel lost," says Flores.

It took him several months to recover his life, but after a while, he took the photos of Naasón Joaquín and threw them into the fireplace.

“For the first time I felt free,” she says, relieved.

She put on earrings and pants, something forbidden for women in La Luz del Mundo, and discovered that spending her money on vacations, instead of giving it in offerings and tithes, did not make her go to hell.

The plea agreement sparked outrage among those who put their lives at risk to denounce Naasón Joaquín and seek a life sentence.

There was no trial.

He did not answer for crimes such as human trafficking, rape and possession of child pornography.

The pact of silence around the institution was not broken.

No precedent was set to end the abuses.

The pact with the apostle was not broken, despite the desperate cries to demand that justice be done.

All that was at stake these days, in the three years that the case lasted.

For many, however, it is not the end of the story.

"The church will never be able to overcome the media, mental and moral blow because you will never be able to talk about La Luz del Mundo without touching on the issue that a pedophile is leading them," Mendoza ditches.

The self-proclaimed "servant of God" still faces civil lawsuits in the United States, investigations in Mexico and the possibility of a federal body investigating other accusations.

Meanwhile, the religious leader will spend 16 years and eight months in jail, and dozens of former faithful will seek their own path to freedom.

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