La Familia is back in the news, now that Attorney General Holder announced the arrest of some 300+ La Familia gang members in the US.
Michael Isikoff’s take is probably the best, since he’s actually willing to write about the religious legitimacy the group enjoys:
The key difference between La Familia and other Mexican cartels is the group’s professed religiosity. Under the tutelage of its spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno-Gonzalez, (a.k.a. “El Más Loco” or The Maddest One), the group forbids drug use among its own people and adopts a “Robin Hood mentality” that seeks to use the proceeds from its illicit activities to benefit the impoverished, said one U.S. law-enforcement official who asked not to be identified talking about the group prior to Holder’s press conference. “They make their people go to church and they don’t want people using drugs in their area.” Moreno-Gonzalez, who remains at large, also requires La Familia members to carry a “spiritual manual” filled with New Age aphorisms. Mexican officials have also found numerous references to Eldredge and his book, Wild at Heart, in La Familia documents.
It bears repeating that La Familia is not an outlier so much as the avant-garde. The utter explosion of Christian communities in the “Global South” is going to provide more and more incentive for these groups to shroud their activity in popular evangelical theology. And so long as they provide the security and services that the state fails to deliver, the legerdemain will work.