Blessed is the ‘narco-saint’ in the city where El Chapo is a hero
There is a steady flow of visitors to the chapel dedicated to Jesús Malverde – widely considered the “narcosaint” – in the northern Mexican city of Culiacán, Sinaloa.
A folkloric figure, Malverde was a bandit who used to rob from the rich to give to the poor and both locals and visitors from far and wide come to ask him for favours and blessings.
But there is a new addition to the Malverde busts, key rings and trinkets for sale here: a miniature statue of the drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Wearing a bulletproof vest over a bright pink shirt, Guzmán is holding the Mexican drug-traffickers’ weaponof-choice, an AK-47, in his hands. His face, defiant, holds a genuine likeness to the man found guilty in a courtroom in New York of running a brutally violent drug trafficking cartel.
This week’s guilty verdict promises to cement Guzmán’s place in Mexican history, further glorifying rather than vilifying him. Most in his home state don’t see him as a violent drug lord but rather a benevolent hero.
“Everyone speaks well of El Chapo,” says Jesús Gonzales, 38, whose father built the Malverde chapel in 1979 and passed it on to him to oversee. Like Malverde, Chapo had a reputation for generosity and helping the poor. The statues of El Chapo appeared about a year ago, according to Mr Gonzales, and they’re a big seller. “People who want to take drugs take drugs – no one is putting a gun to their heads,” he adds. “If there’s a market then it’s going to carry on.”
“He has always helped people,” said Jehu Rendon, a street seller in the main square of Badiraguato – the small town where Guzmán was born.
“Indirectly, we all benefited from the drug trade,” he says, referring to the thousands of clandestine poppy and marijuana plantations that pepper the mountains in Sinaloa and other neighbouring states. Farmers have for decades depended on US demand for heroin and marijuana to feed their families and support the local economy.
These humble farmers continue to produce and sell both poppy and marijuana to the cartel El Chapo once ran, even though it has made their masters infinitely richer than them.
Nowhere is their ostentatiousness more apparent than in Jardines del Humaya, the local cemetery just outside Culiacán. One section of the burial ground is dominated by tombs the size of contemporary houses, complete with tinted black windows with stainless steel bars across them, air-conditioning units and burglar alarms. The rivalry to upstage each other continues in the afterlife.
The cost of the land alone that they needed to buy and construct the tombs amounts to more than a $100,000 (£78,000) for the larger buildings, according to Miguel Angel Vega, a journalist at the local weekly news magazine Rio Doce.
Granite, onyx, marble and other expensive stones were used in their construction. The tombs are all locked, and some have bulletproof glass as well as alarms and security cameras.
“There is a rumour that some people might hide drugs or money – it could be just a myth but it’s really hard to say. Why would you have so much surveillance in a tomb?” says Mr Vega.
El Chapo is revered for the two great escapes he made from maximum security prisons, widely perceived as getting one over on a government that in Sinaloa is despised and distrusted a lot more than the cartel bosses.
Maria Isabel Cruz’s son, Yosimar, was a municipal police officer who she says was taken from the family home by an armed commando unit of five or six men on the night of Jan 26 2017. The men handcuffed and gagged Yosimar, forced him into a civilian truck and drove him away, never to be seen again.
“The government haven’t done anything to look for him at all,” says Cruz, part of one of nearly a dozen civilian groups in Sinaloa dedicated to looking for missing people. Across Mexico some 40,000 are missing. The new government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president, has vowed to prioritise searches for them.
The extradition of Guzmán to the US in January 2017 made matters in Sinaloa and arguably across Mexico worse, at least in the short term.
At a local level, Sinaloa descended into a violent civil war with two factions of the cartel vying for control. El Chapo’s sons and another drug lord took over after a vicious battle for supremacy against El Chapo’s former right-hand man.
Drug trafficking and production in
‘The old generation like El Chapo believe in helping people, but the new leadership is disposable and more violent’
Sinaloa, and Mexico, is now as prolific as it has ever been.
Guzmán’s exit from Mexico coincided with the two most homicidal years in Mexico’s history. In 2018, the country registered more than 33,000 murders, up from more than 31,000 in 2017, according to government data. Guzman’s control is widely perceived as having maintained peace in Sinaloa.
“The old generation like El Chapo believe in helping people, but the new leadership is disposable and more violent,” says Mr Rendon, the streetseller in Badiraguato.
A police officer in Badiraguato’s central square who did not want to be named says: “Organised crime here will always exist. With or without El Chapo, drug trafficking will continue.”