According to Martinez, if a gang member asks to leave to live a more religious life, gang leaders will often let them – though they will watch out for “bad behavior,” including smoking and cursing, which can undermine the former member’s claim to be religious and result in punishment, he adds. Analysts say gangs appear to respect evangelical churches because of their emphasis on personal transformation and forgiveness of past crimes, with more than half of gang members identifying as evangelicals compared to 17% as Catholics, per research shared with NPR. Annual surveys by national newspaper La Prensa Grafica have found the proportion of Salvadorans identifying as evangelical grew from 28.7% in 2004 to 39.5% in 2019, while the percentage identifying as Catholic fell from 55.1% to 40.5% over the same period.
For several decades, evangelical Christianity-practiced by around 16% of the country in the 1980s-has been spreading rapidly, displacing Catholicism. One of them said the only solution would be to live in the sewer.”Įvangelical churches offer a rare way out of gang life in El Salvador. “If they ever got out of prison, they’d have nowhere to go. “But the truth is that they are already condemned: they’ve left the gang they’ve lived with former members of other gangs and they’ve lived openly as gay people,” she says. She says she kept reminding them the film would be shown in El Salvador and available online, and asking if it would put them at risk. Conditions in the cell, where overcrowding means nine prisoners live 24 hours a day in just a space of one by two meters, made for a difficult shoot.īut four inmates agreed to participate and began to speak about their lives with surprising candor, according to Viñayo. Viñayo and Martinez were granted twelve days to film inside the prison in May 2019. This week police arrested three gang members for an armed attack on a Doctors Without Borders ambulance. Though gang violence and murder rates have plummeted over the last year-which many suspect is the result of a secret pact between the gangs and President Nayib Bukele-there are an estimated 60,000 gang members in a country of 7 million, and they have killed tens of thousands over the past decade. And sympathy for gang members is a tough sell. Homosexuality remains taboo and violence and discrimination against LGBTQ people is rife. Evangelical churches are a growing influence in El Salvador, far outstripping the state and just pipping the Catholic Church to become the country’s most trusted institution in 2016, according to public research institute IUDOP. But it is likely to be controversial at home. The film’s nuanced portrayal of the former gang members’ experience won it international praise and prizes at a string of major film festivals in 2020, making it the first Salvadoran film to be eligible for an Oscar. “But loving another man, that’s not natural.” “I think killing a person, yes it’s bad but it’s not that difficult,” he says at one point. Living in the isolation cell with his partner and other gay inmates, he grapples with both his sexuality and his violent past. 8-follows Geovany, a gay man who worked as a hitman for Barrio 18 and left the gang in 2016. The short documentary they produced, Unforgivable-premiering worldwide via Vimeo on Demand from Feb. The state had effectively ceded control of daily life inside Gotera to church leaders, who preach that homosexuality is a sin as grave as violence.Īs soon as Martinez left the prison and got in his car, he called Marlén Viñayo, 33, a Spanish director living in El Salvador, to tell her what he’d seen. Starting in 2015, evangelical pastors had converted almost all of the prisoners there to Christianity, and convinced them to leave their gangs.
In this particular prison, San Francisco Gotera, in the east of the Central American country, gang culture was not the only source of virulent homophobia.