They would all cross themselves as properly practicing Catholics did and then eat the feast prepared, while the peasants in the nearby village starved or got by on half rations, because their output of refined cocaine was low for the month.
Despite this imposed hardship on the poor, the family was blessed regularly by the local priest, because after all hadn't they put a new roof on the mission building and gave generously of their pocket change every mass. After dinner the cartel lord would beg leave of his family claiming business in town as the reason.
He'd choose one sports car out of his collection of twenty seven and motor leisurely to where his lieutenants were holding a man accused of stealing something from him. They'd beat the man for hours, until he would confess to anything just to escape the pain of the next hit.
A lieutenant would step forward and slit his stomach open and in horror the tortured man would watch his entrails spill out onto the floor as those in attendance of his last moments alive would laugh and make fun of his look and cry of abject horror, as the man watched himself die.
It was never really a matter of the man's guilt or innocence, but rather just a reminder to the lower peasant class of the abject power and influence of the cartel's leadership. The message of the cartel's heavy handed tactics, 'they could do anything they wanted to so don't get in the way and do as they said and you might die anyway, because your life is not your own and isn't worth much anyway'.
The cartel lord would wash up and head back to enjoy his children's evening theatrical recital followed by a night of enjoying his expensively put together wife. In the early hours of the morning he would bumble about online trying to figure out how to invest his latest installment of drug money best and worry about the rise and fall of his stock options. In the morning another body would lie in a roadside ditch unreported, even as the victim's family was kept from openly mourning for the loss of their loved one.
Somewhere in America a concerned couple would step into a hospital room and find their former honor roll student lying on a bed an almost unrecognizable pile of bones and skin, as she clings onto a life of lost opportunities and broken dreams.
They'd had no idea this was happening to the daughter they both loved. Who would do this to their precious daughter?
The answer, the daughter did it to herself. She'd gambled her future for a temporary feeling, while the cartel lord who had helped to steal her innocence decided on the color of number twenty eight of his sports car collection, as his wife lay spent on the bed behind him worn out from her efforts of pleasuring him.