http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1305
By Lynn Brezosky
Express-News
When Webb County sheriff’s deputies started photographing the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3148, sometimes blood-soaked shrines to shrouded skeletal figurines found at the homes and stash houses of big-time drug dealers, they did so with the sense they were glimpsing into the psyche of a subculture.
That was a few years ago. Now, the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1328 displays of homage to the Santa Muerte, or holy death, seem more kitschy than creepy. The defiant faith that sinister-looking statues could summon netherworld power, which emerged as something associated with cartel kingpins tucked inside gated estates, has gone mainstream for the Mexican border’s criminal element.
Teens caught with “dime bags” of pot might have Santa Muerte amulets hanging from their rearview mirrors. Small-time drug dealers may have an altar on a closet shelf, with an assortment of statues, beads, roses and spell books arrayed below stacks of folded towels.
In scale with one’s fortunes, the statues may be hand-carved of ivory or onyx, or manufactured in China.“What we’re seeing is a trend,” said Capt. Ted Garcia, who keeps a poster of Santa Muerte shrines superimposed with a sheriff’s badge on a wall near his desk. And by “trend” he means “fad.”
“It’s like the Malverde a few years ago,” he said, referring to http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3348 Malverde, a Mexican folk hero who has been likened to Robin Hood. “Or the Scarface posters everyone used to have. Everyone wanted to be Scarface. Or those little rabbit foots in the 1970s.”
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/mexico/stories/MYSA060108.1B.Santamuerte.3a52452.html