‘The Knights Templar’: Mexico’s Newest Drug Cartel [???]
July 25th, 2011Don’t miss the one about La Santa Muerte.
Via: Al Jazeera:
Pictures of the latest objects seized by the police in the Mexican state of Michoacan, revealed that the mysterious ‘Knights Templar” drug cartel is more bizarre than most people imagine.
There were four hooded tunics, with a red cross, a metal helmet, and a pamphlet or Templar rule book. This drug cartel claims to draw inspiration from the medieval Christian warriors who fought to protect Jerusalem and the Holy Grail.
No one knows if its founder, Servando Gomez, a school teacher, was a history enthusiast or simply read the Da Vinci Code.
The rules in the modern day ‘templar bible’ call for observance of ‘gentleman’ like behaviour and respect for women – but also state that any disclosure of knights templar activities will result in the death of the person and his whole family, and confiscation by the cartel of the snitch’s property…
The cartel is like a secret society.
The Mexican Templars have an initiation ritual, which apparently includes dressing up like knights from the Middle Ages, and performing blood pacts.
The cartel recruits drug users and enrolls them in the organisation’s rehabilitation centers; the process is closely monitored and has a strong religious component.
The double standard is striking: the Templars can not take drugs, and yet they run one of the biggest methamphetamines traffic corridors to the United States.
This sort of thing makes all the sense in the world from an organizational standpoint, especially in the greed-driven dog-eat-dog milieu of organized crime/drug cartels/narco-politics.
The initiation aspect, or imparting of “gnosis” (real or imagined), is the truly brilliant part; this sort of loyalty can be used to transcend the debiltating nature of pure greed on loyalty within secretive organizations.
What to do as an aspiring Escobar, to keep your people true?
Make them members of the same “secret society” as you the Big Kahuna, of course. Build affinity and “brotherhood”. And of course, keep the sword sharp and ready to provide the occasional bloody lesson when a brother betrays one of your secrets.
Fealty no longer managed exclusively through fear and intimidation, but also by appealing to the virtues of the individual and offering them a path to greater purpose, even if that purpose is serving as a CIA subcontractor on key routes into the Caribbean.
That a “revised Templar” model is being used says much about the strength inherent in such forms of social contract. When a business model is still being adopted a thousand years later, that’s a pretty good indicator of its efficacy.
After all, look at how the various clubs and societies that make up the ruling elite’s unofficial structures of “governance” are still organized to this very day.
Organized crime and what we are told to believe in as “government” are just two shades of the same damn color. Always have been, always will be.