Against this historical backdrop religion y patria, the Army and the Catholic Church represent the power structure that carries on the traditions today. When G.W. Bush approved the MÃ ©rida Initiative, during the end of his administration, giving $1.4 billion of U.S. tax money to the Mexican Army, he most likely had no clue that there are two Mexicos. Alternatively, if he did understand Mexican history and culture, he intended to enforce neocon policies by supporting conservative Christian theocracy and its status quo. After all, Mexico's conservative theocracy seems to be the ideal for the right-wing, Bible-thumping Republican agenda in the U.S.
The Mexico most American tourists and viewers of mainstream media see is the Disney World view""one where "the Mexican president is fighting a valiant war on drugs, aided by the Mexican Army"," as Charles Bowden reports in his article in Mother Jones magazine (August 2009), We Bring Fear. This Mexico has a free press, a fair justice system, rule of law, and an effective government.
Though we can see in its long history Mexico, in its current state, is teetering on collapse, the tourist version of Mexico continues to exist in the zombie minds of TV viewers and spring-break Cancun hotel dwellers. The real Mexico operates on bribes in an economy that has been flat lining for decades, if not centuries. Aside from its natural energy reserves and tourism, its most lucrative source of national income now arises from the illegal drug industry""the only thing propping up the country from its decades-old recession that NAFTA and the maquiladoras never resolved, despite one of Mexico's greatest resources being its cheap labor force.
In the real Mexico, the war is for drugs "where the police and the military fight for their share of the drug profits, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between the government and the drug world has never existed (Danish Brethern, dailykos.com).
Like the twisted fundamentalist versions of Islam among certain groups in places like Saudi Arabia, Mexico too has a long history of carrying on seemingly distorted versions of religious traditions, many of which have become subcultures of modern versions of ancient Aztec faiths.
Especially popular among a huge and growing part of the Mexican people, the poor and alienated""those excluded from the wealth modern globalization""Santa Muerte is a faith not likely to go away any time soon. It may have arisen as a reaction to Vatican II or simply as a longstanding tradition based on the popular "Thin Lady," Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec queen of the underworld, a part of Mexico's native religion.
On the American taxpayers' dime, the Mexican Army is using funds from Bush's MÃ ©rida Initiative to carry out the wishes of the Catholic Church condemning Santa Muerte as devil worship because some drug traffickers wear tattoos of the Thin Lady. But drug traffickers more often wear images of Christ and the crucifix as well. So, why isn't the government seeking to destroy Catholic churches by this same logic? The government claims that the Santa Muerte sect is part of the narco subculture, a justification for the Army to demolish "dozens of shrines to Santa Muerte, claiming that the worship of this skeletal woman in a white cloak is a "narco-cult.' As resistance grows, so does this new religious movement" (US/Mexican Narco War Targets Religious Sect, by Danish Brethern, DailyKos.com). This represents another variation of how the Mexican people can rebel against their authoritarian, conservative government and its official church by worshipping the Holy Death, a spirit who cares for the poor and the marginalized.
In another form of rebellion against Mexico's economic inequality, today's drug cartels continue the traditions of the caudillos and have seized control of large regions of the country. They are overpowering or buying out the Mexican Army, which is weakened by a bad economy, one that does not engage and motivate a middle class. Like the police, the Army is so poorly paid that its soldiers desert the government and use their skills, including those gained from Special Forces training in the U.S., to join the higher paid caudillos, or what the mainstream media calls the drug cartels.
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