Posted on 01/09/2010 7:37:22 PM PST by TigerLikesRooster
January 10, 2010
Mexican drug gangs worship Saint Death
As bloody feuds grip the traffickers, many are turning to a grim icon. Tony Allen-Mills reports from Ciudad Juarez
Tony Allen-Mills in Ciudad Juarez
/snip
First, her head had been crudely hacked off — a trademark cartel warning to rivals. Second, her torso bore a distinctive tattoo of a cackling skeleton dressed in suggestive female clothing.
Police recognised it at once as Santa Muerte — best translated as Saint Death, a macabre feminine icon who has replaced the Virgin Mary as an improbable source of unholy comfort to Mexico’s legions of gangsters and hitmen.
“If you revere her and are faithful to her, she might look after you. But she’s a mean saint and beware her vengeance,” said Nacho Puente, a Juarez market vendor. In the past he sold statuettes of Santa Muerte mainly to tourists seeking souvenirs of the Day of the Dead, Mexico’s perversely cheerful funeral festival.
To the dismay of the Catholic church and the disgust of the Mexican government, a bogus saint from popular folklore has become a crucial accessory for junkies, gang members and cartel kingpins alike.
The government has dubbed the skeleton a “narco-saint” and sent troops to destroy the garishly decorated roadside shrines erected in her honour. In drug-related trials or in raids on supposed cartel strongholds, Santa Muerte is repeatedly invoked as an indication of depravity and guilt.
At the trial of Gabriel Cardona, accused of kidnapping and murder on behalf of the Gulf cartel, investigators alleged that he collected his victims’ blood in a glass and drank a toast to Santa Muerte. When police smashed into a house allegedly occupied by a leader of the Sinaloa cartel, they found an entire room turned into a Santa Muerte chapel.
I saw the pictures you posted after the one I posted. The figures of which I speak, Catrinas, are all female skeletons and they all have the wide brimmed hat and nicely dressed. The ones you posted with the scythe and such seem to be a different animal, for sure.
We are in deep, deep trouble and refuse to acknowlede it ...
This religion is basely most on Aztec and Mayan religion that type
Paganism in action...once again.
And both are cults who worship the same "diety".
It is, and Mexicans often don’t even know that. Some of the people in my church congregation have Santa Muerte tattoos or stickers on their trucks (Mexicans love trucks!), and I don’t think they see any problem.
They just haven’t been taught, and it’s our job, as people who know the Christian Faith, to charitably straighten them out as much as we can.
Hey I live in SO CAL I know I see all the time they don’t realize that
The "sophisticated" pro-abortion enviro-cultists are following the same death-god. They'd hate to admit it, but worshipping Death is worshipping Death, no matter how you dress it up.
Nancy Pelosi would never admit it, but she's a devotee of Santa Muerta as much as any Sinaloa narco is.
Hundreds of years ago, people expected to die any time. We don’t live that way now in the US, but it’s still out there. It’s not the Catholic faith, any more than the French-Caribbean Papa Legba is St. Peter.
Culture and history are ... what they are. And we have to recognize what is out there, while making a distinction between “what some people who call themselves Catholics believe” and “what the Catholic Faith is.”
I think this is what the movie Apocolypto was trying to point out. The meztizos are only a few steps out of the jungle. They are coming to a hometown near you.
Looks like the patron saint of dead gang bangers and homeboys...
bookmark
"What a beautiful world this will be,
What a glorious time to be free" - Donald Fagan, IGY
According the the left, we should embrace other cultures and not make value judgements.
Mexico is just another turd world country that is barely out of the stone age.
Seal the borders, kill drug smugglers and dealers. Kill the head and the rest is dead.
You just got to stop making sense. You might cause others to think the same way.
Sorry, it was early.....must have been the Copenhagen pouches for breakfast.
Ping!
If you want on, or off this S. Texas/Mexico ping list, please FReepMail me.
“As one Freeper pointed out a few months ago, this isn’t a quaint little old custom, but a belief system which emboldens crimminal behavior.”
It’s been years since our sheriff found the relics of ‘Saint Death’ worship in camps in our national forests. Just think, as more Mexicans come, and more of their cartels take over our cities....soon THIS will be a protected religion in this nation. ONe of the delegates of the FR Squatter support squad will be along soon to tell us what good Catholics ALL Mexicans are.
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