Mexico City, Mexico - Followers of a rapidly growing Mexican religious cult that deifies death and counts a number of drug traffickers among its adepts are mounting a series of protests in Mexico City to express anger at the recent destruction of several dozen of their shrines.
"We are believers, we are not criminals," the devotees of Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, chanted during a first march this week. Further demonstrations were set for today and Easter Sunday.
The shrines, located near the northern border, were bulldozed in late March under supervision of the army. Their demolition was interpreted as a mission of psychological warfare aimed at intimidating the drug cartels, as many traffickers are known to be among the Santa Muerte's most fervent worshippers.
But this argument did not convince the few hundred marchers who shouted slogans about religious freedom and tolerance last Sunday, as they passed in front of Mexico City's Catholic cathedral flanked by huge idols strapped to the top of cars.
The images depicted the Santa Muerte as a female version of the Grim Reaper. One stood upright in a long flowing white dress with a crown on her head, while another sat nursing a crucified Jesus Christ on her knees.
"It isn't fair to repress our faith just because there are some narcos who believe in La Santisima too," Isidro Pastrana, a middle-aged cook and cross-dresser, said as he walked along with a papier-mache scythe in his hand. "Our faith is much bigger than them."
More numerous than drug lords and other underworld operators are the devotees drawn from the vast numbers of Mexicans living on the edge of personal disaster and on the fringes of legality. They ask the Santa Muerte for protection and for favours, at least in part, because they have no faith in the institutions around them.
Men such as Sergio Hernandez, a 24-year-old toilet cleaner, who insists he was falsely accused of car stealing last year, but doesn't believe his innocence has anything to do with the freedom he enjoys today.
He recalled during the Palm Sunday march: "I really thought I was going to have to spend a few years in prison, but I appealed to the holy Santa Muerte and when the verdict came they let me go. These are the kind of things that really make you believe in her."
Similarly, a jocular butcher, Mariano Sanchez, credits the Santa Muerte with everything from putting food on his children's plates to curing his wife's cancer, and protecting his eldest son from harm the day armed gunmen tried to steal his taxi.
"All you have to do is believe and ask and she delivers," Sanchez said. "The Santa Muerte does not discriminate."
According to Bernardo Barranco, a religious scholar, the cult mixes the legacy of a prehispanic cultural fascination with death, African-Caribbean religiosity and a particularly baroque form of Catholicism. He said the cult's popularity has exploded in recent years because it offers help and an explanation to the growing number of Mexicans living precarious lives on the what he calls "the frontier of their own security".