Grisly Meso-American Syncretinism Coming Soon To A Hamlet Near You!

NYPost |  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.”