ROBIN HOODS? DRUG LORDS TRY TO CAST SAINTLY AURA

CULIACAN, MEXICO - Off a main street in this Mexican city, three musicians
sing their hearts out in a chapel that is a center of both high kitsch and
high faith.

For five hours - with their accordion, guitar, and bass never letting up -
the three sing the region's ranchera ballads to Jesus Malverde, a
turn-of-the-century Mexican Robin Hood in whose name the chapel was built.

The musicians have been paid 500 pesos - $60, or about 18 times the daily
minimum wage here - supposedly to implore Malverde's help for a group of
farmers' corn crop. But a young man who often visits the chapel to seek
Malverde's intervention in personal problems says he doesn't buy the
explanation.

(Picture) SOUVENIR: Pendants with the likeness of Jesoes Malverde are sold
at a chapel in Mexico honoring the famed bandit. (Robert Harbison - Staff)

"Corn farmers around here don't have that kind of money, so don't believe
it," he says. "They may be singing for a crop, but I'd guarantee it's not
corn. They're singing for the narcos."

Since he was killed by government officials in 1909, Malverde has become a
popular saint here, increasingly sought out by the poor in a land of both
great faith and faltering adherence to the Roman Catholic Church.

But here in Sinaloa State, a center of marijuana and heroin production in
Mexico, Malverde has also become something else.

Since sometime around 1980, in a deft move that has helped put a growing
segment of desperately poor rural peasants in their corner, drug
traffickers in this Pacific coast state have adopted Malverde as their
patron saint.

"Malverde was nothing more than a common thief, but it appears that he did
share what he robbed with the poor," says Herberto Sinagawa Montoya, a
historian of Sinaloa State.

"Looking to improve their image, the narcos chose him as their example,
their 'saint,' and it worked," he says.

Church Condemns The Cult

If it "worked," Mr. Sinagawa adds, it's because the miserable living
conditions of Sinaloa's mostly indigenous rural population have changed
little from the days of Malverde.

"This cult is the reflection of a misery that isn't being resolved," says
the retired state historian. The rural poor "are finding no answer in
either the government or the Catholic Church, and so they develop a
sympathy for their only benefactors - the drug traffickers." The drug
traffickers, or narcos, give the peasants jobs and provide services like
electricity and water, he says.

The local hierarchy of the Catholic Church has condemned the cult of
Malverde as a sham. But as the church's authority has broken down,
Malverde's popularity has reached beyond the destitute into other sectors
of Sinaloan society. "The rise of Malverde here coincides with the crisis
of faith in Catholicism and the boom in alternatives for people to believe
in," says Francisco Padilla, a researcher at the Sinaloa cultural office.

And as Sinaloa's drug gangs have carried their business beyond the state,
and the poor have emigrated to more promising lands, the phenomenon has
spread throughout the region and into the Southwest United States.

(Picture)(Picture) CHAPEL FOR A 'ROBIN HOOD': A shrine (above) in Culiacan,
Mexico, is dedicated to Jesus Malverde, an outlaw who may have lived a
century ago and aided the poor. At left, a woman pays homage to him. Some
say drug traffickers encourage worship of Malverde to promote their image
as friends of poor people. (Photos By Robert Harbison - Staff)

In Phoenix and other Arizona cities, police increasingly find Malverde
medallions around the necks of the drug thugs - often from Sinaloa - they
encounter in drug busts. In Los Angeles, Malverde believers light candles
and leave offerings at another chapel to the dark-eyed, heavy-browed
"saint." And when Sinaloa's migrants return home, often the first place
they stop is Malverde's chapel.

But at the Culiacan chapel - a hodgepodge collection of small shrines to
their black-scarved hero and engraved plaques thanking him for his help,
all encased in a stained-glass façade and corrugated metal roof -
Malverde's association with narcos is dismissed.

"People come here from all [social] classes, from all activities," says
Eligio Gonzalez, the chapel's founder and manager.

"Malverde is here for everybody, narcotraficantes or not, 24 hours a day,"
he adds. "That's why so many people come."

Mr. Gonzalez came to Culiacan in 1960, when he began visiting what was then
only a cross and a pile of pebbles in Malverde's name. The pebbles
accumulated from passing Mayo Indians, whose custom is to leave a stone at
any grave they pass.

Then in 1973, while driving a taxi, Gonzalez was shot four times in a robbery.

"I promised Malverde I'd serve him if he helped me," he says, "and I lived."

By that time, interest in Malverde was dying out, the historian Sinagawa
and other local observers say.

Events changed that.

In 1980, the state government - never too fond of Malverde for obvious
reasons - decided to build a new state capital on land that included the
Malverde cross.

"Their original idea was simply to destroy it," Gonzalez says, "but they
found out that meant trouble."

Street protests ensued, and, according to Malverde followers, the
construction project was slowed by strange occurrences: Windows in the new
building shattered on their own and equipment disappeared.

He 'Still Helps People'

Finally, the state relented and moved the cross to a nearby plot, throwing
in a chapel shell for good measure. Gonzalez took care of the rest - joined
by the drug traffickers who knew a good thing when they saw it.

(Picture) ASKING FOR HELP: Plaques placed by worshippers inside the
Malverde chapel ask the bandit 'saint' to assist them. This one reads, 'God
bless my truck. Thank you, Malverde, for granting this wish to me.'

On a recent sultry weekday night, Pedro Aviles was at the chapel with his
wife and children to thank Malverde for his protection during a business
trip. The director of transportation for a regional supermarket chain, Mr.
Aviles is religious about visiting the chapel before he travels, and then
to give thanks when he returns safely.

Aviles laments Malverde's growing association with drug traffickers
"because it's hurting the good image of someone who was good and still
helps a lot of people." The father of two realizes he has put his faith in
a "criminal," but he says, "If he did something bad, it was to help people."

It is this blurring of the line between good and bad that the area's narcos
- - drug traffickers and growers - want to encourage, says Jose Luis Esteban
Martinez, Culiacan's police chief.

The idea that the narcos are ultimately doing "good," like Malverde, breaks
down resistance to them, Mr. Esteban says, and can even be an impetus for
narcos to expand their activities.

"The narco-farmers and traffickers and other delinquents are [the ones] who
believe most in Malverde, but then there is the other facet of average
people who simply want a miracle or who want to do good deeds," the police
chief says. "We can't ignore the fact that Eligio [Gonzalez] has used the
money the chapel takes in to help a lot of people."

Did Malverde exist?

Gonzalez says the chapel has used donations to give out almost 10,000
coffins to families who couldn't afford a decent burial for a loved one, as
well as thousands of wheelchairs, crutches, and other aids. The chapel also
throws a party on Mexico's Children's Day and hosts a large celebration of
the Day of the Dead, Mexico's Halloween.

Yet despite all the "history" and devotion surrounding Malverde, some
people here say the bandit - who legend has it got his last name, which
translates as "bad green," because he hid himself in tree branches - never
existed.

"We have no records of Malverde's existence: no birth or death certificate,
nothing," says Sergio Lopez, a Sinaloan actor and writer.

If the legendary thief did exist, it's a noteworthy story, Mr. Lopez says.
But if he didn't, it's "an amazing example of how creative the popular
imagination can be."

Either way, Malverde is a phenomenon that observers here say will prosper.
"As long as the drug-trafficking continues to grow and the people's misery
is left unanswered," says Sinagawa, the historian, "Malverde will continue
to gain followers."

(c) Copyright 1998 The Christian Science Publishing Society.

Checked-by: Richard Lake