It is June 2019. A crowd sings and raises its arms before a stage worthy of a great concert in Sao Paulo. And in the center of that stage: Jair Bolsonaro. A few months ago he had won the presidential elections in Brazil thanks, in part, to that crowd of faithful evangelists.

These cults, very fragmented and diverse, among which we can find Baptists, Methodists, Mesonites or, the most widespread, Pentecostals, They have been growing for several decades in Latin America.

“Are a social, political and economic actor“, says Eduardo Saldaña, co-director of ‘The World Order’. The arrival of John Paul II at the top of the Catholic Church left a space in the Latin American region that these currents have been occupying. “We see that in the last 20 years , with a media ‘boom’ of new technologies, neo-Pentecostalism is gaining all the religiosity in the region,” he adds.

Its weight is especially noticeable in Central America, not so much in the southern cone of the continent. so, in Dominican Republic, Fabricio Alvarado combines his sermons with his speeches in the country’s Legislative Assembly and has even become a candidate for president. In Guatemalaone of the countries with the most evangelical weight, pastors like Cash Luna are media stars with millions of followers on social networks.

“The Catholic Church was leaning in much of Latin America towards theses closer to Marxism with the theory of liberation and In the process of secularization of these societies, the evangelists have found a niche“, reflects Óscar Vara, an expert in geopolitics, in the Al Rojo Vivo program. They have managed to spread, continues Vara, “through very well-financed promotional programs from the United States.” He remembers how a decade ago, in Guatemala, he he saw evangelical missions coming from the great neighbor to the north to promote his ideology: socially conservative and very market friendly In economic terms.

These groups reject pro-LGBT, pro-abortion or feminist policies, while supporting liberal ideas such as that if you work hard enough, you can jump social or economic barriers. All of them combine with the ideas of conservative parties and even ultra-rightists.

Therefore, it is not surprising that in the United States ally with Donald Trump during his campaign and tenure. Because although the most striking are the exorcisms that they practice or the miracles that they claim to work… the truth is that they move millions of people.

“It is a mistake to remain on the surface, to ignore the implications“, says Saldaña, who remembers that understanding the movement can help confront it. In fact, in Latin America even the leaders of the left have ended up adapting: Lula Da Silva sent a letter to the evangelicals in the last elections in which he managed to defeat Bolsonaro and López Obrador, in Mexico, even allowed himself to be blessed.