EMULATING DRUG LORDS IS HEIGHT OF FASHION IN RURAL MEXICO

CULIACAN, Mexico -- In ancient Mexico, kings traveled to the next life with
jade masks and their favorite jewelry.

In modern Mexico, drug lords head for the sweet hereafter with bags of
cocaine, wads of dollars and submachine guns tucked beside them in coffins
riddled with fake bullet holes.

The burial practice is part of what Mexicans call narcocultura, a growing
cultural trend that celebrates the lifestyles of this nation's cocaine
smugglers, marijuana growers and heroin manufacturers.

President Vicente Fox has made enormous strides against the drug trade in
Mexico, the primary land corridor for trafficking into the United States.
His government has made more than 10,600 drug-related arrests and seized
tons of drug shipments in the past 18 months. But in Culiacan and other
drug-producing states in this country's northwest, narcocultura's influence
on architecture, couture, music, literature and even religion suggests a
lack of faith in legal authority that will be a tougher challenge for the
government than stopping the next cocaine shipment from crossing the border.

"The narcos have a saying that 'I'd rather live five years like a king
[rey] than 50 years like an ox [buey],'" said Elmer Mendoza, a Culiacan
author whose novels draw from the drug world."A lot of young people around
here can relate to that."

Many narcocultura fans say they are adopting a style rather than supporting
drug trafficking, just as most U.S. adherents of hip-hop music aren't
gangsta wannabes.

"It's a look. It doesn't mean anything," said ranch hand Eligio Ramirez as
he strolled through the Culiacan market wearing typical narco garb - a gold
chain with a marijuana leaf pendant, a fake designer shirt tucked into
tight jeans, a wide-brimmed cowboy hat and ostrich cowboy boots.

"It's a way to be counter-establishment," agreed Luis Astorga, a
sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who is a
leading authority on drug culture.

The allure of illegal lifestyles is strong in Mexico because of a paucity
of rural jobs and a history of government corruption, he said. "The people
indirectly share many values of the illegal world because the authorities
themselves traditionally don't respect law and order," Astorga said. "And
like all groups when they start to have a significant impact, the drug
traffickers create their own mythology."

One way they do so is through narcocorridos - gory, chronicles of drug
dealers' exploits patterned on traditional ballads. Authorities have banned
narcocorridos from the airwaves in the northwestern states of Sinaloa,
Chihuahua and Queretaro - thereby increasing their popularity, most
observers believe.

"The more people know it's prohibited, the more they want it," said Daniel
Jimenez, 23, a music store clerk in Culiacan, Sinaloa's capital.

Jimenez estimated that at least half of his store's music sales are
narcocorridos, which, like rap, can be socially insightful as well as
gruesome. The artists range from regional performers such as Fabian Ortega
(aka The Falcon of the Sierra, who sports a cowboy hat and an AK-47 assault
rifle on his album cover), to multiplatinum, international stars including
Los Tigres del Norte and Chalino Sanchez, who lived the outlaw life of his
songs before being shot dead in his native Culiacan eight years ago.

Nowhere in Mexico is narcocultura more prevalent than in Culiacan, the home
city of the notorious Arellano Felix clan and just about every other top
Mexican drug trafficker. True, groupies can get their Arellano Felix fix in
Mazatlan, a port 150 miles to the south, where cabbies offer tours of the
cartel's glitzy discos and sprawling mansions - and the busy street corner
where police gunned down enforcer Ramon Arellano Felix in February.

But Culiacan is the best place to buy a belt buckle of real or false rubies
shaped like a poppy (the flower that yields opium), or an
all-terrain-vehicle that shoots oil toward pursuing cars to make them slide
off the road, or fake-silk bootleg designer shirts, or cowboy boots made of
spotted ostrich or glistening black manta ray.

Ironically, most drug lords have stopped sporting such ostentatious gear,
Mendoza said.

Culiacan even has a patron saint of drug dealers, the dapper, mustachioed
bandito Jesus Malverde. According to local lore, Malverde was Mexico's
Robin Hood, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, until Culiacan
authorities hanged him from a mesquite tree in 1909. Locals credit him with
such miracles as healing the terminally ill and, more recently, bringing in
bumper marijuana crops in the hills outside the city.

Visitors from as far away as Los Angeles come to visit Malverde's remains,
which supposedly lie beneath a pile of stones and dirty plastic roses,
topped by a rusted bird cage containing a bust of his likeness in a
used-car lot next to a McDonald's. "The government tried to get rid of him
several years back, but the bulldozers kept breaking when they pushed up
against the stones," said Martin Alarcon, the car lot's manager.

Malverde has never been recognized by the church - or by the state, which
has no record of his existence. But at a chapel dedicated to him near the
car lot, the faithful thank him for miracles or buy key chains or other
mementos featuring his face framed by marijuana leaves or machine guns.

Drug traffickers whose prayers to Malverde went unanswered often land in
Culiacan's Humaya cemetery, where many tombs are three stories high and
resemble cathedrals or castles, complete with columns and figurines of
horses and cattle - a style that's also popular for homes, offices and
discos here.

Many traffickers are buried with a stash of drugs, cash and their favorite
weapon in custom-made coffins decorated with AK-47s or bullet holes,
according to several residents - including a funeral home official who
declined to give his name, explaining: "I don't want to end up in Humaya, too."