The large orange chapel here, with its towering cross, would be just
another Roman Catholic church if not for a bronze plaque announcing that
it was “donated by Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano” — better known as “the
executioner,” commander of the ruthless crime syndicate called the
Zetas.
The nameplate goes on to quote Psalm 143: “Lord, hear my prayer, answer
my plea.”
But Mexican Catholics are the ones struggling with how to
respond.
Ever since the chapel’s financing spawned a government investigation four months ago, the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico has been trying to confront its historic ties to drug traffickers.
Long dependent on gifts, but often less than discriminating about where
they come from, the church is grappling with its role as thousands die
in turf wars among rich, and sometimes generous, criminals.
“The chapel put the entire church in Mexico on alert,” said the Rev.
Hugo Valdemar, a spokesman for the country’s largest archdiocese, in
Mexico City. “As a result, our public posture has changed, and become
much tougher.”
The church has indeed gone further than before, with public pledges to
reject “narcolimosnas,” or “narco alms,” and priests linked to
traffickers.
A handful of outspoken bishops have also stepped up condemnations of both the cartels and the government’s militaristic efforts to stop them.
But at the local level, the codependency of the church and the cartels
often endures. Here in the middle-class neighborhood of Pachuca where
Mr. Lazcano is said to have grown up, priests still say Mass at the
chapel every Sunday, arguing that the church is not responsible for
determining whether the Zetas’ leader has any connection to the building
that bears his name.
Catholic officials have said there are other chapels that they believe
were built with drug money, in what some describe as money laundering
for the soul.
And yet, according to Father Valdemar — who works closely
with Mexico’s conference of bishops — the church has no formal strategy
for how to deal with the cartels in their midst and no plan to develop
guidelines for priests struggling with munificent killers.
The Rev. Joseph Palacios, a sociology professor at Georgetown University and a Catholic priest who has written extensively about the Mexican church, said more must be done.
“This is an endemic problem,” Father Palacios said. “If they just issue
statements and don’t analyze the roots of the situation, they aren’t
going to change anything.”
The church’s challenge is partly historic. Mexico’s 1917 Constitution
separated church and state far beyond what can be found in the United
States.
It forbade churches of all denominations from operating primary
and secondary schools, nationalized ownership of all church buildings
and barred priests and other religious leaders from voting or
criticizing the government, even in private.
The restrictions were lifted in 1992, but religious scholars say the
church had become impoverished by that time, reliant on the wealthy and
with a mentality of “no mete en la política” — don’t get into politics.
For years, that culture of nonconfrontation and need has allowed narco
alms to be an open secret, according to experts like George W. Grayson,
the author of “Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State?”
After a
Catholic cardinal was assassinated by a drug gang in 1993 (in what may
or may not have been a case of mistaken identity), sociologists outlined
a “religious economy” in which priests administered sacraments in
exchange for exorbitant donations.
The Rev. Robert Coogan, 58, a Brooklyn-born Catholic prison chaplain in
Saltillo, said that dubious donations had become an engrained feature of
the country’s religious life.
He cited several instances in which Zetas
offered him 6 to 10 times as much as the typical small donation for a
baptism.
While he said he refused — and now insists on providing sacraments free —
Father Coogan explained that for some priests, danger and poverty had
made it easy to say, “Hey, the guy who owns the factory, he’s a bastard,
but we take his money, so why not take the drug money?”
This is especially true, he said, in a country where riches are often
produced by corruption and in areas where violence has pushed legitimate
donors to flee.
“The church in Mexico is impoverished,” Father Coogan
said.
Some Catholic leaders have openly defended their dubious benefactors. Amado Carrillo Fuentes,
who was considered Mexico’s most dominant drug trafficker until he died
in 1997, was publicly praised by at least one influential priest, who
encouraged Mexicans to see the drug baron as a model of Catholic
generosity.
Mr. Carrillo Fuentes was also photographed traveling to
Israel with two priests, including one who said he considered the trip
appropriate because of the cartel leader’s gifts to an orphanage.
But the recent surge in violence has altered the dynamic.
Father
Valdemar said that dozens of priests had been quietly transferred to
avoid death threats and extortion attempts from drug gangs.
At the same time, cartels have been expanding their own “alternative
religiosity,” said Alberto Hernández, a sociologist at El Colegio de la
Frontera Norte in Tijuana.
La Familia, a cartel that is concentrated in
Michoacán State, has become known for its pseudo-Christian messages left
on banners over highways.
Organized crime groups have also popularized
unofficial saints, like Santa Muerte, or St. Death.
And increasingly, they have taken on the construction of chapels and shrines.
Church officials say there are about 6,000 independently built chapels
nationwide. They note that the benefactors are rarely known, but priests
at nearby parishes often perform services in them.
At times, the distance between the church and the cartels is obvious:
Mr. Hernández cited an instance in Sinaloa when, after a senior cartel
figure was killed, his associates shot to bits a giant image of St.
Jude, patron saint of lost causes, apparently because they felt he did
not answer their prayers.
The Lazcano chapel, however, is a more complicated case. Despite the
plaque, and Mr. Lazcano’s roots in the area, the archbishop of the local
diocese, Msgr. Domingo Díaz Martínez, insisted that “whether the chapel
was built dishonestly, that we cannot say.”
He noted that the authorities did not appear to have finished their
investigation, which federal prosecutors confirmed. More important, he
said, “People in the community have asked for services, and when they
ask, we go.”
Many of those who attended on a recent Sunday seemed to agree with both
the archbishop and the priest conducting services, the Rev. Margarito
Escorcia Reyes, who said after Mass that the chapel’s financing and
services should be judged separately.
Outside the main door, below a banner of flowers from a recent festival,
Elvira Rodríguez López, 59, insisted that “the mysteries of God are
great” and that all donors should be thanked.
“It’s not like the government helps us,” she said. “If there’s someone
willing to support the community, to support us, why question it?”
Even if the money that built the church might have been earned through
crime, even killings? “I’m not interested,” she said.
Others echoed her view, but their darting eyes and quick answers
revealed something different: fear. No one else interviewed outside the
church was willing to provide a name.
Many claimed that it was their
first time visiting the chapel.
Residents of the neighborhood’s homes, usually one-story structures with
small gardens on the roofs, were even more wary. Conversations behind
closed doors yielded a portrait of a community, without severe violence,
that nonetheless felt powerless and afraid.
One 33-year-old woman brave enough to say that her name was Natalia said
she wished the chapel had never been built because now she worried
about who attended services, and who might be milling about.
“I don’t go
out at night, and when I see new people I’m worried about their
associations,” she said.
What church officials seem to have missed, she said, is that what sounds
like support is partly the culture of “nadie se mete” — no one gets
involved. Yes, she and others said, the community cooperated with the
church at first, because no one knew who was paying.
But once that
became clearer, said an older woman who would identify herself only as
Mrs. Téllez, how could they have resisted?
“Whether we cooperated or not,” she said, “they would have built it.”
The Catholic Church, the government or the neighborhood — were they too
weak to stamp out the influence of the Zetas’ commander, even by just
removing the plaque?
“Exactly,” Mrs. Téllez said, smiling, seemingly glad someone else said it first. “Exactly.”