Mass arrest

Big time meth distributor Miguel Angel Beraza Villa, aka “La Troca,” along with 33 of his friends and associates, was arrested Sunday in Apatzingan, Michocan. Two hundred federal agents, two Black Hawk heliocopters, an airplane and a couple armored trucks were sent to arrest the baddies, which is all to the good, though the Catholic Church saw the raid as showing a lack of respect.

It seems La Troca and company were at a Quinceanera Mass, and disrupting church services in such a spectacular fashion was considered more than just bad form.

I don’t think this is just some arcane argument over the theological implications of an interrupted Mass, or over any specific concern for the souls of congregants whose religious obligations go unfilled because of state intervention.  I think at least in some minds this was seen as an attack on Mexican tradition — and the peculiar tendency of Mexicans to think in historical terms.    One of the more important incidents in the buildup to the  Cristero War was almost exactly 80 years ago — 4 August 1926 to be exact — when  240 soldiers stormed a parish church in Sahuayo, killing the priest and a number of congregants.

The Cristeros, mostly rural, were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned by the Federal Government in the late 1920s.  While the Cristero War most resembled the bloody Vendée revolt after the French revolution (in that it also pitted  outnumbered traditional peasants and reactionaries against the Revolutionary state), blood feuds between the traditionalists and the modernists are nothing new in Mexico:  one reason the Zapatistas were taken as seriously as they were in 1994.  The gangsters, in many ways are trying to hold on to their rural lifestyle any way they can — and if that means producing meth, or growing marijuana, — so be it, as more people think than we realize.

The Cristeros have not completely faded into history.   Despite a settlement (described as one cynic as meaning “the church is deaf, and the state is blind”) worked out in 1929 between the Mexican Government and the Vatican, brokered by Dwight Morrow and the Bishop of Galveston/Houston, there is tension from time to time, and the memory of what the Church saw as persecution, and the State as foreign intervention, runs deep.

The music of the Himno Cristero was recorded some time in the 1950s, the photos are from the war, showing several of what are today considered saints and martyrs of the Catholic Chuch.