Mexico has been wracked by a wave of gruesome drug-related violence since Felipe Calderón became president in 2006. One product of the narco-violence is a spate of protests that reveal some hidden elements of Mexico's drug war: The first is a new narco-propaganda effort; and second, a religious cult adopted by the narcos.

In February, protestors along Mexico's border with the U.S. blocked border crossings in a show of force against Calderón's deployment of 40,000 Army troops to fight the drug cartels. The governor of one border state dismissed the protests, claiming the cartels had orchestrated the demonstrations.

The suggestion is not far-fetched: Drug lords in Colombia and Mexico have shrewdly created paternalistic relations with the public to drum up a social base of support. (Pablo Escobar famously built an entire public housing complex in a barrio of Medellín, while other Colombian capos bank-rolled soccer fields and stadiums.) Mexico's corporatist parties also have a long established tradition of paying off individuals to turn out for such events. Still, the protestors stated grievances should not be dismissed: Namely, that the militarization of the narco wars has led to rights abuses by police and soldiers.

Now that the cartels have become so powerful and institutionalized, it's not surprising that they've resorted to such tactics, which help score points in the parallel PR-media battle. With the state on the offensive, these small PR-media skirmishes can have a big impact in helping undermine the military's legitimacy.

Maybe we are witnessing a new front in the narco wars that could be called "narco-propaganda" or "narco-ganda." Even illegal crime organizations need some public support, and as the cartels increasingly make the headlines, the narco-ganda will follow.

Take a more recent protest that, for me at least, seems far more interesting and genuine, but that also stands to score the narcos some big populist PR points (or at take some costly points from the government).

Yesterday, April 5, about 200 people in Mexico City marched to denounce the Army-led destruction of shrines to "Santa Muerte," or "Holy Death" – also known as la niña blanca (the white girl) – a saint-like deity that some Mexicans pray to in exchange for a bit of divine intervention. Although Santa Muerte has many followers in Mexico – some estimate two million – the saint was made internationally famous by narcotraffickers, who are supposedly among the cult's most committed devotees, praying for protection from authorities and enemies as well as safe passage for their shipments.

Called by some a "narco-saint," the San Diego Union-Tribune clarifies, "Many followers of La Santa Muerte insist their devotion has nothing to do with drug trafficking. And those who would link her image to crime are mistaken, said José Manuel Valenzuela Arce, a researcher at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a Tijuana-based think tank."

“Destroying these chapels is not going to do anything to diminish crime,” Valenzuela told the Union-Tribune. “Someone who's going to commit a crime could just as easily go to a Catholic church as a Santa Muerte shrine, or go nowhere at all.”

This didn't stop the Army from attacking the shrines. According to the AP, "Army troops accompanied workers who used back hoes to topple and crush more 30 shrines on a roadway in the city of Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas." In response, the AP says hundreds of marchers set out "from a gritty Mexico City neighborhood to the Metropolitan Cathedral downtown."

The gritty neighborhood is almost certainly Tepito – a place I remember well from the couple of childhood years I spent in the D.F., as the city is known through out Latin America (for "Distrito Federal"). My brother and I would go to Tepito to buy our over-sized, pirated Metallica and Guns 'n' Roses T-shirts.

Santa Muerte and Tepito make a colorful cameo in Alma Guillermoprieto's New Yorker ;> piece on the cultural "cottage industry" of Mexico's narco-wars:

On the first day of every month, at the Tepito metro stop in downtown Mexico City, a new breed of pilgrim can be observed inching his way on his knees out of the stop and down a filthy market street, and cradling in his arms, babylike, a plastic figure of Death—or Holy Death, La Santa Muerte, as the pilgrims refer to the robed skeleton, who carries, variously, a scythe, a sceptre, a set of scales, or a globe in her (sometimes his) hands. There were dozens of these effigies, borne by crawling men in their teens or early twenties.

…

Their goal was some four blocks distant, in the heart of Tepito, a legendary neighborhood that in the centuries since the Spanish Conquest has remained stubbornly insubordinate. Venders were everywhere along the pilgrims’ path, hawking T-shirts and baseball caps and medals decorated with the Santa Muerte.

Guillermoprieto tracks down the source behind this Mecca-like node of the cult:

The shrine of the Holy Death is just blocks away from a compound of low-income housing where, in 2007, Mexico City police conducted a full-scale assault in search of drugs, weapons, and other illegal goods. Enriqueta Romero Romero, known as Queta, or Quetita, set up the shrine on this spot seven years ago after one of her sons, who was himself a devotee of La Santa, made her a gift of the skeleton.

…

The Santa Muerte had been hanging around the fringes of popular belief in Tepito and other raffish neighborhoods for decades—Queta says that she learned to pray to her from her aunt—but thanks to Queta her cult now extends throughout Mexico City and far beyond.

Queta tells Guillermoprieto that some 2,000 shrines for la Santa Muerte exist throughout Mexico. A similar cult, but one more closely associated with narcos, exists around the figure of Jesús Malverde, a legendary folk hero from Sinaloa – home to one of the most powerful cartels. Apparently, shrines in honor of Malverde were also destroyed in the recent campaign.

The Santa Muerte cult incorporates Catholic beliefs and syncretic rituals, which has enfuriated local Catholic officials, who have come out strongly against devotion to Santa Muerte. Archbishop David Romo (not recognized as such by the Catholic Church), who has become a de facto leader of the cult, says the Church simply feels threatened by Santa Muerte's mass following.

Romo demanded a meeting with President Calderón to complain about the destruction of the shrines as an act of religious persecution. Calderón comes from the ultra-conservative National Action Party (PAN), which has a very influential orthodox Catholic faction. I don't think Romo will be getting an invitation anytime soon.

It is in these seemingly tangential stories about Mexico's drug war that allow us to read between the lines and get a sense of how the narcos are changing the country. As I know from living in Colombia, the reach of the narco phenomenon is capillary-like in its ability to infiltrate nearly every part of society. Sometimes these changes are orchestrated (narco-ganda), while in other cases the narcos powerfully co-opt an already existing "institutions" (Santa Muerte, politicians, businesses, contraband routes etc.). When the government decides to crackdown on the latter, the narcos deploy the former.

One of these days, I'd like to write about the transnational narco-culture in Latin America and how there are all kinds of cultural remittances flowing back and forth between Colombia and Mexico.

See a short preview of a documentary on La Santa Muerte (narrated by Gael García Bernal):