Jonathan Legaria's mother, the new Panther of the order claims in various reports that her son had nothing what so ever to do with drug's or drug dealers. You have to wonder how he financed the Cadillac SUV the he was driving when he was killed? My 4 host's/guide's mentioned below all claimed Jonathan had been killed by the Federales(Mexican Federal Police) in retaliation for providing spiritual sanctuary for drug lords. There are both sides. You decide..... Devotion to a religion. Go figure........
The Economist
Jan. 7, 2010
DEATH IN THE HOLY ORDERS
Syncretism in the era of the drug baron
The statue looks at first like a narrow, windowless office building towering over the skyline of Tultitlán, a working-class suburb of Mexico City. In fact it is of Santa Muerte (“Holy Death”), the image of a skeleton, clad in hood and tunic and bearing a scythe and globe, that some 2m Mexicans are said to worship. Surrounding it are three small altars, one placed there after the man who paid for the statue, Jonathan Legaria, murdered in 2008 aged just 26.
Some anthropologists link the cult to Aztec underworld gods. David Romo, the priest at the One and Only National Sanctuary of Santa Muerte—thus called because there are two rivals—insists the image originated in Italy during bubonic plague. Either way over the past decade the cult has grown rapidly.
Mexico has a rich syncretic tradition. Its patron, the Virgin of Guadalupe, is venerated by many Mexican Indians as an Aztec goddess. Santa Muerte is even more accommodating: she accepts offerings of beer and tequila, and is thought by believers to protect criminals and the law-abiding alike and to be amenable to all petitions. “Death to my enemies” is inscribed on the candleholders in Mr Romo’s church. She is very popular in jails. She is sometimes portrayed smoking a joint.Mexico’s Catholic bishops have denounced Santa Muerte as a satanic cult that promotes violence. The government withdrew official recognition from Mr Romo’s church after he incorporated her into its rituals. Last March the army destroyed some 30 Santa Muerte altars in the northern state of Nuevo León, saying they were linked to drug traffickers. In response, devotees staged rallies in Mexico City demanding religious freedom, and insisting that they come from all walks of life. Indeed, some police and soldiers fighting the narcos ask Santa Muerte to bless their weapons.
Santa Muerte has become a good business. A biweekly magazine devoted to the cult is sold at most news-stands. Mr Romo’s church sells Santa Muerte books and paraphernalia, and collects tithes. “Tuesday is my birthday,” he declared at the close of a recent mass, “and I need special new glasses that cost $500. Here’s my basket.”
As I understood it from the 4 bouncer's, sorry my guide/host's mentioned below these two "temples" standing by the statue served two purposes. The one above was where folks prayed for a miracle. Beside it was a temple, picture below, where you prayed, if a miracle was not forthcoming, and your ass was in the fire. Oddly, the bail out/rescue temple seemed to be doing a brisker business.
TULTITLAN, MEXICO — The police officer knelt reverently in the flowered shrine to Holy Death, his right hand blessing himself, lips moving with silent pleas.
"She has taken me and protected me," Marco Antonio Olvera, 28, said of the guardian spirit, whose tiny skeletal likeness hangs from his neck as an amulet, along with a .38-caliber bullet he offers in homage. "Many policemen depend upon her."
Dating to the native religions before the Spanish Conquest, the cult venerating death has made a strong comeback in a Mexico awash with drug-related violence.
Mexicans from all walks of life — but especially policemen, soldiers and criminals caught up in the country's drug wars — have flocked to the folk saint, beseeching delay of their life's one certainty or favors of love or money while they still draw breath.
Shrines to Holy Death — La Santa Muerte — adorn Mexico City's rough Tepito neighborhood, notorious for smugglers, drug dealers and thieves. Vendors hawk varied-colored statues of the spirit — looking like the Grim Reaper in drag — in kiosks around the city, even in the streets outside the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Fiberglass skeleton
But perhaps the biggest shrine stands here, inside a 1-acre compound tucked behind iron gates along a busy boulevard in this gritty suburb on the north side of the Mexican capital. A tire repair shop sits next door to the shrine, an 18th-century Roman Catholic church and a recently installed Domino's Pizza outlet stand a few blocks away.
Dominated by a 65-foot-tall fiberglass statue of a shrouded skeleton, the compound serves as a beacon to hundreds of devotees from central Mexico.
"Oh, Holy Death, body and blood of your children," intoned a dyed-blond priestess as she led Olvera and about 100 other devotees in prayers at the compound one Sunday morning. "Join my voice to your voice, join my being to your being."
The faithful — black-clad and nose-ringed youths, Sunday-best dressed families — mumbled the incantations in response, some kneeling in the grass, others' clutching their own statues of Holy Death.
'Commander Panther'
"This is the moment when we ask the Most Holy Death for her favor," the priestess, who calls herself Professor Constantine, continued, in a service that mixed such prayers with the Lord's Prayer and Hail Marys from the Roman Catholic creed. "We beg her to be with us today."
The compound was the life's work of Constantine's common-law husband, Jonathon Legaria, 26, the self-styled high priest of Holy Death International, a flourishing enterprise that included radio programs, esoteric shops and spiritual services.
Legaria, who dubbed himself "Commander Panther" and "Godfather Endoque" — a name he reportedly adopted while studying voodoo in Haiti — had erected the huge statue and smaller shrines on the lot in January. His congregation was growing, likely enticed by written promises on the lot's outside wall promising wealth, health and other good fortune.
"He was my spiritual guide, a gentle soul," said Abraham Gil, 42, a former soldier who began attending the services last fall at Legaria's invitation. "I wouldn't call it a religion. It's a faith. My faith is with her. Whatever you call it, death is always with us."
Gunned down
Legaria got what he prayed to shortly after midnight on July 31.
Assassins with automatic rifles intercepted him as he drove with two female friends in his Cadillac SUV on the boulevard that cuts past his shrine. He was hit by more than 45 bullets, dying instantly.
Local newspapers reported that Legaria's killing was due to the gangland war raging in the Mexican capital's suburbs. The battle pitted the Zetas, gunmen linked to the drug smuggling cartel based in the cities bordering South Texas, against a growing gang from Michoacan state called La Familia.
At least 15 men — including several police officers — have been killed in and around Tultitlan this summer in the struggle for control of street drug sales and other vice.
"We've had some trouble, but nothing like what they are talking about," said Juan Marcial Paredes, a state investigator who looked into Legaria's killing. "It's nothing like along the border or those kinds of places."
Investigation of the murder, usually a state crime, has been taken over by the federal Attorney General's Office.
That's often a signal that a crime has ties to drug traffickers or other organized criminals
Legaria's mother, Enriqueta Vargas, said she has received calls from local mobsters since offering a reward for information about her son's death, assuring her that they had nothing to do with his murder.
"Unfortunately, in Mexico it's always going to be the same story," Vargas, 49, said after attending a Sunday service. "When they can't solve anything, they always put the blame on organized crime. They've investigated nothing.
"My son didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't take drugs," she said. "He couldn't have had dealings with drug traffickers. If they sought him out, it was for spiritual help."
Centuries of belief
Still, gangland connections to the supernatural are far from unusual in Mexico. Belief in witchcraft and indigenous deities has survived nearly 500 years after the conquering Spanish brought Roman Catholicism here.
It remains strong among the working-class and rural poor, from whose ranks spring many of the gangsters.
In a grisly signal of Holy Death's gangland following, police say 11 men who were decapitated and stacked like cordwood in late August outside the Yucatan city of Merida may have been sacrifices to the faith.
The still-missing heads may have been burned in sacrifice, police speculated.
Several men with alleged ties to the Gulf Cartel, including two Cuban nationals, have been arrested for the crime.
Olvera, the state police officer who works as a security guard contracted to businesses, said he became a follower of Holy Death to avoid that fate.
Too many police are dying, Olvera said. Perhaps one-third of the officers he works with are devotees as well.
"It's because of the constant danger we face in the streets," Olvera said, as he stood next to a pile of artificial skulls inside the Holy Death compound. "Our work is very risky.
" You are always asking Holy Death for protection for yourself and those you love
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