Rio’s ‘narco-pentecostal’ gangs use religion to dominate favelas

One man who has experience of crime and religion – though in his case, not at the same time – is Pastor Diego Nascimento, who became a Christian after hearing the gospel from a gangster holding a gun.

Looking at him, it’s hard to believe that this boyish looking 42-year-old Wesleyan Methodist minister with a ready smile and dimples, was once a member of Rio’s notorious Red Command crime gang and managed its activities in the city’s Vila Kennedy favela.

Four years in prison for drug dealing weren’t enough to make him give up crime. But when he became addicted to crack cocaine his standing in the gang plummeted.

“I lost my family. I practically lived on the street for almost a year. I went so far as to sell things from my house to buy crack,” he says.

It was at that point, when he was at rock bottom, that a well-known drug dealer in the favela summoned him.

“He started preaching to me, saying there was a way out, that there was a solution for me, which was to accept Jesus,” he recalls.

The young addict took this advice and began his journey to the pulpit.

Pastor Nascimento still spends time with criminals, but now it is through his work in prisons, where he helps people turn their lives around, as he did himself.

Despite having been converted by a gangster, he regards the idea of religious criminals as a contradiction in terms.

“I don’t see them as evangelical believers,” he says.

“I see them as people who are going down the wrong path and have a fear of God because they know that God is the one who guards their lives.

“There is no such thing as combining the two, being an evangelical and a thug. If a person accepts Jesus and follows the Biblical commandments, that person cannot be a drug dealer.”