Posted on 06/01/2008 3:32:25 PM PDT by SwinneySwitch
LAREDO — When Webb County sheriff's deputies started photographing the eerie, sometimes blood-soaked shrines to shrouded skeletal figurines found at the homes and stash houses of big-time drug dealers, it was with the sense they were glimpsing into the psyche of a subculture.
That was a few years ago. Now, the elaborate displays of homage to the Santa Muerte, or holy death, seem more kitschy than creepy. The defiant faith that sinister-looking statues could summon netherworld power, which emerged as something associated with cartel kingpins tucked inside gated estates, has gone mainstream for the Mexican border's criminal element.
Teens caught with “dime bags” of pot might have Santa Muerte amulets hanging from their rearview mirrors. Small-time drug dealers may have an altar on a closet shelf, with an assortment of statues, beads, roses and spell books arrayed below stacks of folded towels.
In scale with one's fortunes, the statues may be hand-carved of ivory or onyx, or manufactured in China.
“What we're seeing is a trend,” said Capt. Ted Garcia, who keeps a poster of Santa Muerte shrines superimposed with a sheriff's badge on a wall near his desk. And by “trend” he means “fad.”
“It's like the Malverde a few years ago,” he said, referring to Jesús Malverde, a Mexican folk hero who has been likened to Robin Hood. “Or the Scarface posters everyone used to have. Everyone wanted to be Scarface. Or those little rabbit foots in the 1970s.”
What Garcia can't dismiss is the conviction devotees have in Santa Muerte's protection, even as they are being arrested.
He recalled asking one busted drug dealer, “How come you worship it if it doesn't work?”
The man answered, “I was expecting you guys.”
“I promised her I wouldn't use,” the man continued, explaining that he told the saint he had quit using cocaine. “I had faltered. I knew she would seek revenge on me.”
Sgt. Melanie Velarde recalled the arrest of a member of the Mexican Mafia, a prison gang. Even as he was led out of the house in handcuffs, he didn't question what would happen to the wife or daughter he left behind.
He worried only that the police had tainted his altar.
“He just kept asking. ‘Did you touch her? Did you touch her? Did you offend her?'” Velarde said.
Once behind bars, criminals have been known to re-create altars with what's at hand, carving statues out of soap.
Academics are fascinated with the cult. They hold differing opinions about its origins, but agree it originates deep within Mexican culture.
The Santa Muerte is a female entity. She is not accepted by the Catholic Church and is today associated with the drug trade — but is called a saint, her pendants worn by many law-abiding Mexicans and Mexican Americans alongside Christian crosses.
At a curandera shop in a crumbling block of downtown Harlingen, an owner who gave his name only as “El Indio” displayed an array of Santa Muerte objects ranging from votive candles to a large statue with a $650 price tag.
He explained how different colors of her robes or offerings could be used to pray for different things. Green for money. Yellow for business and health. Blue for help with a court case. Pink for passion and love.
“She's not evil,” he insisted. “God created her. If you believe, you believe. It's what you believe. Some people believe in Jesus Christ, the Virgin of Guadalupe. ... People call for the power of the saints.”
He explained the skeleton is part of life.
“Everybody has the reaper. Later on when you leave this world, what you leave is only that shell. ... She works in both places, dark and light.”
Tony Zavaleta, an anthropologist and vice president of the University of Texas at Brownsville, has published extensively on the folk figures that have emerged from Mexico's history of cultural clashes and convergence.
What can't be denied, he said, is that Mexico's death imagery is pre-Columbian. A visitor to the Aztec Templo Mayor in Mexico City will take in walls full of skulls. The November Day of the Dead celebrations are marked by ancestor veneration that predates the arrival of the Spanish.
But Zavaleta stopped short of concluding the roots of the smiling skeleton's imagery are indigenous. Only 15 years ago, he said, the Santa Muerte, or Santísima Muerte, was a phenomenon limited to the Tepito neighborhood in Mexico City.
“I've seen it come up,” he said. “It's a fad, and it's caught widely,” he said.
“Certainly there is a pre-Columbian connection and then, of course there's the association with the Grim Reaper. ... The symbol of the Reaper is not one that is Mesoamerican or Central American — that's associated with the Grim Reaper of New Year's Eve.
“It's kind of become sort of self-styled for whoever wants it or needs it. I wouldn't be surprised if we're going to see holy death morph into holy death symbols that have guns,” Zavaleta added.
Zavaleta rejects theories that Santa Muerte has roots in African religions, or in the Cuban Palo Mayombe associated with the chilling cult murder of Texas student Mark Kilroy in Matamoros, Mexico, in 1988.
But, he said, there was a commonality with drug lords believing they could be made invincible by offerings.
“It's not a dangerous thing any more than a gun is dangerous,” Zavaleta said. “It's the people who are dangerous. The people who are practicing it are not always, but often, looking for something that they identify with that is sinister.”
James Creechan, a Canadian sociologist who teaches part-time at a university in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, also has been researching Santa Muerte.
Of late, he's seen efforts to have it recognized as an official church.
“It's probably best to think of this cult as a ‘cover all bases' type of thing,” he said, describing the icons and figurines as “a personal expression and recognition of the danger that encompasses narcotraffic.”
“There is a fine line between being a true believer and being someone who covers all bases and maybe even between those two things, a perverted sense of style and fashion.”
Years back a bunch of Americans were sacrificed in Matamororos in a ritual intended to protect drug dealers.
Don’t underestimate this one. Estimates of followers are as high as 2,000,000. If some charismatic individual creates doctrines for it, it will be a church overnight.
Such doctrines could be peaceful, but if they aren’t, the Santa Muerte cult could become another Thuggee cult, which murdered at random. The Thuggee terrorized all of India until the British wiped them out, twice.
And left a permanent mark, the word ‘thug’, on the English language.
I visited a street arts and craft show in Key West, that is, in Florida. There was a dealer there whose whole little booth was this Mexican death art,sculptures, dioaramas and paintings. It was positively creepy.
The British of yesteryear were a formidable crew.
Teens also were charged with kidnapping two 6th grade girls who had skipped school to see what the perps were up to...
One of the girls' dads got a posse together to burn down the barn on his land that the teens were using as a hangout.
teens who are still in jail (maybe) were 13, 14, and 15 years old... 10 teens in all
There was that near-revival in the nineteen-thirties, but it’s discovery by Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. and prompt action by Capt. Phillip Blumburtt with his Gurkha regiment thankfully put paid to it with a minimum of publicity.
“You build your pyre and we shall build our gallows, you observe your custom and then we shall observe ours..”
A different breed altogether.
The thing is, you don’t mess with Satan, witchcraft, or death cults without waking up things that are better left undisturbed.
If you call in Satan, whether you think you believe in him or not, he is all too likely to accept the invitation.
This is a very bad business, although the reporter tries to trivialize it.
There's low class, and then there's no class.
Yes, let's let 'em all in...
Family values south of the Rio Grande.
Limbaugh worshippers have been caught with bumper stickers and AM radio shrines.
Family values south of the Rio Grande.
This article reminds me of the opening scene of "No Country for Old Men": carnage under the wide Texas sky.
Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
Celebrate diversity!
We should end the “War on Drugs.”
Those who wish to kill themselves with drugs may do so.
Those who wish to sell them drugs may do so.
Prices would collapse, the profits would collapse, the gang wars and murders would stop, and the Satanic rituals would stop.
We would, however, also need to end the principal soul-killing force that is causing so many people to get involved in drug use and mindless sex: government schools.
You ain’t going to win any arguments around here with facts.
This culture of death could easily be turned into suicide attacks ala jihadists with the proper motivation. This is dangerous and is yet another urgent reason we must stem the illegal tide into America
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