Sporting gloves and a red ribbon to ward off evil, Ecuadoran police raiding a drug den apprehensively inspect an altar to Santa Muerte -- a Mexican death saint adopted by local gangs as their own talisman. The eerie statue of a skeleton shrouded in a cape -- a scythe in her right hand and a globe of Earth in her left -- is the latest in a fast-growing number of Santa Muerte shrines found in criminal hideouts in the western city of Duran. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES