Luz del Mundo Allegations: Sex Trafficking, Child Abuse and Paramilitaries
Does the Guadalajara mega church operate like a mafia?
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The Jalisco-Michoacán border is one of the bloodiest fronts in the Mexican cartel wars and the ranch that soldiers and state police raided there last week at first appeared like a narco training camp, with tactical vests and rifles. Most of the guns were replicas, however, and the 38 detainees (including one American) did not have kilos of cocaine or the insignias of a cartel, but t-shirts with the logo of a church, La Luz del Mundo, or Light of the World.
Luz del Mundo was using the camp, Michoacán police claimed, to train a paramilitary group known as the Jahzer. When police asked the Jahzer members what they were doing, they replied, “We are preparing for the end of the world.” This apocalypse was being provoked by the persecution of the Luz del Mundo leader in a court case in the United States, they said.
Just two days later, however, a federal judge in Michoacán freed the 38 detainees arguing the police had gone into the camp without a search warrant so the arrest was illegal. While Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum hit back that they are still looking into the paramilitary group, Luz del Mundo has followers among elected politicians and judges in Mexico.
The raid took place the day after the leader of Luz del Mundo, Naasón Joaquín García, pleaded not guilty in a New York court to charges of racketeering, sex trafficking and child exploitation. He faces the case along with five others, including his mother Eva García.
“The defendants engaged in a racketeering enterprise…for decades to facilitate the systemic sexual abuse of children and women - including the creation of photos and videos of sadistic child sexual abuse,” the Justice Department said in a release when the indictment was unveiled on Sept. 10.
A lawyer for Joaquín said in a statement that he denied the charges. “We reject the grotesque portrait painted by the government,” he said. Joaquín, 56, is already in prison serving a 16 year sentence after pleading guilty in 2022 in California to three counts of sexual offenses with minors.
Like the United States, Mexico is home to a splattering of curious Christian (or heretical Christian) sects, some home grown others imported. In New Jerusalem, Michoacán, adherents dress in Biblical robes, call technology diabolical and have smashed up schools with sledge hammers. Some of the Mormons living in Chihuahua and Sonora openly practice polygamy. The (now deceased) meth lord Nazario Moreno, known as “The Craziest One,” had his own evangelical temples where they venerated him as a saint.
But Luz del Mundo grew from its base in Mexico’s second city of Guadalajara to become a sprawling mega church with congregations all over the globe. It boasts a Greco-Roman temple in Houston, a church in the style of a Mayan pyramid in Honduras, and its flagship temple in Guadalajara is a towering stunning building that has smaller replicas in Alaska and Chile.
It claims to have five million adherents in the world including 1.5 million in Mexico, although those numbers need to taken with caution. Joaquín sits at the top of this pyramid, proclaimed as “The Apostle,” directly chosen by God to be his servant on Earth. The church allegedly has sayings that “the desires of the apostle are commandments” and that “nothing the apostle does is sin.” He celebrated his 50th birthday in Mexico’s grandiose Palacio de Bellas Artes, or Palace of Fine Arts, and met with Nayib Bukele when opening a new temple in San Salvador.
The indictment against Joaquín and others depicts horrific child sex abuse but it is also contains organized crime charges, alleging Luz del Mundo operates as an international criminal conspiracy. Back in Guadalajara, there are questions about how the church co-exists with one of Mexico’s most powerful mobs, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and accusations it has paramilitary units running criminal rackets. And the indictment is sending a shock wave through Mexican politics where Luz del Mundo has members across the political parties, including…
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