Last year a video surfaced on the Internet showing a member of the upstart Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) consuming the heart of a man whose corpse was laid out in front of him. Interviews with CJNG members have since confirmed that cannibalism is indeed a rite of passage within the organization.
This is only one example of that spectral presence latent in Central American narco-trafficking cartels and criminal gangs whose behavior and symbolism palpitates with the counter-religious, cultic resonance of pre-Christian devotion.
As Latin American gangs continue to grow in Spain, with MS-13 members having committed crimes in Spain and Italy, even trying to set up local branches, making headway on a continent where they had not previously been present, it is worth trying to understand what the most violent and lucrative of these groups represent.
The contemporary phenomenon of mass migration has brought with it an influx of violent Wahabist militancy into the post-Christian West, especially Europe, with a somehow corresponding militancy associated with drug cartels in the North American theater.
The underlying psychologies of these two currents are watered by a common font of nihilism. Indeed, there is some evidence that ISIS based its propaganda videos on Mexican cartel audiovisual productions. But where Islamic terrorism finds its historic touchstone in specific strands of medieval and early modern literalism and puritanism, the cartels are ideologically anchored in a system of thought whose peak corresponds to an earlier phase of history.
Local cultural dynamics, the pressures of an international system to which exploitation and inequality are consubstantial, and postmodern cultural decay combine to generate throwbacks, like a recapitulation of the archaic past to mock the “end of history.”
The coming of Christianity to Mesoamerica was interpreted by some as, in some wise, a fulfillment of a Toltec legend foretelling the return of the ancient, venerable king, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, who banned human sacrifice, earning him the scorn of the shaman priests of blood-thirsty spirits, until Quetzalcoatl was forced to flee, merging with the morning star in the sky.
Many centuries later, shortly after the fall of the Aztec capital to an army led by Hernan Cortés, a certain Martín Ocelotl would try to revive blood sacrifice and drive the newcomers’ faith back to where it had come from.
The Spaniards tried him and sent him across that ocean, in order that he might serve his sentence, or be executed, away from those receptive to his religious mission, who might take hold of his corpse and venerate it.
Narco-Aztec Cannibal Cartels
Ocelotl was martyred for his desire to regain the old blood offerings rather than to banish them. The return of this parody of Quetzalcoatl may be identified with the enshrining of Aztec symbolism by an independent Mexican state, opting to put the omen of an eagle clutching a snake in its beak, said to have marked the spot on which the Aztec capital was founded, on its flag. Aztec revivalism was partly owed to North American influence, beginning with the U.S. Minister to Mexico in the late 1820s, Joel Roberts Poinsett, and his apologia for Emperor Moctezuma. The U.S. has long promoted the Spanish Black Legend, potentially to prevent the Spanish imperial legacy from serving as an agglutinating element in Latin America.
Beyond symbolism, however, it is in the present tyrannizing of Mexico by criminal groups amid a rising tide of occult practice that we may more fully discern the restoration of those practices Ocelotl championed, with drug cartels engaging in ritualized murders and acts of cannibalism offered up to preternatural entities (often under names drawn from Santeria). We may also consider the place of psycho-active substances in Aztec religion.
In the neighboring Central American country of El Salvador, citizens have long been brutalized by the MS-13 gang, whose early years were marked by explicit occultism in an environment characterized by hyperviolence and heavy drug use, as depicted in reports gathered by Thomas Ward’s account of criminal gangs.
“The devil himself visited me once, and told me he would fulfill my wishes if I sacrificed and prayed to him. I know he is extremely powerful, because I’ve felt it,” reminisces one former MS-13 member. Several of the group’s members—active criminals since the 1970s—planned to murder a pregnant woman to garner supernatural favor, with one of them converting to Christianity after what he describes as a vision of a demon.
“The beast wanted a soul,” another MS-13 recruit recalls hearing an older member say to explain why he had murdered a fifteen-year-old girl in Texas, apparently for “disrespecting” a shrine to the devil. After witnessing a murder in 2014, another young gang-banger was told, “Let’s pray, homeboy. I already fed the beast, now we have to pray to the beast that we will not be caught,” adding “the beast basically is the devil … When you [are involved in MS-13], you feel that the devil is helping you, and sometimes the devil asked [sic] you to do things for him.”
But if such beliefs were foundational, they were also rare, or would become so as the gang grew, attracting people interested in lucrative criminal activity. As Ward specifies, there was a “low representation of devil worshippers among their membership … a handful of such dedicated supplicants.”
The expansion of MS-13 and its operating more as a business than overt cult, corresponds to its early transition from a 1970s ‘stoner’ and ‘metal-head’ aesthetic to the more typical ‘cholo’ look popular among certain groups of Central American migrants in California. Apparently, this happened when its imprisoned members aligned themselves with the larger and more powerful “Mexican Mafia” gang in the penitentiary system. It was at this time that the number thirteen was added to their moniker, referring to the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, the “M” of Mexican Mafia. Never dispensing with its occultic allegiance, however, the gang would also imbue this number with superstitious overtones.
In the 1990s, as the group contributed to L.A.’s soaring crime rate, the government began deporting members to their country of origin, wherein began MS-13’s rise to power in the impoverished Central American country of El Salvador.
Effectively being a vassal of the Mexican Mafia, however, and given geographic and cultural proximity, they also began operating in Mexico, including the southern state of Chiapas. It seems this may be happening more as a consequence of El Salvador’s effective crackdown on the gang. Reports the Associated Press (AP):
Organized crime groups including the rival Mara Salvatrucha [MS-13] and Barrio 18 gangs have long maintained a presence along the border between Mexico and Guatemala, but Mexican authorities say their numbers have increased over the past year [2022] as El Salvador cracks down on gang members and their criminal enterprises.
Specifically,
In October [2022], the Attorney General’s Office in Chiapas stated it had opened 122 investigations against MS13 and Barrio 18 members in Chiapas. In total, 148 alleged gang members were arrested in Chiapas from January to September 2022, including 50 from El Salvador, although the charges were not specified.
These “reports of increasing extortion in southern Mexico,” suggest that the Mexican government’s incapacity to match El Salvador’s urgency in the fight against organized crime has turned it into a haven for fleeing MS-13 members.
According to the Mexican state prosecutor for migrant affairs, José Mateo Martínez, “People are coming to hide from that, but there are also gang leaders who come to create a criminal group here.” Apparently, the specific kind of crime in which Chiapas has seen an upswing (including extortion of the transport sector) bears the marks of MS-13:
The crackdown in El Salvador has stripped the MS13 and Barrio 18 of much of their income and power, with much of their membership behind bars. To escape, some may have followed the flow of migrants north to seek other means of income outside El Salvador … Extortion of the public transport sector has been a significant and consistent earner for the MS13 and Barrio 18 in Central America. Chiapas borders Guatemala and lies a few hundred kilometers from El Salvador.
Mayan Militias
Chiapas has long been an area of transit between the rest of Mexico and the U.S. to the north, and other Central American countries to the south. Recently, however, apart from MS-13 and Barrio 18, cartel competition over transport routes has intensified. We may note the presence of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel mentioned previously, for example. Indeed, whereas both Zapatistas and the state might have made their peace with a drug flow through Chiapas they had no power to stop, whatever balance existed has been disrupted by the rise of Jalisco (and the relative decline of one of the main established cartels, Los Zetas).
The rise of the presence of drug cartels (and not only of MS-13 and Barrio 18) is particularly striking because it is putting an end to what has been a virtuous exception in Mexico. Indeed, Chiapas had, until recently, kept the menace at bay, with crime rates below the country’s national average.
This, in a region which is precisely partly under the control of (mostly indigenous) non-state militias, the Zapatistas. To explain why this is happening, we should not focus exclusively on the fleeing of criminals from El Salvador. Carlos Ogaz of the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center claims the unfortunate rise of organized crime in Chiapas is the result of the Mexican state’s strategy in fighting against the Zapatistas.
Allegedly, this strategy has involved using “old inter-ethnic, religious or territorial conflicts” to pit some groups against others, in which context “indigenous and peasant groups were armed and instigated to attack the Zapatistas.” It is this sowing of social strife and division, then, that would, over time, have “broken down the fabric of the community,” specifically weakening the indigenous militias opposed to the cartels, thereby allowing organized crime to fill the vacuum. Ogaz maintains, therefore, that “there is a synergy between counterinsurgency [anti-Zapatista Mexican state actions] and organized crime [the cartels].”
Some analysts have further suggested that the fight over Chiapas and the government’s interest in rolling back the Zapatistas is motivated by the fact that the region is resource-rich, with local indigenous activists (supported by the Zapatistas) having blocked government projects aiming to expand the local presence of agricultural industry companies.
Whatever the case, drug cartels are gaining ground in communities where indigenous militias once went so far as to ban drugs and alcohol. It is true that, strategically, the Zapatistas have not been terribly effective in recent years, and their ideological trajectory includes dissonant elements and is often fuzzy. But it seems undeniable that they have done good in the region whose communities have been under their administration.
It may be interesting to note the degree to which these Mayan revolutionaries of Chiapas participate in the same symbolic language as the rest of Mexico, but where the state and several of the cartels focus on Aztec imperial symbols, the Zapatistas reject this: “We do not want to return to that past … much less by the hand of those who … feed their outdated nationalism with the supposed splendour of an empire, that of the Aztecs, whose expansion came at the cost of the blood of their fellows.”
Indeed, the namesake of these Zapatista guerrillas of Kukulcán, the historic Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, has been identified with Quetzalcoatl (Mayan Kukulcán) by certain of the literary and poetic portraits of him. Zapata was not himself a native Mexican, but mestizo, albeit he seems to have spoken the native language of Nahuatl, and his movement’s telos—its direction—appears to make the indigenous element the protagonist of Mexico’s national character.
Bottom-Up Militia, Top-Down Law Enforcement
The hypothesis that weakened community coherence (specifically, in this case, the erosion of Zapatista identity) contributed to the forward march of the cartels would support the idea that the gang phenomenon relies on weakened community bonds because it is itself a counterfeit community. It transcends criminal business and should be understood as an ethnogenesis, as the emergence of new tribes, tumorous mutant cultures whose purpose, as I’ve written elsewhere, “is to swallow nations and compete with countries.” Gangs configure themselves politically, and set themselves up as a competing identity, offering a sense of belonging. Genuine, wholesome community is therefore required to break them down.
In particular, participative community life provides opportunities for people, especially the young, to take on responsibilities—as well as providing rites of passage. These psychological needs are exploited by criminal and antisocial groups to attract members. A modern lack of awareness of this need may have contributed to the rise of nihilistic subcultures, criminal or not.
For their part, the cartels understand the value of propaganda and constitute a culturally attractive force. We may, for example, highlight the phenomenon of pro-cartel ballads and rap music, as well as clothing and social media accounts.
There is value, then, in understanding our two (in some ways opposite) success stories in the fight against gangs and cartels in tandem: the bottom-up militias of Chiapas and the top-down policies of El Salvador.
The patriotic, rational policies we see enacted in El Salvador are proving extremely effective. When the ‘state of emergency’ is ended, however, Salvadorian society will have to be strong enough to resist attempts by these gangs to return (especially given that their presence in neighboring countries is not abating, and might even be increasing).
The state of emergency is needed to eliminate the presence of MS-13 and others, but reliance on exceptional measures by the state can, in the long term, cause organic social reactions to atrophy. As it stands, the state’s actions are allowing such social reactions to develop in the first place, given El Salvador’s previous state of thorough occupation by the criminals.
However, going forward, social institutions, down to the neighbourhood level, are called for in order to ensure that, once those measures are no longer in place, there is no vacuum for the gangs to fill, no shred of space for the cartels to wedge themselves into between the Salvadorian people and the law. This is where lessons may be drawn from the American ideal of a “well regulated Militia” and the years of relative security garnered by the Zapatistas in Chiapas.
Culture, idealism, and a society’s commitment to certain postulates, properly inculcated into the young, are fundamental to this, bringing us back to the theme with which we began concerning the criminals’ quasi-religion and atavism.
The civilising action required to counter these should count on its own creed, its own wholesome sense of belonging, identity, and loyalty. Deeper, rather than shallower, roots are called for in order to fight atavism: myth-making and nation-building expressive of archetypical and moral realities.
To summarise the point, in the wake of barbarism, both the state and civil society have a role to play, wherein the potential of the latter is greatly catalysed by a strong identity, the solidity of inherited traditions, rites of passage for the young, and the moral certainty and willingness to take action against criminal outrages. These are fostered by participatory, dynamic community life. Top-down state action is essential, but it should be complemented by bottom-up civic engagement, because the latter precisely cultivates strong subjects willing to take a personal stand, and more able to band together collectively, when threatened.
Gods and Gangs:
The Struggle Against Cartels
Last year a video surfaced on the Internet showing a member of the upstart Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) consuming the heart of a man whose corpse was laid out in front of him. Interviews with CJNG members have since confirmed that cannibalism is indeed a rite of passage within the organization.
This is only one example of that spectral presence latent in Central American narco-trafficking cartels and criminal gangs whose behavior and symbolism palpitates with the counter-religious, cultic resonance of pre-Christian devotion.
As Latin American gangs continue to grow in Spain, with MS-13 members having committed crimes in Spain and Italy, even trying to set up local branches, making headway on a continent where they had not previously been present, it is worth trying to understand what the most violent and lucrative of these groups represent.
The contemporary phenomenon of mass migration has brought with it an influx of violent Wahabist militancy into the post-Christian West, especially Europe, with a somehow corresponding militancy associated with drug cartels in the North American theater.
The underlying psychologies of these two currents are watered by a common font of nihilism. Indeed, there is some evidence that ISIS based its propaganda videos on Mexican cartel audiovisual productions. But where Islamic terrorism finds its historic touchstone in specific strands of medieval and early modern literalism and puritanism, the cartels are ideologically anchored in a system of thought whose peak corresponds to an earlier phase of history.
Local cultural dynamics, the pressures of an international system to which exploitation and inequality are consubstantial, and postmodern cultural decay combine to generate throwbacks, like a recapitulation of the archaic past to mock the “end of history.”
The coming of Christianity to Mesoamerica was interpreted by some as, in some wise, a fulfillment of a Toltec legend foretelling the return of the ancient, venerable king, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, who banned human sacrifice, earning him the scorn of the shaman priests of blood-thirsty spirits, until Quetzalcoatl was forced to flee, merging with the morning star in the sky.
Many centuries later, shortly after the fall of the Aztec capital to an army led by Hernan Cortés, a certain Martín Ocelotl would try to revive blood sacrifice and drive the newcomers’ faith back to where it had come from.
The Spaniards tried him and sent him across that ocean, in order that he might serve his sentence, or be executed, away from those receptive to his religious mission, who might take hold of his corpse and venerate it.
Narco-Aztec Cannibal Cartels
Ocelotl was martyred for his desire to regain the old blood offerings rather than to banish them. The return of this parody of Quetzalcoatl may be identified with the enshrining of Aztec symbolism by an independent Mexican state, opting to put the omen of an eagle clutching a snake in its beak, said to have marked the spot on which the Aztec capital was founded, on its flag. Aztec revivalism was partly owed to North American influence, beginning with the U.S. Minister to Mexico in the late 1820s, Joel Roberts Poinsett, and his apologia for Emperor Moctezuma. The U.S. has long promoted the Spanish Black Legend, potentially to prevent the Spanish imperial legacy from serving as an agglutinating element in Latin America.
Beyond symbolism, however, it is in the present tyrannizing of Mexico by criminal groups amid a rising tide of occult practice that we may more fully discern the restoration of those practices Ocelotl championed, with drug cartels engaging in ritualized murders and acts of cannibalism offered up to preternatural entities (often under names drawn from Santeria). We may also consider the place of psycho-active substances in Aztec religion.
In the neighboring Central American country of El Salvador, citizens have long been brutalized by the MS-13 gang, whose early years were marked by explicit occultism in an environment characterized by hyperviolence and heavy drug use, as depicted in reports gathered by Thomas Ward’s account of criminal gangs.
“The devil himself visited me once, and told me he would fulfill my wishes if I sacrificed and prayed to him. I know he is extremely powerful, because I’ve felt it,” reminisces one former MS-13 member. Several of the group’s members—active criminals since the 1970s—planned to murder a pregnant woman to garner supernatural favor, with one of them converting to Christianity after what he describes as a vision of a demon.
“The beast wanted a soul,” another MS-13 recruit recalls hearing an older member say to explain why he had murdered a fifteen-year-old girl in Texas, apparently for “disrespecting” a shrine to the devil. After witnessing a murder in 2014, another young gang-banger was told, “Let’s pray, homeboy. I already fed the beast, now we have to pray to the beast that we will not be caught,” adding “the beast basically is the devil … When you [are involved in MS-13], you feel that the devil is helping you, and sometimes the devil asked [sic] you to do things for him.”
But if such beliefs were foundational, they were also rare, or would become so as the gang grew, attracting people interested in lucrative criminal activity. As Ward specifies, there was a “low representation of devil worshippers among their membership … a handful of such dedicated supplicants.”
The expansion of MS-13 and its operating more as a business than overt cult, corresponds to its early transition from a 1970s ‘stoner’ and ‘metal-head’ aesthetic to the more typical ‘cholo’ look popular among certain groups of Central American migrants in California. Apparently, this happened when its imprisoned members aligned themselves with the larger and more powerful “Mexican Mafia” gang in the penitentiary system. It was at this time that the number thirteen was added to their moniker, referring to the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, the “M” of Mexican Mafia. Never dispensing with its occultic allegiance, however, the gang would also imbue this number with superstitious overtones.
In the 1990s, as the group contributed to L.A.’s soaring crime rate, the government began deporting members to their country of origin, wherein began MS-13’s rise to power in the impoverished Central American country of El Salvador.
Effectively being a vassal of the Mexican Mafia, however, and given geographic and cultural proximity, they also began operating in Mexico, including the southern state of Chiapas. It seems this may be happening more as a consequence of El Salvador’s effective crackdown on the gang. Reports the Associated Press (AP):
Specifically,
These “reports of increasing extortion in southern Mexico,” suggest that the Mexican government’s incapacity to match El Salvador’s urgency in the fight against organized crime has turned it into a haven for fleeing MS-13 members.
According to the Mexican state prosecutor for migrant affairs, José Mateo Martínez, “People are coming to hide from that, but there are also gang leaders who come to create a criminal group here.” Apparently, the specific kind of crime in which Chiapas has seen an upswing (including extortion of the transport sector) bears the marks of MS-13:
Mayan Militias
Chiapas has long been an area of transit between the rest of Mexico and the U.S. to the north, and other Central American countries to the south. Recently, however, apart from MS-13 and Barrio 18, cartel competition over transport routes has intensified. We may note the presence of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel mentioned previously, for example. Indeed, whereas both Zapatistas and the state might have made their peace with a drug flow through Chiapas they had no power to stop, whatever balance existed has been disrupted by the rise of Jalisco (and the relative decline of one of the main established cartels, Los Zetas).
The rise of the presence of drug cartels (and not only of MS-13 and Barrio 18) is particularly striking because it is putting an end to what has been a virtuous exception in Mexico. Indeed, Chiapas had, until recently, kept the menace at bay, with crime rates below the country’s national average.
This, in a region which is precisely partly under the control of (mostly indigenous) non-state militias, the Zapatistas. To explain why this is happening, we should not focus exclusively on the fleeing of criminals from El Salvador. Carlos Ogaz of the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center claims the unfortunate rise of organized crime in Chiapas is the result of the Mexican state’s strategy in fighting against the Zapatistas.
Allegedly, this strategy has involved using “old inter-ethnic, religious or territorial conflicts” to pit some groups against others, in which context “indigenous and peasant groups were armed and instigated to attack the Zapatistas.” It is this sowing of social strife and division, then, that would, over time, have “broken down the fabric of the community,” specifically weakening the indigenous militias opposed to the cartels, thereby allowing organized crime to fill the vacuum. Ogaz maintains, therefore, that “there is a synergy between counterinsurgency [anti-Zapatista Mexican state actions] and organized crime [the cartels].”
Some analysts have further suggested that the fight over Chiapas and the government’s interest in rolling back the Zapatistas is motivated by the fact that the region is resource-rich, with local indigenous activists (supported by the Zapatistas) having blocked government projects aiming to expand the local presence of agricultural industry companies.
Whatever the case, drug cartels are gaining ground in communities where indigenous militias once went so far as to ban drugs and alcohol. It is true that, strategically, the Zapatistas have not been terribly effective in recent years, and their ideological trajectory includes dissonant elements and is often fuzzy. But it seems undeniable that they have done good in the region whose communities have been under their administration.
It may be interesting to note the degree to which these Mayan revolutionaries of Chiapas participate in the same symbolic language as the rest of Mexico, but where the state and several of the cartels focus on Aztec imperial symbols, the Zapatistas reject this: “We do not want to return to that past … much less by the hand of those who … feed their outdated nationalism with the supposed splendour of an empire, that of the Aztecs, whose expansion came at the cost of the blood of their fellows.”
Indeed, the namesake of these Zapatista guerrillas of Kukulcán, the historic Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, has been identified with Quetzalcoatl (Mayan Kukulcán) by certain of the literary and poetic portraits of him. Zapata was not himself a native Mexican, but mestizo, albeit he seems to have spoken the native language of Nahuatl, and his movement’s telos—its direction—appears to make the indigenous element the protagonist of Mexico’s national character.
Bottom-Up Militia, Top-Down Law Enforcement
The hypothesis that weakened community coherence (specifically, in this case, the erosion of Zapatista identity) contributed to the forward march of the cartels would support the idea that the gang phenomenon relies on weakened community bonds because it is itself a counterfeit community. It transcends criminal business and should be understood as an ethnogenesis, as the emergence of new tribes, tumorous mutant cultures whose purpose, as I’ve written elsewhere, “is to swallow nations and compete with countries.” Gangs configure themselves politically, and set themselves up as a competing identity, offering a sense of belonging. Genuine, wholesome community is therefore required to break them down.
In particular, participative community life provides opportunities for people, especially the young, to take on responsibilities—as well as providing rites of passage. These psychological needs are exploited by criminal and antisocial groups to attract members. A modern lack of awareness of this need may have contributed to the rise of nihilistic subcultures, criminal or not.
For their part, the cartels understand the value of propaganda and constitute a culturally attractive force. We may, for example, highlight the phenomenon of pro-cartel ballads and rap music, as well as clothing and social media accounts.
There is value, then, in understanding our two (in some ways opposite) success stories in the fight against gangs and cartels in tandem: the bottom-up militias of Chiapas and the top-down policies of El Salvador.
The patriotic, rational policies we see enacted in El Salvador are proving extremely effective. When the ‘state of emergency’ is ended, however, Salvadorian society will have to be strong enough to resist attempts by these gangs to return (especially given that their presence in neighboring countries is not abating, and might even be increasing).
The state of emergency is needed to eliminate the presence of MS-13 and others, but reliance on exceptional measures by the state can, in the long term, cause organic social reactions to atrophy. As it stands, the state’s actions are allowing such social reactions to develop in the first place, given El Salvador’s previous state of thorough occupation by the criminals.
However, going forward, social institutions, down to the neighbourhood level, are called for in order to ensure that, once those measures are no longer in place, there is no vacuum for the gangs to fill, no shred of space for the cartels to wedge themselves into between the Salvadorian people and the law. This is where lessons may be drawn from the American ideal of a “well regulated Militia” and the years of relative security garnered by the Zapatistas in Chiapas.
Culture, idealism, and a society’s commitment to certain postulates, properly inculcated into the young, are fundamental to this, bringing us back to the theme with which we began concerning the criminals’ quasi-religion and atavism.
The civilising action required to counter these should count on its own creed, its own wholesome sense of belonging, identity, and loyalty. Deeper, rather than shallower, roots are called for in order to fight atavism: myth-making and nation-building expressive of archetypical and moral realities.
To summarise the point, in the wake of barbarism, both the state and civil society have a role to play, wherein the potential of the latter is greatly catalysed by a strong identity, the solidity of inherited traditions, rites of passage for the young, and the moral certainty and willingness to take action against criminal outrages. These are fostered by participatory, dynamic community life. Top-down state action is essential, but it should be complemented by bottom-up civic engagement, because the latter precisely cultivates strong subjects willing to take a personal stand, and more able to band together collectively, when threatened.
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