“What is that tattoo on your arm?” we ask the waitress at Famous Dave’s Bar-B- Que in El Paso.
“I don’t know,” she says. Her name is Anyssa.
“It’s the Santa Muerte,” I answer. “Do you know what that is?”
She says no.
Less than two hours earlier on Thursday, January 15, by sheer coincidence, we had been at a large Santa Muerte shrine on the west edge of Juárez.
It was Pastor José Antonio Galván, the founder and director of the nearby mental asylum, Vision in Action who led us to this shrine. He believes it supports the narcos and the drug cartels. He says, “They ( narcos, police, delinquents and high level government officials)
prefer to place their lives in the hands of La Santa Muerte, thinking erroneously that she will save and protect them.” (My translation of his Spanish.)
I first read about La Santa Muerte in a 2008 New Yorker article, Days of the Dead, the New Narcocultura, by Alma Guillermoprieto. She said that: “The cult is known for the drug traffickers’ devotion to it.” Describing her visit to the sanctuary in the Tepito district of Mexico City, she continues, “Along the edges of the packed street, young men took quick snorts of glue and sometimes wept. A thin tattooed and pierced man with terrible skin was the only one of many toughs who was willing to talk to me, and his amiability may have had something to do with the fact that he had just absent-mindedly assembled a joint about the size of a Robusto and was now wreathed in its smoke.”
Jesus Malverde near Tijuana, Mexico. (Photo: Morgan Smith)
Are they correct? Is this a legitimate concern? Mexico is going through a terrifying drug war with thousands of unsolved murders. If the drug dealers or narcos have their own saint, La Santa Muerte, it will make it even more difficult to bring this under control.
I’ve now seen the Santa Muerte shrine in Mexico City as well as those in Juárez, south of Palomas, in a series of little capillas south of Nogales, in Anapra, and in a big santuario in Tijuana.
Almost everyone I see at these shrines is willing to talk about their devotion and to be photographed. Here are some of their comments.
When I first stopped at the capillas south of Nogales, a battered truck came crashing off the highway and two young guys jumped out. My cab driver ran to his taxi and locked himself in. This could be trouble, I think, but they turn out to be very friendly. One of them, Adriano, said that the Santa Muerte is for people who have “real problems.” She doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with drugs, he added, showing me the pendant that he wore around huge neck.
Lorena Mendoza lives on the outskirts of Tijuana in a two-story house. On the bottom floor, she maintains a large statue of the Santa Muerte in a big glass case. “I’m a Catholic,” she says,“but the Church always wants money. You even have to pay for the final Mass.” So, she has turned to La Santa Muerte and maintains it for the whole neighborhood. While remodeling this lower floor, she moved it temporarily to another location. Her nephew, Humberto, age 15 at the time, took me to see it. “I have always believed in La Santa Muerte,” he said.
Along the highway between Tijuana and Tecate, there is a little Jesús Malverde capilla. Malverde is a mythical folklore hero who allegedly lived in the state of Sinaloa, robbing the rich and giving to the poor – a Mexican “Robin Hood.” Supposedly he was killed by the police on May 3, 1909. There was always someone sleeping on the floor of the shrine. In addition, cars would stop and men would jump out to say a quick prayer. “We’re long-distance drivers,” one of them told me. “He protects us on the highway. That has nothing to do with drugs.”
La Santa Muerte has a long but unclear history as part of Mexico’s reverence towards death. Jesus Malverde is the same. I’m sure that there are narcos who look to them for protection, but the story is much more than that. It’s about people of all types and professions who are seeking help and can’t find it in the orthodox ways that we take for granted.
As a non-churchgoer, I am always amazed at the power of religion along the border, most of it positive. Almost all of the leaders of the humanitarian programs we work with are empowered by some form of faith, even though they might not be church goers. Including these two alleged narco saints in this mix is a mistake, I believe, and distracts from the extraordinarily difficult work of combating these cartels. Guadalupe and Beatrix, the mother and daughter who care for the shrine we saw last Thursday invited us to return when they have a service. Pastor Galván’s concerns notwithstanding, that’s our plan.
Editor's Note: The above guest column was penned by Morgan Smith of Sante Fe, New Mexico. The author writes frequently about border issues and can be reached at Morgan-smith@comcast.net.
