Many countries have a violence problem, but Mexico is a sensitive country in this sense. The data on violence is devastating and ranges from thefts that have changed the lifestyles of many Mexicans to violence that has blocked access to Mayan ruins or violence by organized crime and drug traffickers.

Within this spiral we can see both the narcostanism of a few decades ago and the cannibalism that emerged in some Mexican cartel rituals and represents a definitive violation of the human body.

NarcostanicsAdolfo Constanzo had a childhood in which spirituality played a very important role. He was baptized a Catholic, but his mother was a nun of the polytheistic Palo Monte religion. Both he and his mother were arrested several times for petty theft, and his mother believed that Constanzo had psychic powers and some superhuman abilities.

He had a magnetic personality and created a cult around himself in Matamoros, Mexico, as if he were some kind of Charles Manson. There he devoted himself to drug trafficking, as well as kidnapping and sacrificial killing. He died at the age of 26 after a shootout with the police, who began investigating the death of a 21-year-old American and were confronted by a bizarre cult that involved kidnapping, torture, exhumation and human sacrifice.

Baptism of fleshThere is no evidence that cannibalism was part of the rituals, but the fact that human sacrifices were involved is perverse enough. Although the story is straight out of a movie (‘Borderland’ is loosely based on his life and HBO has a documentary called ‘La Narcosatánica’), it doesn’t make sense when compared to other cartels’ school of terror.

In a report, one of these hitmen describes how one of these organizations runs a scam. In the initiation ceremony, they make them sleep next to dead bodies, watch them kill other people, and one of the rituals that is done when training hitmen is to feed them human flesh. It has been said before that narco-cannibals do these practices for one purpose: to completely desensitize them and make them not see the target as a human being.

Tamales. Claudio Lommitz is an anthropologist who has been studying organized crime and its practices for years. A few years ago, he explained that forcing new recruits to eat human flesh was a kind of ritual that marked a point of no return once criminal activity began. Cannibalism has always existed, but it is a relatively new ritual when it comes to organized crime in some Mexican groups.

If the hired gunman doesn’t eat the piece, they kill him on the spot. In an interview with the BBC, Lommitz explained that this wasn’t about swallowing blood or eating part of someone else’s heart, but about cooking meaty pieces to put in tamales. Referring to another cartel, he assures that these tamales were “served at a New Year’s party, a banquet where diners were invited to eat human flesh.”

Community. He notes that there is religious symbolism, as if it were a community, and that there are other groups that practice this practice to show the novices that there is no return. So these cases of cannibalism do not only correspond to an isolated practice of a certain criminal group, but are part of the most extreme rituals of some of the most powerful organizations in the country.

And as Claudio assures us, it’s all part of a kind of religious ritual and cult that has changed over time, with criminal groups adopting religious figures as objects of worship: whether they’re figures of Catholicism, twisted versions like Santa Muerte, or the veneration of criminal patterns or beliefs like narcosatánicos and palo monte.

Image | Horacio Cambeiro

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