BRAZIL
Washington Post
By Anthony Faiola and Marina Lopes
April 14, 2018
MINDURI, Brazil — Welcome to Paradise Farm.
In the fertile hills of southeast Brazil, scores of Christian workers tend banana and citrus fields, rousing iridescent butterflies in the noonday sun. In the evenings, laborers come home to cement dorms, communal meals and prayer sessions far from the secular distractions of urban life.
“We are all Christians who follow the New Testament,” said Paulo Henrique da Silva, president of the cooperative that manages the farm. “We came together to live as one.”
Yet this picture of faith, Brazilian authorities say, is masking a darker truth. Officials describe the ranch as part of a sprawling slave labor and racketeering ring led by Pastor Cícero Vicente de Araújo, a former salesman. Federal police are calling it another in an unusual string of high-profile criminal cases tied to evangelical churches here in Latin America’s largest nation.
The dramatic surge of evangelical Christianity in Brazil in recent decades is giving the religious right an increasingly powerful political voice. But in a country where corruption and malfeasance have already infiltrated the highest levels of politics and business, opportunists are also muscling in on houses of worship.
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