You learn something new all the time. I am sure there are numerous tattoos and symbols that these drug cartels are rallying around, but this one is pretty unique. At least law enforcement has another way to identify these jackasses.
The other little piece of interest in this story, is about Senor B. He is a businessman that resorted to using ‘machine gun totting’ security in order to protect his business from drug cartels and corrupt police. The point is, he didn’t trust anyone, to include the police, and so he resorted to using heavily armed private security and turned his business into a small fortress. I am sure this same situation is repeating itself throughout the country, and it would be interesting to hear more about the evolution of the private security market there. –Matt
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Mexican drug gangs worship Saint Death
As bloody feuds grip the traffickers, many are turning to a grim icon. Tony Allen-Mills reports from Ciudad Juarez
January 10, 2010
Tony Allen-Mills in Ciudad Juarez
She was yet another desolate victim of the endless drug wars ravaging the northern Mexican borderlands, one of more than 2,600 people murdered in Ciudad Juarez last year. When police found her body in a residential area close to the Rio Grande river, there were two distinctive signs that she had been caught up in the bloodsoaked feuding between the rival Juarez and Sinaloa cartels.
First, her head had been crudely hacked off — a trademark cartel warning to rivals. Second, her torso bore a distinctive tattoo of a cackling skeleton dressed in suggestive female clothing.
Police recognised it at once as Santa Muerte — best translated as Saint Death, a macabre feminine icon who has replaced the Virgin Mary as an improbable source of unholy comfort to Mexico’s legions of gangsters and hitmen.
