A Death Cult on the Southern Border

On our recent trip to Sonora, Mexico – directly across the southern border – Muckraker discovered evidence of grisly murders with the clear hallmarks of cartel violence: execution-style murders, corpses dumped on roadsides, and in one instance, the body of a man whose face had been removed from his head. At one of these sites, we found ornaments connected to the worship of Santa Muerte, or Saint Death – a shadowy feminine figure in Latin American folk religion who is a key fixture in what some experts call narco-religion.

What is the cult of Santa Muerte?

The cult of Santa Muerte depicts her as a skeletal, grim reaper-like figure modeled after the iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As a spiritual personification of death, she goes by many titles – La Flaquita (the Skinny Lady), la Niña Blanca (the White Girl), and La Huesuda (the Bony Lady), just to name a few. 

The veneration of Santa Muerte has been connected to some of the most heinous and brutal cases of murder, torture, dismemberment, and ritual sacrifice committed on either side of the border. Her cult, which originates in a syncretic blend of Catholicism and indigenous traditions, was first attested in the 18th century, but first emerged as a public cult in 2001 and has since become one of the fastest growing religious movements in North America in the 21st century. The cult continues to spread in both Mexico and the United States, especially in northern Mexico, where shrines to Santa Muerte can be found in bustling cities, on remote roadsides, and in private dwellings.

Although the Santa Muerte cult has been roundly denounced as demonic by Catholic officials ranging from local priests to the Pope himself, adherents of the cult are usually at least nominally Catholic, and thus count Santa Muerte among a host of saints who can be petitioned for worldly and spiritual benefit. Santa Muerte differs from more conventional saints, however, in that she is believed to impart protection, success, and other blessings for endeavors that ordinary saints may not be responsive to. That is to say that, unlike conventional Catholic saints, she is impartial in matters of morality, and can be supplicated to assist in sinful criminal endeavors – to aid a murder or to bless a shipment or narcotics, for instance. While she can be invoked for more innocuous purposes like general protection and love spells, she is perhaps best known as a patron of criminal enterprises. Thus, while not all followers of Santa Muerte engage in extreme violence, she is especially popular as the patron saint of Mexican criminals, especially cartel members. 

Under President Felipe Calderon (2006-2012) the Mexican government initiated a crackdown on the Santa Muerte cult, declaring it the “religious enemy number one” of the Mexican state. This crackdown involved the destruction of dozens of Santa Muerte shrines across Mexico by law enforcement officials. According to expert R. Andrew Chesnut, United States law enforcement has also adopted an antagonistic stance toward the cult, considering Santa Muerte affiliations as “probable cause for even arresting somebody on suspicion of having narcotics.”

Recently, much has been written in both news and academia on the role of Santa Muerte as a benefactor of underprivileged or otherwise marginalized groups in the Mexican underclass like women, prostitutes, or LGBTQ people. This is not entirely off the mark. However, some of this coverage has almost lionized Santa Muerte as an icon of the oppressed and downtrodden – a sort of hero of Latin American intersectionality – while minimizing her malign influence in narco-cult atrocities.

Bloody Santa Muerte Rituals

Many followers of Santa Muerte believe that they can curry favor with her, typically through more mundane offerings like flowers, food, votive candles, money, tobacco, and alcohol. But among the more criminal subset of Santa Muerte cultists, these sacrifices can extend to narcotics, human blood, and other gory offerings. Mexican cartels have long had a sordid reputation for torture killings and mutilation, but the general public is largely uninformed about the dark correlation between ritualized violence and narco-cult beliefs.

In the academic paper “Extreme Barbarism, a Death Cult, and Holy Warriors in Mexico: Societal Warfare South of the Border?”, Robert J Bunker describes how the rapid proliferation of the Santa Muerte narco-cult represents a spiritual war within Mexican society, in which competition between this dark sect and traditional Catholicism mirrors the ongoing battle between cartels and the Mexican government:

[W]hen a cartel takes over an entire city or town, they have no choice but to take over political functions formerly administered by the local government – but social (narcocultura) and religious/spiritual (narcocultos) characteristics are now making themselves more pronounced. What we are likely witnessing is Mexican society starting to not only unravel but to go to war with itself. The bonds and relationships that hold that society together are fraying, unraveling, and, in some instances, the polarity is reversing itself with trust being replaced by mistrust and suspicion. Traditional Mexican values and competing criminal value systems are engaged in a brutal contest over the hearts, minds, and souls of its citizens in a street-by-street, block-by-block, and city-by-city war over the future social and political organization of Mexico.

Bunker goes on to catalog the savage practices common to the distinct narco-cult strain of Santa Muerte worship. He writes:

What is known is that the darker variant of Santa Muerte is by no means benign and that simple commodities are unacceptable as offerings. Dark altars laden with weapons, money, narcotics, and sometimes stained with blood have been identified. The stakes have been raised now that petitions to cause agonizing death to one‘s enemies and bless cartel operatives before battle are being made, in essence providing them spiritual armor against other criminal forces and Mexican authorities. Human body parts and bowls of blood left at Santa Muerte altars, both public and private, are becoming more common as are actual human sacrifices and the ritualized dismemberment of the dead. Examples of what appear to be death cult sacrifices, rituals, and activities include:

-The stacking of headless bodies and the staged placement of body parts. One grisly incident photo shows a skinned skull resting on severed arms with the victim‘s male genitalia held in the palm of one of their hands.

-Decapitated heads left at the tombs of deceased drug lords—implicated as Santa Muerte worshipers— as sacrificial offerings.

-Decapitated heads offered directly to Santa Muerte by her worshipers.

-Victims killed at Santa Muerte altars/shrines.

-The ritual burning of decapitated heads as offerings.

-The removal of the hearts of victims.

-The skinning of victims while alive.

-The likely desecration of shrines belonging to more benign Saints.

-The use of black candle magic to request that the deity kill one‘s enemies.

-The threatening of a kidnap victim at a Santa Muerte altar with divine wrath if they failed to cooperate with their captors.

-The alleged smoking of a victim‘s ashes mixed with cocaine in a ‘smoking death’ ritual.

In 2012, eight people were arrested in connection to the ritual killings of two ten year old boys and a woman whose blood was reportedly found on an altar to Santa Muerte in Sonora, Mexico. This case is hardly unique. In a 2021 article from the New York Post, a sicario for the Juarez Cartel who claimed over 60 murders is quoted as admitting to dedicating gang murders to Santa Muerte:

I actually sacrifice people for my Santa Muerte [...] 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.

Another article by Bunker published on the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin compiled a number of other instances of morbid ritual violence connected to the Santa Muerte cult:

-In the rough neighborhood of Tepito, Mexico City, in 2004, authorities arrested a local car thief who later died in prison. A powerful criminal figure, he killed virgins and babies once a year and offered them as sacrifices to Santa Muerte to gain her favor and magical protection.

-During 2008 in Nuevo Laredo, Gulf Cartel enforcers captured Sinaloa Cartel members, took them to public Santa Muerte shrines, and executed them. Analysis by a U.S. law enforcement officer suggests that the perpetrators killed them as offerings to Santa Muerte.

-In Ciudad Júarez in 2008, authorities found decapitated and stacked bodies at crime scenes in five separate incidents. Links were inferred to Santa Muerte worshipers.

-In December 2009 and January 2010 in Ciudad Júarez, perpetrators murdered individuals in apparent Santa Muerte ritual killings. Regarding one incident, authorities found at the crime scene the remnants of an apparent altar and the words “Santa Muerte” and cuídanos flakita (take care of us, skinny) spray painted. In the second crime, gang members burned a victim behind a house containing an altar and a small Santa Muerte statue. Interviewed neighbors said that the killers—part of the Hillside 13 Gang—asked for “something big”; as a result, the perpetrators performed multiple human sacrifices.

-In Culiacan in January 2010, a suspect placed a decapitated head by the tomb of deceased cartel leader Arturo Beltran Levya. Earlier, after Beltran Levya was killed in his apartment, authorities found items related to the cult of Santa Muerte, suggesting that one of his former fellow gang members may have presented the head as an offering.

-In April 2010 in Camargo and Miguel Aleman, perpetrators tortured and decapitated individuals, carved the letter “Z” into their chests, and placed the victims’ heads on the roof of a desecrated, graffiti-covered roadside chapel. Based on the graffiti messages, the victims belonged to the Gulf Cartel. The perpetrators comprised members of the Los Zetas Cartel, which has embraced Santa Muerte as its patron saint. Many of the group’s members have tattoos of her image on their upper arm or chest.

-In Cancun in June 2010, investigators found the bodies of six tortured victims, three with their hearts cut out and with the letter “Z” carved into their abdomens, in a cave outside of the resort city. Presumably the killers belonged to the Los Zetas Cartel, and the victims belonged to a competing group.

-In July 2011 in Ciudad Júarez, Mexican police discovered a skeleton dressed as a bride at a Santa Muerte altar in a house used to hold kidnap victims. The perpetrators left two skulls and numerous cigarette packs as offerings. The circumstances behind the origins of the skeleton and skulls—if they were prior cult victims—remain unknown.

Santa Muerte in the US

Perhaps even more disturbing is that the most vicious strains of the Santa Muerte have made inroads in the United States. Just to name a few, brutal murders in Chandler, Chicago, and Houston have been connected to Santa Muerte. The Houston murder case was particularly gruesome. In 2017, two MS-13 gang members – Miguel Alvarez-Flores and Diego Hernandez-Rivera – kidnapped, tortured, raped, and murdered a 15 year old girl named Genesis Cornejo-Alvarado after she made a negative comment about the Santa Muerte shrine in their house. Another girl, age 14, was also kidnapped, but survived the ordeal and led police to the perpetrators.

As of 2019, it is estimated that fifteen percent of an estimated 12 million Santa Muerte devotees globally are found in the United States – totalling just under two million in the United States who are involved in these cult practices in some capacity. According to R. Andrew Chesnut:

I think there’s lots of potential for growth. And again, let me just reflect on the amazing rapidity of her growth. It’s been only a decade, if that, in the United States and now we can easily find her here in Richmond, Virginia, where the Latino population is only about 6 or 7 percent. I’ve got a colleague at a college in a small town in Tennessee, where the population is 30,000 and their Latino population doesn’t exceed 1 percent, and just the other day she bought a Santa Muerte votive candle at one of the shops in her town. So she’s pretty much everywhere today in the United States, again, in just ten years. And one of the newest trends is that, more and more, I’m finding not only non-Mexican devotees, but non-Latin American devotees, i.e. devotees who are both Euro and African American. So I think she’s showing that she has this ability to transcend her Mexican and Latin American origin.

Conclusion

For decades, cartel violence has posed not only a deadly risk to individual Americans through the importation of dangerous drugs and savage criminal gangs through our southern border, but a broader threat to our national security. After decades of waging futile wars against religious terrorist organizations in the Middle East, our government has allowed narco-terrorist militaries with ties to a bloody death cult to operate not only along our own southern border, but in the homeland.

Muckraker’s recent forays into Sonora, Mexico shed crucial light on threats that should have been stamped out long ago. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a full report on our investigations into the dire situation south of the border.