Santa Muerte: Patron Saint of the Drug War

Though she believes in God and closes her botánica on Sundays, she has left the Church, frustrated by its scandals and what she sees as its seeming unconcern for the poor and downtrodden. It's become just another powerful institution to her, another power for grassroots Mexicans to fight, like their former colonial overlords, and then later the big landowners, and now the corporations and maquiladora operators.

"You hear this again and again from people who venerate her: 'I love her because she does not discriminate,'" Chesnut explains. Why fear her? The White Lady will eventually press us all to her cold bosom, from billionaire Carlos Slim to the lowliest Matamoros chicle peddler, from the most virtuous goody-two-shoes to the most dissolute hellraiser, the priests and the nuns, the whores and the hired guns in the drug trade, all of us equally.

Photos by Daniel Kramer

Santa Muerte is all over Houston, if you know where to look. She's on the shelves at most Fiesta stores, ruling over her very own dedicated botánicas, and vying for your attention alongside the Pope, Jesus and a drunken deer at an Airline Drive flea market.

Daniel Kramer

Maria stands beside her public Santa Muerte altar inside her Sharpstown botánica. The Veracruz-born Santa Muerte priestess keeps another altar in her office and a truly awe-inspiring one in her back room. She won't allow that one to be photographed. "It's my religion," she says. Click here to see a video interview with Maria.

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SIDEBAR: Santa Muerte: Know Your Narco Saints
VIDEO: The Rise and Rise of Santa Muerte

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• Santa Muerte
• Gustavo Arellano
• Holy Death
• New York Crime
• Drug Trafficking

"Her scythe takes all heads," says Chesnut.
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Santa Muerte will consider the darkest petitions, such as the death of your enemies, success in a kidnapping or pickpocketing venture, or a windfall in the drug trade.

"St. Peter is not going to protect your next shipment of cocaine," Arellano says, but Santa Muerte might, if the price is right.

Thus her near-universal adoration in the drug trade, through which she has garnered most of her infamy. She serves many purposes in that arena: protector of life in a business that has claimed 35,000 souls since 2008, with the number rising every year. She can also be deployed as a destroyer of life, and a guarantor of success in shipping, so even within the confines of the narco world, she remains a complex multitasker.

In 2008, police found 11 charred heads near a Santa Muerte shrine in the Yucatán tended by the Zetas drug cartel. Earlier this year, Drug Enforcement Administration agent Chris Diaz testified that during a wiretapping operation, he heard a Zeta heavy boast of sacrificing two teenaged rivals to Santa Muerte by slicing open their bellies and offering the blood of one as a toast to La Flaka. Also this year, on the side of a highway not far from Monterrey, police found the handless, footless and headless torsos of 49 men and women, many of which bore Santa Muerte tattoos.

In fact, Chesnut says that one of her first mentions in the mainstream media predates the modern era of Mexico's Drug War, to what is still one of the most infamous bloodlettings the borderlands have ever known. That was when police found a Santa Muerte altar at the Tamaulipas ranch of Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo, the psychotic, sadistic Cuban-American drug lord who, before his death in a shootout with Mexican police in 1989, ritually sacrificed at least 16 men, women and children, including University of Texas premed student Mark Kilroy, who was kidnapped in Matamoros while on spring break. Constanzo's dark faith fused a twisted version of Cuban Santeria with Mexican traditions, and he believed that the slaughter and mutilation of innocents would protect his business from police.

His on-off girlfriend and constant consort, the six-foot-one former Brownsville nursing student Sara Maria Aldrete, was known as "La Madrina," or "the Godmother," and so shared one of Santa Muerte's many nicknames. After her arrest, she told police that their religion was growing and could not be stamped out by authorities. She pointed out that a Santa Muerte shrine, one shorn of Constanzo's Santeria trappings and totally unrelated to theirs, had already sprung up in Monterrey.

Aldrete was right. Santa Muerte veneration continued bubbling under the surface of Mexican life, primarily in northern and eastern Mexico, until Santa Muerte made her dramatic public debut in the notorious Mexico City slum of Tepito in 2001, where the first public altar was built. Ever since, at the stroke of midnight on All Saints' Day (November 1), to the strains of marimba bands and mariachi orchestras, thousands of faithful turn out to venerate her and offer gold, apples, tequila, cigarettes and money. And water, lots of water: She is still "the Parched One" to some degree. "She's a skeleton," says Chesnut. "She's always thirsty."

Nodding to the drug trade, marijuana smoke is used in lieu of incense at this rite. At another public shrine in the capital, Jesús Malverde, a legendary Robin Hood-like figure and folk saint who long served as La Flaka's predecessor as protector of drug smugglers, is also honored.

"Malverde was at least straightforward and honest," says Arellano. If someone venerated him, you pretty much knew they were a narco. Now it's not so clear-cut. "Good people pray to Santa Muerte," Arellano says. (See "Know Your Narco Saints.")

Officer "J.G." Garza has served in the Houston Police Department for 35 years, the last 20 in the Narcotics Division. He says he has seen a lot of Santa Muerte over the last ten years.

"It's really changed back from the '80s when we had a lot of Colombian nationals with the dope coming directly from Colombia and South America," he says. "You did see other kinds of altars with them, but when the Mexican cartels started taking over, you did see a transition into Saint Death."