The worship of Santa Muerte, first noted among Mexico's poor in the middle of the last century, remained a largely underground practice until the last decade; since then, it has become a full-fledged mainstream cult with 2 million to 5 million followers, practiced in an increasingly public fashion both in Mexico and the United States. Its rise has provoked alarmist rhetoric. A U.S. military report brands Santa Muerte "the death cult of the drug lords," and indeed her shrines are frequently uncovered during police raids on narcos on both sides of the border. In March 2009, the Mexican Army bulldozed some three dozen shrines near the U.S. border as part of a psychological war on "narcoculture."
But the drug war is only tangentially connected to Santa Muerte: "Her primary base is poor people -- those excluded from the formal economy or who have lost faith in the judicial system," says Lois Ann Lorentzen, director of the University of San Francisco's Center for Latino Studies in the Americas. Santa Muerte's popularity, rooted in dangerous urban areas like Tepito and the rural regions that increasingly resemble them, reflects economic and political uncertainty in a country where almost 50 million people live below the poverty line.
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whoa, that report is very Sahib in tone. and the part where it acts as if it "may have been true" that aztecs etc had very ingrained death-worshiping practices is crap. it's proven,there's no question there. They did all kinds of nasty things as part of theri spiritual practices, flaying people alive, cutting hearts out of the living and so on.
There are altars remaining with channels for the blood to flow from. Not a happy-go-lucky bunch
While they say other nations return to "fundamentalism" in times of alienation and crisis, this is supposedly so different. But maybe this IS the indigenous people's fundamentalism, eh? Catholicism is not that natural state of this nation, this reperot acts like it is. it was forced upon them, and very harshly so.
That ancient elements have returned in spite of the pope's wish to blot them out, and that those elements are now twisted in form, this is a surprise?
And an outside culture saying a religion is not a real religion tho' the practitioners perceive it to be, is crap beyond belief.
I guess the officail word is that Catholicism is real religion - others are all garbage, that has been their premise for 2000 years.
and let's all Lol at the amount of blood that has been spilled by Catholics, but that's just not polite to bring up.
This is a very ethnocentric report, and none of the US military's business.
all that aside, I've been to Teotihuacan myself and it's definitely the creepiest place on earth. Like no words do justice.
intensely death-worshiping culture has been on that part of the planet a long time. way before any "drug lords".
Some people need to watch a little more Star Trek and learn about the damn Prime Directive fer god's sake
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