Santa Muerte: Patron Saint of the Drug War

Garza says now that he sees some representation of Santa Muerte "just about every time" he arrests a suspect. Some sport her tattoos, others wear her on gold necklaces, while more discreet devotees might tuck a Santa Muerte prayer card in their wallet or dashboard. He says the sight of her raises his antenna on traffic stops.

"You start seeing little red flags: a Santa Muerte emblem on the back of his car," he says. "And then he has a bunch of these prayer cards or maybe a Santa Muerte bobblehead or whatever. And then you go back and check this guy and he has a prior for narcotics and a bad criminal history. And then you talk to him and he's extremely nervous and it's a simple traffic stop. You start using that to get you where you need to go, be it a consent or calling the dog out there."

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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More About

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

Garza finds more elaborate displays at stash houses, where the skeletal figurines are surrounded by Santa Muerte votive candles, often with a plate of sacrificial offerings nearby. "Food, water, money, cigarettes...I don't know how she got such a big nicotine problem, but she has one. She's always got a cigarette somewhere nearby," Garza chuckles. "But yeah, we see big temples. Some of them are six feet high, or it could be just a small tabletop or simply a picture on the wall."

Garza says the traffickers he's arrested never talk about these altars to him. "They just kinda pretend they aren't there," he says. "But it's my opinion that these people all believe in some kind of some superior being — God or something else. They're not atheist by any means. I think they know that God would not approve of what they are doing, so they have to find somebody that they'll listen to."
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Santa Muerte devotee Maria's shop is in a strip mall, directly across Gessner from Strake Jesuit, my high school alma mater. While most typical Mexican spiritualist shops sport images of traditional saints, her shop is named Santísima Muerte ("Most Holy Death"), and its robed namesake is spray-painted on the window.

Inside, on a glass counter near votive candles, figurines of saints, and bins of medicinal and magical herbs, Maria has placed her public Santa Muerte shrine, where devotees have laid ofertas of apples, candles of many colors, money, cigarettes and rum at the White Lady's bony feet. Maria tells us that we can photograph this altar to our heart's content, and tells us that people ask it to grant them jobs or heal them.

"I have another in the back," she says in broken English. "I'll show you. But no pictures. It's my religion."

She takes Houston Press Art Director Monica Fuentes and me back to her office, and there's another shrine in the corner, this one a little bigger than the first, a little more impressive, but hardly awe-inspiring. Somewhere an unseen dog is barking in the shop; Maria's daughter is helping us translate, and a toddler lies on a swivel chair watching a telenovela.

Maria beckons us out of the office and toward a door marked "Absolutely No Admittance" in English. She opens the door and we step over and around a black-and-red throw rug marked with a pentagram and into an unholy of unholies, an ornate chapel of death, a folk-baroque masterpiece of the darker side of Mexican folk religiosity.

Under purple fluorescent tubes, on a cement floor, there's a small table and two metal chairs placed in front of a sort of stage. Front and center is a five-foot representation of grinning, veiled and robed Santa Muerte, surrounded by candles of red, green, white and black.

Her purple robe is festooned with offerings of two-dollar bills — never ones, never fives, tens or twenties. An owl is nearby. "The owl represents protection over the night, to see all the enemies that come at night to hurt you, human as well as spiritual," Maria would later tell intern Norma Vasquez.

Santa Muerte's scythe of vengeance and protection looks sharp. Maria calls it "a protection to free us from all enemies. A spade where you can cut out all bad and everything that can damage your character. That's why a lot of us use the sickle to protect ourselves."

Around Santa Muerte's feet are the same sorts of offerings we saw out front, only more of them — a pack of filterless Delicados cigarettes, a handle-bottle of Cuervo gold, whole baskets of fruit, bouquets of lilies and roses.

Santa Muerte is not alone on this altar. A gorgeous talavera statue of La Catrina, the laughing lady skeleton with the parasol and sun hat long known to celebrants of Day of the Dead, is up there, too, in a supporting role. (La Catrina and Santa Muerte are occasionally confused. La Catrina is a secular figure of fun who was created by a graphic artist, and is not petitioned for miracles.)

Winged Saint Michael the Archangel guards them both from dark forces with his sword. "San Miguel Archangel is the master of demons," Maria says. "He can always defeat them."