Rivera was born in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain in 1935 and died of colon cancer in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma in 1997. Chick promised to promote Alberto's claims even after he died. Rivera claims to have been a Jesuit before becoming a Fundamentalist Protestant, and many of the stories Chick published about Rivera involve Jesuit conspiracies.

Biography

Rivera is most

He was born in Spain and educated at a Catholic seminary. He was sent to destroy various Protestant organizations and discredit Protestant leaders, before becoming disillusioned upon finding that the Vatican was behind Freemasonry. He exposed the Catholic Church at an Ecumenical Conference in 1967 at a stadium in Costa Rica to 50,000 people. The Jesuits sent him to a top-secret location in Spain (then ruled by the Franco dictatorship) to make him recant his faith. He was tortured and put on drugs until he nearly died. He was put into an iron lung because his lungs had broken down. But nearly at death, he asked Jesus to forgive him and then Jesus set him free. He then flew to London and

Allegations against Catholicism and Islam

According to Rivera, Jesuits are responsible for the recession, communism, Islam, Nazism, the World Wars, the Jonestown Massacre, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; he further claims that the Catholic Church wants to spread homosexuality and abortion, that the Charismatic Movement is a front for the Catholic Church, that the Popes are antichrists, that the Catholic Church is the Whore of Revelation, and that the Prophet Muhammad was used by the Catholic Church to create Islam and destroy the Jews and Christians.

Presence in "Chick Tracts"

Six of Jack Chick's comics feature Rivera specifically: Alberto , Double Cross, The Godfathers , The Force, Four Horsemen, and The Prophet . The stories are so extreme that many people dismiss them out of hand, though Chick also printed a series of counterclaims in reply. Chick's comics and tracts came to be removed from many Christian bookstores on the grounds that his anti-Catholic charges were false and bigoted. Chick then withdrew from the Christian Booksellers Association after the CBA began considering whether to expel him. Chick calls Rivera the most godly man he has ever met and claims that the charges against him and Rivera are themselves a plot by the Catholic Church.

Rivera's last place of residence and place of death-- Broken Arrow, Oklahoma-- were not revealed until after Rivera's death; Chick now says that Rivera's body was secretly taken out of Oklahoma and buried in a secret location in a private funeral service out of fear that the Jesuits would exhume his corpse and desecrate it.

• Catholic Answers article that claims Rivera has been discredited as a fraud.

• From Cornerstone Magazine, from the author of an expose of Rivera that appeared in Christianity Today magazine.