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.
