Santa Muerte has a fondness for tequila, cigarettes, candy — and human blood.
The saint is a favorite of Mexican and Central American drug traffickers who are known to leave the severed heads of their enemies at improvised shrines, featuring wax effigies and votive candles emblazoned with the skeletal image of the one also known as Holy Death.
Dressed in a flowing white robe and often wielding both a scythe and a globe, Santa Muerte — a cross between the Grim Reaper and the Virgin of Guadeloupe, Mexico’s patron saint — is just one of a rapidly growing religious movement of “narco saints,” worshiped by drug traffickers who pray to them for protection, riches and the silence necessary to mask their underworld dealings.
“The narcos and the gangs all believe in the power of prayer,” said Robert Almonte, a Texas-based security consultant and former deputy chief of the El Paso Police Department who specialized in narcotics. “They believe that the saints will protect them no matter what they do — and that’s dangerous because it emboldens the traffickers who truly believe they can get away with murder and still go to heaven.”
The movement is growing, with estimates of up to 12 million devotees in Mexico and, now, parts of the US. American law enforcement officials struggling under the recent wave of illegal migrant crossings are increasingly documenting altars to the macabre saint — and another, Jesus Malverde — in stash houses in US border communities where Mexican drug cartel members often hold migrants for ransom, Almonte said.
Not that these saints are canonized. The Catholic Church has condemned Santa Muerte worship as “blasphemous and Satanic.” When Pope Francis visited Mexico for the first time in 2016, he condemned the cult, which is one of the fastest growing new “religious” movements in the world, according to the Catholic Herald.
“I am particularly concerned about those many persons who, seduced by the empty power of the world, praise illusions and embrace their macabre symbols to commercialize death in exchange for money,” the Pope said, referring to Santa Muerte. “I urge you not to underestimate the moral and antisocial challenge which the drug trade represents for Mexican society as a whole, as well as for the Church.”
Altars to Santa Muerte are created in private homes, with larger statues erected in public squares in impoverished parts of Mexico. There is also a Santa Muerte sanctuary, with several life-sized effigies of the saint, in an industrial area of Las Vegas.
In some cases, Santa Muerte altars feature bundles of cash offerings, which are considered sacrosanct. Rival narcos — including members of the notorious MS-13 gang from El Salvador — know not to touch the money for fear of enduring the saint’s wrath, law enforcement officials say.
Many of the gruesome murders, including beheadings and human sacrifices, committed by Mexican drug gangs are done so in the name of Santa Muerte, said Almonte, who is writing a book about the cult.
In a 2016 interview, a sicario for the Juarez Cartel named Edgar described his worship, telling documentary filmmakers during a prison interview that, before each hit job, he would pray to the saint to ensure that everything would go according to plan.
“I actually sacrifice people for my Santa Muerte,” said Edgar, then 26. “The thing is that I kill for ordering, but I talk to her and say, ‘Hey, I go to a job. Just make me hit, I am gonna give you that life, it is for you.’” Edgar claimed he had killed 60 people on the orders of the Juarez Cartel.
The Santa Muerte cult traces its roots to colonial-era Mexico when devotees worshiped the folk deity in secret after the Catholic Church had banned the practice. The cult gained prominence in the 1940s and then again in 2001 when a street vendor named Queta Romero mounted an outdoor shrine to Santa Muerte in Tepito, one of Mexico’s City’s most violent neighborhoods. Thousands came to worship at the shrine — including women who prayed to the saint to make their husbands’ mistresses disappear.
Almonte, who is a former federal marshal, has been documenting the Santa Muerte cult since 1985 and spent the last several years crisscrossing the country, lecturing US law enforcement about Santa Muerte as well as a pantheon of other narco saints — including Jesus Malverde, a mustachioed Robin Hood-like bandit revered among the Sinaloa Cartel and considered the patron saint of drug traffickers in Mexico.
During jury selection at the 2018 trial of former Sinaloa Cartel chief Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman in Brooklyn federal court, potential jurors were asked if they were familiar with Jesus Malverde, a legendary figure of pre-Revolution Mexico.
Jesus Malverde and Santa Muerte are often honored together in ceremonies throughout Mexico, although human sacrifices are not offered to Malverde, cartel experts told The Post.
In January, 2010, a trafficker placed a decapitated head next to the tomb of legendary cartel leader Arturo Beltran Leyva, who had been killed in his apartment surrounded by Santa Muerte paraphernalia. The suggestion was that the drug dealer had placed the severed head next to the grave as an offering to Santa Muerte, experts said.
“When we see a deep criminal Santa Muerte connection it’s about the gaining of some
sort of favor [vast riches or the death of an enemy] or supernatural powers [spiritual armor] via the reaping of a soul,” Robert Bunker, a security consultant and University of Southern California instructor, told The Post. “Sometimes this is ritualized and other times it is not.”
Authorities have also documented a handful of Santa Muerte-influenced murders on the US side of the border, including a 2010 beheading in Chandler, Ariz. Cook County prosecutors in Chicago documented 13 Santa Muerte-affiliated murders between 2009 and 2011 by cartel kill teams. One killing crew had Santa Muerte stickers on their vehicles, tattoos on their bodies, altars in their homes and Santa Muerte-stamped bands to hold their cash, the Chicago Tribune reported.
In 2012, the cult made headlines in Mexico when one of its self-proclaimed high priests, David Romo Guillén, was sentenced to 66 years in prison for kidnapping and extortion. Earlier, he had called for holy war against the Catholic Church. Most of the Santa Muerte adherents live in Mexico, and the vast majority are not as hardcore as drug trafficker devotees, worshiping the folk deity without resorting to any acts of violence.
According to Bunker, who has also worked with the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, “A component of the cartel and gang members have gone down the path of ‘dark’ Santa Muerte worship as opposed to more benign Santa Muerte veneration” — which represents the vast majority of adherents in general society and also criminal groups who may be into SM “lite.”
Almonte recalled being approached by a police officer who was not able to crack a difficult homicide case until finding a note — written by a suspect seeking protection — at the crime scene.
“She would only have written that if she needed protection from us,” said the officer in an email to Almonte that was viewed by The Post. “She then broke down and told us about how the suspect used her rental car to commit the murder and that the prayer was written to help them from getting caught.”
As cartels continue to make inroads into the US, Santa Muerte-influenced violence is expected to increase, experts say.
“What I tell the officers when I am training them is that the cartel guys are doing this in Mexico and they will continue to do the same things here,” Almonte said. “It’s going to get worse here.”
A GUIDE TO THE NARCO SAINTS
