Jesus Malverde

Photo credit: Daniel Aguilar

"Sinaloa is one of those places in Mexico where justice isn't blind and the lawless aren't always the bad guys. Having the government as an enemy can improve a reputation. So maybe, then, it's not such a stretch to understand how thousands of people could come to believe that Jesus Malverde, a renegade supposedly long dead, performs miracles in their lives.

Nor, for that reason, is it hard to understand how over the past two decades, Jesus Malverde has also become what he's now best known as: 'The Narco Saint,' the patron saint for the region's many drug smugglers. Mexican drug smuggling began in Sinaloa. Here smugglers are folk heroes and a 'narcoculture' has existed for some time. Faith in Malverde was always strongest among Sinaloa's poor and highland residents, the classes from which Mexico's drug traffickers emerged. As the narcos went from the hills to the front pages, they took Malverde with them. He is now the religious side to that narcoculture. Smugglers come ask Malverde for protection before sending a load north. If the trip goes well, they return to pay the shrine's house band to serenade the bandit, or place a plaque thanking Malverde for 'lighting the way'; increasingly plaques include the code words 'From Sinaloa to California.'"

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"The legend is that Jesus Malverde was one of these, a bandit who rode the hills near Culiacan. They say Malverde robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. A Mexican Robin Hood. It must have been true, for they say the government hung him and left him to rot in a tree. That was on May 3, 1909. Every year on that day there's a great party at Malverde's shrine."

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But historians have found no evidence he ever existed; a likelier prospect is that Malverde's an amalgam of two bandits -- Heraclio Bernal from Southern Sinaloa and Felipe Bachomo, from the north part of the state. "If he lived, faith in him is a remarkable thing," says Sergio Lopez, a dramatist from Culiacan, who has also researched and written about Malverde. "If he never lived, it's even more remarkable because people have created this thing to achieve the justice that is denied them."
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"Eight years ago, doctors diagnosed Dona Tere with cancer. She decided not to take medicine. "I said, ´Malverde, they say you do miracles. I'm going to ask you for a miracle. I don't believe in you. I know I'm going to die.'" Dona Tere's still around. "I have four Malverdes in my house," she says. "One in the kitchen. One in the dining room. One going up the stairs and one in the bedroom. I bless myself every time I'm at the foot of the stairs." Last time they operated on her, Dona Tere paid for two hours of music to be played to Malverde. "Rich, poor, sick, not sick -- everyone comes here," she says. "When they come here and pay for music to be played people here say it must have gone well for them on their trip (sending drugs to the U.S.). I don't know. It's their own private business. I don't ask. But I'll tell you. More people come here than go to church. If you go to church asking for food, the priest will give you advice, but if you come here asking for food, you'll get food."

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"In the late 1970s, Sinaloa was embroiled in the great military strike against the region's drug smugglers that was known as Operation Condor, during which the army went through the hills attacking drug smugglers and innocent ranchers with equal vigor; the state lost an estimated 2,000 hamlets and villages during those years as people abandoned homes, land and livestock and streamed from the hills to the cities. "The press, sharing the same view as the authorities, or perhaps so as not to be left behind when the graft was being handed out, added their two cents," says Luis Astorga, a researcher of the narcoculture who lived in Culiacan during this time. "They labeled Malverde as the ´Narcosaint.' The drug smugglers, due to their social origin, had inherited the belief in Malverde. But the media gave it a kind of yellow slant. They were really the ones who made Malverde into the drug smuggler's saint, forgetting how old the belief in him really was."

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Excerpts from:
Quinones, Sam "Jesus Malverde" True Tales from Another Mexico. University of New Mexico Press, 2001.

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