Mexico's Robin Hood a blessing to both sides of the law

Published on Saturday 9 February 2008 18:03

JESUS Malverde has been revered for almost a century in north-western Mexico. According to folklore, he was a Mexican Robin Hood who took from the rich and gave to the poor until he was killed by the police in 1909.

Now immigrants have brought his legend to the United States. His image, which is thought to offer protection from the law, can be found on everything from T-shirts to household cleaners.

Malverde is widely considered the patron saint of drug dealers. A shrine has been erected atop his grave in the remote city of Culiacan in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, which has long been associated with opium and marijuana trafficking.

"The drug guys go to the shrine and ask for assistance and come back in big cars with stacks of money to give thanks," said James Creechan, a Canadian sociologist and adjunct professor at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa in Culiacan.

Creechan added that the poor also pray to Malverde for money and safe passage across the border into the United States.

An influx of immigrants from the Sinaloan region in recent years has made Malverde's image increasingly visible on the US side of the border, particularly in the south-west and California. His legend has spread among Hispanics, Creechan said, inspiring many to build altars to Malverde in their homes, as well as to wear Malverde cologne.

His image, which looks suspiciously like that of Pedro Infante, the Mexican matinee idol of the 1940s, appears on T-shirts and patches sewn on jackets and backpacks. Busts of Malverde can be seen next to cash registers at restaurants, bars and discos.

Manuel Simental, a Sinaloan immigrant, has an altar to Malverde in his restaurant, El Paisa, in Lynwood, California. Simental claims it brings him good luck. His customers leave dollar bills and loose change on the altar, which he collects and distributes among the poor when he visits Mexico.

Five years ago, Indio Products, a manufacturer in Los Angeles that distributes mystical products, did not carry any Malverde merchandise. Today, it has a full line of Malverde items including candles, rosaries, trading cards, stamps, hair oils and bathroom cleaners. The company's president, Martin Mayer, said Malverde's popularity was spreading.

"I just shipped an order of Malverde busts to Italy last week," Mayer said. "I joked that they were probably going to the Mafia."

Malverde items are typically sold at botanicas – alternative medicine pharmacies found in Hispanic neighbourhoods that sell herbs, ointments and assorted good luck and black magic charms and potions.

"People say Malverde helped me do this or that; mostly it's people into drugs who think he'll shield them from the police," said Raul Gonzalez, owner of a botanica called Mystic Products in Compton, California. "It's the power of the mind, you know. They believe it, so they take chances and get away with it, but they will eventually get caught."

Indeed, drug enforcement authorities in Mexico and the United States said Malverde statues, tattoos and amulets can be tip-offs to illegal activity.

"We send squads out to local hotel and motel parking lots looking for cars with Malverde symbols on the windshield or hanging from the rearview mirror," said Sgt Rico Garcia with the narcotics division of the Houston Police Department. "It gives us a clue that something is probably going on."

Courts in California, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas have ruled that Malverde trinkets and talismans are admissible evidence in drug and money-laundering cases.

Last month, Cerveceria Minerva, a Mexican microbrewery in the central-western state of Jalisco, introduced a beer called Malverde. Company officials said they chose Malverde's name and image for its label because he was the most recognisable and admired figure in focus groups. "Drug smugglers drink it like holy water," Garcia said.