For several months, a team from the New York office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) traveled across the country and interviewed dozens of La Luz del Mundo followers. Some of those agents had previously imprisoned singer R. Kelly and dismantled a trafficking network in Tenancingo, Mexico. A year ago, the team arrived in Los Angeles to arrest the church leader, Naasón Joaquín García, and his elderly mother, Eva García. But this time, unlike other cases, they have encountered tough opposition: a defense with resources and legal strategies aimed at avoiding a trial in a federal court in Manhattan at all costs. Their lawyers’ latest attempt is to argue that the Government lacks evidence to prosecute them in that city on charges of conspiracy to commit organized crime, sex trafficking, and child exploitation.
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“The Prosecutor’s Office has refused to reveal what Mr. García did in the Southern District of New York,” states a 36-page document submitted by Naasón Joaquín’s defense on September 11. The lawyers add that, moreover, their client is being attributed sexual abuses for which his father and grandfather, Samuel and Aarón, both deceased and historical figures of La Luz del Mundo, were accused.
According to the text, under the argument that the alleged victims were coerced by their belief that they were fulfilling a divine mandate, prosecutors present a legal act, having maintained “consensual sex between adults,” as a crime. The litigators argue that this federal case derives from the process filed in Los Angeles in 2019 and that ended three years later with a reduced sentence of nearly 17 years in prison. “It is simply not true that the federal prosecutor’s office of the Southern District of New York investigated this case on its own or reinvestigated the California case,” they claim.
This legal battle is being fought while, in Mexico, the victims have succeeded in reopening the case that Alejandro Gertz Manero mysteriously closed, who was attorney general during Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration. However, there are low expectations about what the Mexican authorities might do. As it did for decades with the hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the leadership of this congregation, based in Jalisco, has found in the ruling Morena party a perfect ally. Several of its followers hold public office under its banner at various levels of government.
Additionally, the political arm of the cult, the Association of Professionals and Entrepreneurs of Mexico (APEM), obtained registration in 2023 of an organization within Morena, whose name takes up one of López Obrador’s recurring expressions: Mexican Humanism. The bet is that it will become an independent institute, with its own agenda and candidates aligned with the cult.
Naasón Joaquín, whom his followers call Apostle of Jesus Christ because they consider him the only representative of God on Earth, continues leading thousands of believers from a Brooklyn prison who believe in his innocence. They do so despite the fact that in 2022 he pleaded guilty to three charges related to the sexual abuse of three minors in a criminal process in California.
If he obtains parole and manages to leave behind the federal criminal processes he still faces, the one in New York and another in Los Angeles, he could be released from prison in September 2030. An online fundraiser collected more than 2.6 million dollars from 10,000 contributions to pay for the services of one of the most expensive law firms in Southern California. The firm, which already represented him in the state process, now defends him tooth and nail in the Manhattan court with a strategy focused on questioning procedural errors and seeking elements that, at least, allow negotiating a possible reduction of charges.
The flight to New York in 2015
Naasón Joaquín’s lawyers argue that, six months before the trial — scheduled to begin on March 29, 2027 — they still do not know precisely who accuses their client and what specific facts they impute to him. The defense attributes this lack of information to a protective order that keeps complainants’ data confidential.
“No defendant in a criminal process should be denied the right to know what they are accused of, and the Government lacks convincing arguments to justify denying such right to Mr. García,” they state in a document. For the litigators, the three million pages of documents that the New York Prosecutor’s Office delivered during the discovery process are also not enough.
“If the Government really has concrete accusations about any of the defendants performing any action in the Southern District of New York, then it should be ordered to state it before the trial,” they argue. Waiting until the Prosecutor finishes presenting its case in court, they add, “would be a considerable waste of judicial resources” and would allow the Government “to put anyone on trial in any district.”
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According to the defense, the only territorial jurisdiction link that the accusation establishes is that Naasón Joaquín supposedly possessed child pornography videos while flying over “the waters of the Southern District of New York,” during a flight from Europe to Newark Airport, New Jersey, in June 2015. However, the lawyers point out that at least three of the charges related to that crime would have started in May 2016. “If the allegations regarding the creation of the videos are true, then the allegations about ‘territorial jurisdiction based on the overflight’ are false,” they maintain.
The defense also points out another apparent contradiction: the accusation mentions a trip that Naasón Joaquín made in July 2017 from South Africa to JFK Airport, in Queens, which belongs to the Eastern District of New York, not the district where the process is taking place.
The sins of three generations
When Naasón Joaquín took the leadership of La Luz del Mundo in 2014, he continued a system of child sexual abuse, exploitation, and illicit enrichment that he inherited from his grandfather, Aarón Joaquín, and his father, Samuel Joaquín, according to the accusations. The Manhattan case alleges that Eva García was an accomplice of her husband Samuel by participating in the sexual assaults, while living like a queen at the expense of the tithes delivered by millions of followers.
In her luxurious home in Los Angeles, which was nicknamed ‘The Versace House’ because most of the furniture is from that brand, federal agents found more than a million dollars in cash and jewelry. She has asked the court to be tried separately, so as not to be punished for the crimes attributed to her son.
The Apostle, in turn, has requested that the entire case be dismissed, indicating that he should not be held responsible for the sins of his descendants. “The first charge of the formal accusation explicitly describes three distinct conspiracies, involving Aaron, Samuel, and Mr. García… These alleged conspiracies occurred in different periods, involved different people and acts, and had different purposes,” the document mentions. “The formal accusation imputes, in a single charge, crimes allegedly committed in the early 1970s — when Mr. García was a small child — and crimes allegedly committed in 2018, when he was 50 years old,” it adds.
The Government’s response to these arguments is still pending. This is literally the last procedural resource the Apostle’s lawyers have to try to get the judge to dismiss the accusation before the trial. Both Naasón Joaquín and his mother face the possibility of a life sentence. The decision is in the hands of District Judge Loretta Preska, who has a hearing scheduled for October 27.
In the process initiated by the California Department of Justice seven years ago, Naasón Joaquín’s lawyers managed to put the state prosecutors on the ropes after they failed to fulfill their obligation to deliver all evidence in their possession to the defense. In a controversial negotiation, the Prosecutor agreed to withdraw most of the charges against the religious leader, thus avoiding the possibility of spending the rest of his life behind bars.
Since 2023, another process against the Apostle remains open in the Central District of California on charges related to possession and production of child pornography, crimes that could bring him up to 40 additional years in prison. That case was investigated by FBI agents in Los Angeles.
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