El Narco (32 page)

But the son of death met his own death. As he drove his Cadillac SUV through the industrial sprawl, he was greeted by a rattle of gunfire. More than a hundred bullets covered his truck, killing him instantly. It had all the hallmarks of a classic organized-crime hit. Investigators said Comandante Pantera had probably been dealing drugs and had not paid off the mafia. He was a gang-funded preacher, they sighed, who died in the world of crime he perpetuated.

But was he really?

Legaria’s mother gave a press conference and told a radically different version of events. The Pantera had never come from Sinaloa or lived in the Barrio, she said; he was really a rich kid, born in the plush Mexico City suburb of Satellite City. After he went to private schools, his father gave him a highly profitable business, verifying cars for their pollution levels. Legaria got into Santa Muerte after joining a motorcycle club and discovering he had a talent for ghetto preaching. Finding himself with a flock, he invented a new dynamic identity for himself. But, as he discovered to his peril, it was no game pretending to be a gangster during the Mexican Drug War.

His mother offered a reward for information to seek justice for her son. She got dozens of calls with an array of accusations: some said it was the Tepito Santa Muerte temple; others La Familia drug cartel; others even accused gunmen working for the Catholic Church. It was doomed to become yet one more Mexican murder mystery.
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I attend a mass in Pantera’s temple a month after his killing. His common-law wife is presiding over the ceremony. It is a truly crazy party. Mariachis pluck out lively tunes and the faithful leap around as if they were possessed; one middle-aged woman is going particularly mad, dancing in frenetic circles. We then go through prayers reminiscent of New Age meditation. Hundreds of wide-eyed believers stare at the sky and claim to see the face of Pantera. A high school student tells me that the Santa Muerte cured her of cancer. Another tattooed young devotee claims they have severed heads buried under the temple grounds. I decide not to try looking.

Religious sects famously attract kooks, weirdos, and fantasists. But some really seriously dangerous people venerate Santa Muerte. Shrines dot the turfs of northern Mexico where the drug war rages. In the northeast, Mexican soldiers smashed up various Holy Death altars they said were built by the Zetas. Over in Sinaloa, I reported on a narco massacre of thirteen people in a village. Driving out, I ran into an altar of La Niña Blanca by the road. Seeing the image of death so close to bloody murder is unnerving.

In the southern state of Yucatan, killers left twelve severed craniums in piles on two ranches. Police arrested Zetas affiliates with the axes used for the beheadings. In their homes were shrines to the skeletal death queen.
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These psychos seemingly feel the Holy Death condones such barbarity or is even pleased by it.

Catholic priests understandably rail hard against the heretical acts of Santa Muerte preachers. From the pulpit, they urge the faithful not to mess with the dark and diabolical. They argue that the reaperess encourages violence by making devotees believe she can deflect bullets. As Father Hugo Valdemar, the spokesman for the Mexico City diocese, told me, “Believers think they can act with impunity. They think they don’t just have human strength, but also a divine protector. And of course for them she is strong and for them she is brave. This leads to more crime.”

I personally follow neither Pope Benedict nor a skeletal incarnate of death. I was baptized under Roman law but stopped going to church when I was a teenager. If I were in segregated Northern Ireland (or North Texas), I would call myself an agnostic Catholic. In Mexico, I’m just agnostic.

However, I do find the idea of assassins cutting off heads and praying to a skulled she-deity discomforting. The cult helps villains justify barbaric actions, at least in their own minds. Of course, faithful adherents of many religions have justified atrocities in the name of their God. Maybe killers would commit exactly the same crimes without the cloaked skeleton. Maybe.

Anthropologists, meanwhile, have a field day with the explosion of Mexico’s religious digressions. Santa Muerte, they say, reflects the nation’s age-old fascination with the deceased, as shown in its Day of the Dead. The skeleton could even be a resurgence of an old Aztec deity called Mictecacihuatl or the Lady of the Land of the Dead.
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An underground belief in pre-Hispanic deities, some argue, is proof of a continued resistance to colonial culture by Mexico’s working class.

Others point to the postmodernist side of Santa Muerte. In many ways, she is an urban pop star. She has spread rapidly by the same media that demonize her, as well as via Web sites, pirate DVDs, printed T-shirts, and tattoos. She answers to the gripes of modern poverty, promising help in everyday struggles rather than in an afterlife.

Whatever the whys and wherefores, it is striking the Santa Muerte rocketed to prominence at the same time as the Mexican Drug War—and as the democratic transition. While traffickers fund some temples, the death saint spreads with her own energy. Perhaps the phenomena are different signs of rebellion against the old orders. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Mexico stands at a crossroads on the path to both its judicial and spiritual futures.

Seizing the mad millennial moment, leaders of La Familia Cartel have taken steps to carve a Mexico in their own vision. They saw the way gangster foot soldiers grasped religious symbols. And the capos asked, why just finance other preachers when you can preach yourself? The result is a frightening evolution of narco religion.

Hailing from the western state of Michoacán, La Familia sprung to world attention with spectacular acts of violence, such as rolling five human heads onto a disco dance floor.
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After one of its lieutenants was arrested in July 2009, the family also demonstrated a great capacity for small-town warfare, waging simultaneous attacks on a dozen police facilities and killing fifteen officers. Startled pundits dubbed it a kind of Tet Offensive. Arrested Familia hoods then claimed they had nine thousand men at arms, who had undergone religious indoctrination. Media barons swung their heads from the north to the west. Where had this upstart militia come from? How had they challenged the traditional narco powers of Sinaloa and the Gulf? Was it their religion that made them grow so fast?

The investigator best equipped to answer this sits in a heavily guarded office in Michoacán state capital, Morelia. Carlos has watched the rise of the ungodly gangsters throughout his career in law enforcement, in which he worked for a long time in the federal spy agency. He now heads a special state-federal unit that follows La Familia. Carlos has piles of documents, photos, and recordings of the gangsters stacked around him. He can’t stop talking about his nemeses. His data sketches a grisly picture of how and why the happy family built its narco church.

La Familia was born in a roasting-hot mountain valley in Michoacán known as the Tierra Caliente. The expanse of lime orchards and agave spikes has long been a hotbed of outlaws and rather fundamentalist religion. Over the hill in grandiose Morelia, residents used to call the valley “hell.” Wild criminals would be exiled to this inferno, where they had to scramble for a living in dirt villages. But the worm has turned. The roughnecks from hell now call the shots over the chattering political classes in Morelia. And if the politicians don’t play ball, gangsters unleash their divine punishments.

La Familia had three chiefs who were all born of peasant farmers in the Tierra Caliente between the mid-1960s and 1970s. Nazario Moreno, “El Más Loco,” also known as El Chayo; Servando Gómez, alias La Tuta; and José de Jesús Méndez, alias El Chango or the Monkey. Their share of power was considered equal, but Nazario headed the spiritual side of the clan. He is normally shown in a black-and-white photo so blurred it is made of gray squares sketching his thick neck, round face, and slim, black mustache.

Like many in the valley of hell, Nazario trekked up to the United States as a teenager, working jobs in California and Texas. But he was quickly lured from the life of a laborer to the luxuries of a drug smuggler. He stayed in the United States working with Mexican gangsters to distribute product.

Within godly America, Nazario came in touch with evangelical Christianity and was born-again to his new calling. As well as following Latino evangelical preachers, he became a huge fan of a Christian author called John Eldredge. In his book
Wild at Heart
, Eldredge paints a romantic idea of muscular Christianity; of man untamed but noble, struggling through a wilderness that can be Mesopotamia, the Sinai desert, or rural Colorado.
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In this outback, man endures wounds and faces challenges that he must overcome like a warrior, with hard but holy acts. The metaphor found fertile terrain in El Más Loco. What could be closer to this wilderness than the Tierra Caliente, and what was a harder struggle than that of the poor Mexican peasant?

Nazario endured a wound that was no metaphor in 1998 when he almost died in a car accident. To cure a gaping head injury, doctors fixed a metal plate into his skull. The investigator Carlos says the shield made him even more loco. But Nazario felt like a visionary and began writing his rambling thoughts that would later shape into his “bible.”

Back in Michoacán, the underworld was turned on its head with the 2003 arrest of regional strongman Armando Valencia.
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During the ensuing upheavals, Nazario returned to Mexico and joined his old Tierra Caliente buddies to vie for power. La Familia first allied with the Zetas and trained with their commandos in urban and rural warfare. But after they felt strong enough, they did a U-turn and started murdering Zetas to claim the territory as their own.

Under Nazario’s direction, La Familia was quick to introduce religious indoctrination to its recruited fighters. The spiritual aspects were useful in providing a glue and discipline for its organization. As Carlos explains:

“These guys really do believe in their religion. They are genuine converts. But they also see the benefits of religion in running organized crime. If you have a kind of ideology, however bizarre, it gives a gang direction and justification for whatever it does. It is not just a war. It becomes a holy war.”

La Familia financed certain evangelical churches and handed out copies of standard protestant Bibles in Spanish. Then Nazario printed his own good book. He called it
Pensamientos
, or
Thoughts
.

I get my hands on a copy of
Pensamientos
from a source in Morelia. The book is a hundred pages long and decorated with pictures of green lands and biblical images drawn by El Más Loco himself. He was not a bad artist. There is no price, as La Familia gives the book out free to troops. The copy I have claims to be the fourth edition, with a print run of 7,500. Overall, the book states that 26,500 copies have been churned out.

True to its name,
Pensamientos
is a splattering of individual thoughts as well as some anecdotes and moral lessons. Structurally, it is quite close to Mao Zedong’s “little red book,” which also jumps from short idea to short idea. Many passages are in the spirit of evangelical self-help that can be heard in sermons from Mississippi to Rio de Janeiro. As the narco prophet writes:

“I ask God for strength and he gives me challenges that make me strong; I ask him for wisdom and he gives me problems to resolve; I ask him for prosperity and he gives me brain and muscles to work.”

However, on other pages, Nazario switches to phrases strikingly similar to those coined by revolutionary Emiliano Zapata—words of peasants fighting oppressors. As the Maddest One goes on, “It is better to be a master of one peso than a slave of two; it is better to die fighting head-on than on your knees and humiliated.”

On other pages, Nazario talks in more concrete terms about building up La Familia’s “movement”:

“We are beginning an arduous, but very interesting, task: the building of consciousness. Today, we need to prepare to defend our ideals so that our struggle will bear fruit and organize so as to go down the best path, perhaps not the easiest, but the one that can offer the best results.”

Pensamientos
may not be a candidate for the Booker Prize. But Carlos assures me that the ideas hit home with uneducated peasants of the Tierra Caliente, as does the notion that they can carry out vengeful violence in the name of the Lord. The religion gives thugs, once recruited, a discipline that makes them more reliable soldiers. But if any of them mess up, they must themselves face the wrath of God. According to Familia declarations, employees who make a first mistake are tied up in a room; on a second, they are tortured; and a third mistake is their last.

An obvious gaping contradiction in all this is, how can drug traffickers and murderers claim to be devout Christians? To justify their actions, La Familia bosses argue they are bringing better-paying employment to Michoacán and, like many gangsters, act as benevolent godfathers, handing Christmas presents to poor kids in mass events. They also pose as vigilantes bringing divine justice to the lawless streets and say that while they sell narco poison to gringos, they won’t deal to their own. To get out this message that they are really guardian angels, they have taken the brash step of going to the media. When they first burst on the scene in 2006, they placed an ad in several newspapers. The bravado text had a headline entitled MISSION and went on:

“Eradicate from the state of Michoacán kidnapping, extortion in person and by telephone, paid assassinations, express kidnapping, tractor-trailer and auto theft, home robberies done by people like those mentioned, who have made the state of Michoacán an unsafe place. Our sole motive is that we love our state and are no longer willing to see our people’s dignity trampled on.”
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