She says she kept reminding them the film would be shown in El Salvador and available online, and asking if it would put them at risk. “But the truth is that they are already condemned: they’ve left the gang they’ve lived with former members of other gangs and they’ve lived openly as gay people,” she says. “If they ever got out of prison, they’d have nowhere to go. One of them said the only solution would be to live in the sewer.”Įvangelical churches offer a rare way out of gang life in El Salvador. For several decades, evangelical Christianity-practiced by around 16% of the country in the 1980s-has been spreading rapidly, displacing Catholicism. Annual surveys by national newspaper La Prensa Grafica have found the proportion of Salvadorans identifying as evangelical grew from 28.7% in 2004 to 39.5% in 2019, while the percentage identifying as Catholic fell from 55.1% to 40.5% over the same period. Analysts say gangs appear to respect evangelical churches because of their emphasis on personal transformation and forgiveness of past crimes, with more than half of gang members identifying as evangelicals compared to 17% as Catholics, per research shared with NPR.