In northern borderlands (of Mexico), unusual saint of death draws followers

thenewsmexico ^ | 12 19 2002 | John Sevigny, AP - 12/19/2002

[dennisw]

Saint Death is becoming a more popular cult figure in northern Mexico. File Photo, TheNewsMexico.com

In northern borderlands, unusual saint of death draws followers

John Sevigny, AP - 12/19/2002

MONTERREY, Nuevo Leon - When police raided the home of a powerful Mexican drug trafficker, a statue of a skeleton standing on a homemade altar peered back at them with eerie, yellow eyes.

The figure, known as La Santísima Muerte, or Saint Death, is a spirit representing death worshipped by everyone from drug traffickers to jealous housewives in Mexico's borderlands. Anthropologists say a growing number of border residents are turning to witchcraft and black magic for power over a host of evils, from deceit and jail time to poverty and sickness.

"God helps the good and the devil helps the bad, but death treats everyone the same," said Blanquita Tamez, a Monterrey spiritual counselor who calls on Saint Death for worshippers.

Tamez said she began praying to Saint Death when she was a little girl. Her grandmother was also a follower. Statues of the grim reaper dressed in a long cloak and wielding a scythe line the shelves of Monterrey's markets. Saint Death also appears on medallions that dangle from the necks of waitresses in tough cantinas.

Last year, police found a statue of Saint Death when they raided the home of the Gulf cartel's lieutenant, Gilberto Garcia, in the northern state of Tamaulipas, which borders Texas. The Gulf Cartel was the strongest of the border-based Mexican cartels until 1996, when Juan Garcia Abrego was sentenced in Houston to 11 life terms for drug smuggling.

Many drug lords turn to black magic and folk saints for protection.

Nearly every town along the Rio Grande hosts channelers to call on the different spirits. Herb shops along the Mexico-Texas border sell magic candles that believers burn in their homes to ward off everything from traffic tickets to bad grades. Some candles in glass holders picture a giant X over a police officer.

The church has frowned upon such practices and is especially concerned about Saint Death - which borders on black magic. Prayers to Saint Death often mention the Father, Son and Holy Spirit - Catholicism's Holy Trinity.

"That's nothing more than religious ignorance and superstition," said Rev. Pedro Garza, a priest in Monterrey, an industrial city of 4 million people.

At times such practices have gone to the extreme. In 1989, Mark Kilroy, a 21-year-old U.S. pre-med student, was kidnapped off a busy street in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas.

The mutilated remains of Kilroy and 14 young men, were later found on a Mexican ranch. The victims had been boiled alive, castrated, slashed and shot, their brains and hearts cut out of their bodies. Drug smugglers who carried out the satanic ritual believed the sacrifices would give them supernatural protection from the law.

But some say Saint Death stems less from violence and more from the same pre-Colombian beliefs behind Mexico's popular Day of the Dead holiday in which people picnic on tombs and seem to embrace death as a part of life.

Images of death are nothing new in this country. Jose Guadalupe Posada, the 19th century printmaker who is considered by many to be the father of modern Mexican art, used images of skeletons working, riding bicycles and doing other everyday activities to poke fun at the middle class and politicians.

During Mexico's Day of the Dead holiday, people eat skulls and coffins made of candy and decorate their homes with paper streamers depicting skeletons.

Tony Zavaletta, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Brownsville, said Saint Death's following appears to be growing, noting that more markets along the Mexico-Texas border now sell the Saint Death images and amulets.

Zavaletta said each spirit appeals to different people for different reasons. Drug traffickers, for example, might be drawn to Saint Death because they live often dark lives.

"Just like people choose different flavors of ice cream," Zavaletta said, "people also choose different entities to represent them."

 

[dennisw]

bump

[Dialup Llama]

One benefit of multiculturalism is that you can now buy those voodoo candles (the ones with the pictures of saints on them) in Target.

[DallasMike]

The church has frowned upon such practices and is especially concerned about Saint Death - which borders on black magic. Prayers to Saint Death often mention the Father, Son and Holy Spirit - Catholicism's Holy Trinity.

This is a point I have made several times. The Catholic Church needs to stop "frowning" on these practices and instead should outlaw them and punish them as severely as they should pedophile priests. If you wonder why Protestants "frown" on the unbiblical practice of praying to saints, then re-read this article and let it sink in -- this is no one-time heresy in the hinterlands, but rather the general state of the Catholic Church outside the English-speaking churches.

[skeeter]

God fearin' illegal immigrant bump.

[theFIRMbss]

>One benefit of multiculturalism is that you can now buy those voodoo candles (the ones with the pictures of saints on them) in Target.

Yes, and keep your pet
chickens away from fans of
Jennifer Lopez!

[ameribbean expat]

Bingo. The syncretism in Roman Catholicism, particularly in Latin America, is something Rome needs to address.

[DallasMike]

The syncretism in Roman Catholicism, particularly in Latin America, is something Rome needs to address.

Those who live outside the American Southwest don't know the problem that it is even here -- a large percentage of the people here are Latin American immigrants. What seems a harmless and wholesome practice in, say, Ohio is a horrible heresy here.

Never mind the facts though -- expect denials and attacks from the folks I pinged.

[DJtex]

Saint Death is like Voodoo, a pidgin religion based on a mix of the primative and Catholicism's incredible influence in Mexico. But it also points to a richness of their culture that we whitebread Americans sadly lack.

As Don Juan told his apprentice, Carlos Casteneda:

Your death is your truest advisor. It always rides just off to your right shoulder, and at times of great danger, you can glance rapidly to your right and ask it: 'Are you coming for me today?' And he will tell you. If he says No--you know that the crisis will pass.

I know of few Christians who so truly believe that this life is not the only life--or even the important one. Let's be careful about condemning another perspective on life, as viewed from the universal leveler--Death. It may have something to teach us, even as we see it's flaws and limitations.

[ameribbean expat]

Saint Death is like Voodoo...But it also points to a richness of their culture that we whitebread Americans sadly lack.

I find nothing of merit in neolithic observances.

Let's be careful about condemning another perspective on life, as viewed from the universal leveler--Death.

Any criticism in my post is reserved for the Roman Catholic church, which has a quite distinct and well-promulgated position in this matter. I personally do not care if Northern Mexicans worship a head of lettuce, just don't ask me to underwrite other's folly.

[Campion]

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

2111 Superstition is the deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition.[41]

2112 The first commandment condemns polytheism. It requires man neither to believe in, nor to venerate, other divinities than the one true God. Scripture constantly recalls this rejection of "idols, [of] silver and gold, the work of men's hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see." These empty idols make their worshippers empty: "Those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them."[42] God, however, is the "living God"[43] who gives life and intervenes in history.

2113 Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods or demons (for example, satanism), power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money, etc. Jesus says, "You cannot serve God and mammon."[44] Many martyrs died for not adoring "the Beast"[45] refusing even to simulate such worship. Idolatry rejects the unique Lordship of God; it is therefore incompatible with communion with God.[46]

2116 All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to "unveil" the future.[48] Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.

2117 All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church for her part warns the faithful against it. Recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another's credulity.

[end quotation]

Older catechisms will state flatly (and they are correct in doing so) that activity like that described by the article is a mortal sin against the First commandment. That means it damns a person to hell.

What more do you expect us to say? Protestants act like it's the Church's fault that unconverted people who are at most nominally Catholic act like unconverted people. There are plenty of mainline Protestants who act like unconverted people, too. Most of the historically Protestant nations of Europe are effectively atheistic; it's only a matter of time before they lapse into Islam or paganism. Is that Protestantism's fault?

[dighton]

Saint Death is like Voodoo . . .

Geoffrey Holder as Baron Samedi / ClubJamesBond

Diego Rivera: A Dream of Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park, detail of center, see right-hand figure.

Under the Volcano

[BlueLancer]

Or this ...

[Aliska]

Older catechisms will state flatly (and they are correct in doing so) that activity like that described by the article is a mortal sin against the First commandment. That means it damns a person to hell.

They don't read the catechism, they have been poorly catechised, if at all, and they won't go to hell because of invincible ignorance.

And yes, Protestants who fall away or have a poor grasp of the faith are falling into not so much atheism, but the occult and new age, etc.

Both Protestants and Catholics do not present the true faith to the people. The Catholic church does little or nothing to stop the spread of false apparitions. They are afraid if they crack down on these things people will leave. So they do nothing and let them contaminate the rest of the flock who are struggling to maintain the truth as they understand it.

It's all caused by a desperate spiritual hunger everywhere.

[Campion]

They don't read the catechism, they have been poorly catechised

Agreed, but would they listen even if the catechesis were available?

they won't go to hell because of invincible ignorance.

Invincible ignorance is a thin thread on which to hang one's eternal destiny. But if they are really *invincibly* ignorant, catechesis wouldn't help (almost by definition).

[dennisw]

Wow! You know your art.

[theFIRMbss]

>Those who live outside the American Southwest don't know the problem that it is even here...

Is this "saint of death"
a part of Santeria?
Are they related?

[dighton]

8?D?d?ote>DEATH SPEAKS:

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

-- W. Somerset Maugham, used by John O'Hara here.

[FITZ]

The figure, known as La Santísima Muerte, or Saint Death, is a spirit representing death worshipped by everyone from drug traffickers to jealous housewives in Mexico's borderlands. Anthropologists say a growing number of border residents are turning to witchcraft and black magic for power over a host of evils, from deceit and jail time to poverty and sickness.

Many of the over 300 murdered girls and women along the border in Ciudad Juarez were killed in satanic rituals, many were drained of their blood and had bizarre cuts made on their bodies, nipples bit off. One drug trafficker was found with a nipple on a necklace, most likely from one of these murdered women. This stuff is no joke, there are people living in terror and these are very evil people.

[gcruse]

Exactly. I laughed out loud when I saw the 'file photo' accompanying the article. It's from a video game, amigo!!!