Viva la Muerte!

"They died on their own from the beating, guey. They just died. They just died and shit, guey. You should have been there. You would have seen Poncho, dude. He was crying like a faggot —
" 'No, man, I'm your friend.'
" 'What friend, you son of a bitch, shut your mouth!'
"And poom! I grabbed a fucking bottle and slash! I slit his whole fucking belly. And poom! he was bleeding. I grabbed a little cup and poom! the little cup poom! poom! I filled it with blood and poom! I dedicated it to the Santisima Muerte. And then I went to the other faggot and slash! I slit him and same thing."

Gabriel Cardonna in an intercepted telephone conversation to Rosalio Reta describing how he did away with two teenagers affiliated with a rival gang he had kidnapped. After torturing and killing them he disposed over their bodies in a 55 gallon drum of diesel and set it alight, making them into guisado.
Dittrich, Luke "Four Days on the Border" Esquire June 2009

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Cultural War

"The ever-fluctuating war among the constantly fragmenting and multiplying drug clans and families is, among other things, a culture war, one being fought by the old campesino marijuana-growing and smuggling families along the Pacific coast against the wholesale traffickers of the Gulf of Mexico, who grow nothing. It’s also a war with, on one side, Pacific coast criminals who have a romantic vision of themselves as renegade outlaws—and who commission old-timey biographical ballads about themselves (narcocorridos) to spread that vision..."

"On the other side are former members of the Mexican military establishment in the east, whose taste in music, as far as one can tell from the narcovideos frequently put up on YouTube, runs to techno and reggaeton."

“The Sinaloa traffickers’ cult of a rural trickster hero, Jesús Malverde, is in equally stark contrast with Gulf coast worship of Holy Death. The Zetas seem modern and the Pacific coast gangsters old-fashioned, but at the moment we have no way of knowing who is winning, partly because the Zetas are so out of control and partly because the clan leaders on the Pacific coast who used to form an alliance are busily trying to kill one another, as are the Zetas and their former masters in the Cartel del Golfo.”

Guillermoprieto, Alma "The Murderers of Mexico" The New York Review of Books October 28 2010

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