Tales of Bloodthirsty Beast Terrify Mexico

The strange saga of the goat-sucking vampire that has captivated--and terrorized--much of Mexico began in a small village in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa.

A local farmer reported that he found 24 of his sheep dead--with bite marks on the neck and their blood sucked dry--after seeing a giant, bat-like creature swoop down on his corral. A Mexican television network was on the scene within hours, broadcasting nationwide that local residents feared that a mysterious, bloodsucking beast was to blame: an extraterrestrial, or worse.

“This created a great panic across the state,” Desiderio Aguilar, Sinaloa’s chief of civil protection, said of last month’s attack.

“Suddenly, normal deaths of chickens and goats and sheep are all being blamed on the goat-sucker. . . . Mothers have quit sending their children to schools for fear they could be attacked on the way. Farmers who used to start work at 4 a.m. to beat the heat aren’t leaving their homes until well after daybreak. Unfortunately, the people are very gullible, and this has generated a collective psychosis.”

And that’s how Mexico’s version of this vampire story began.

Here’s how it spread:

Federal experts rushed to Sinaloa in a vain attempt to stop the vampire rumor in its tracks. They conducted autopsies and announced results showing that coyotes or other natural predators had killed the sheep. Cabinet secretaries appealed for calm; government scientists called for reason.

But in today’s crisis-ridden Mexico, where an ocean of superstition and suspicion lies just beneath a veneer of science and sophistication, it already was too late.

Traumatized by two years of political assassinations, skyrocketing crime, social instability and the worst economic crisis in recent memory, even the best-educated Mexicans were prepared to believe in the beast. And the least-educated were prepared to do anything--even attack the environment--to kill it.

In the weeks since the Sinaloa sheep deaths, the Mexican media have been filled with the nationwide exploits of the chupacabra, or goat-sucker. It has been sighted and blamed for attacks on everything from barnyard chickens to humans in nearly every state.

A Durango farmer said his 32 hens were massacred and sucked dry. A hired hand at the governor’s ranch in Guanajuato said he saw the creature: a yard-high dinosaur kind of thing with fangs, bulging eyes, bat wings, a needled spine and kangaroo legs. And parents in villages nationwide say they’ve been keeping their children home at night.

It was against that backdrop that Abigael Carlos Tobon, a 25-year-old nurse, fell down the stairs earlier this month in this rural hamlet just outside Mexico City. By then, it seems, everyone--her neighbors, her mother, even the national media--was ready to believe almost anything. The story the following day would read that the goat-sucker had struck in Naucalpan and was closing in on the Mexican capital.

“She was on the stairs, and she bent down like this,” Abigael’s brother, Jose, 24, explained on a treacherous, concrete stairway inside the family home. “She fell against the wall. The bone popped out of her arm, and she was screaming, ‘Mama, I fell!’ Because of all this stuff about the animal, my mother heard, ‘Mama, animal!’ and she started yelling that the chupacabra had gotten my sister.

“The arm was terribly broken--it looked like some animal had bitten it off.” And when the neighbors ran in, Jose said, all they saw was the arm and, at that very moment, a black, winged mass--it turned out to be a flock of swallows--flying away through the dusk.

“And that’s how the rumor started here,” he recalled.

Even well-educated Mexicans like Jose--a graduate student in civil engineering at the capital’s National Autonomous University of Mexico--are vulnerable right now to legends like that of the goat-sucker.

“I think yes--it exists,” Jose maintained. “It just didn’t attack my sister.”

Jose is certainly not alone.

A few miles away from his family’s mountainside home, in a sophisticated Mexican capital bristling with skyscrapers, satellite dishes and computer links, the creature has become the hottest conversation topic everywhere from street-corner kiosks to suburban mansions.

Computer-graphics designers have produced widely published composite drawings of the creature based on “eyewitness” accounts. Not just one but two goat-sucker “Web pages” that were opened on the Internet after similar attacks on goats in Puerto Rico earlier this year have become the rage among the rich. The original victims in Puerto Rico gave the creature its name, but the widespread rumors in Mexico have given it its fame.

Radio stations have been playing at least two different hard-driving merengue tunes dedicated to the chupacabra. And local markets have begun selling goat-sucker dolls, cuddly in a terrifying way.

“It says a lot about the culture here. The Mexican has a great capacity for fantasy,” observed prominent Mexican author and social analyst Guadalupe Loaeza. “And surrealistic things do happen in Mexico.

“But, with the economic crisis, the assassinations and all the terrible things that have been happening here, there is also a climate right now to believe in chupacabras. With everything that has happened, people believe anything can happen. The ground was prepared for this.”

Loaeza, an expert on Mexico’s wealthy and intellectual elite, described a dinner party she attended recently in Mexico City’s most exclusive neighborhood. Among the guests: two university professors, a national political commentator and a Harvard-educated economist. The subject: the goat-sucker.

Here’s a taste of the dialogue, as recounted by Loaeza:

“With respect to the goat-sucker, the other day I thought that, in reality, it had been created thanks to the pollution in Mexico City,” the economist said. “Or perhaps it was born in one of those garbage dumps on the road to Puebla, where diapers, soda cans, pizza boxes, newspapers and plastic bottles accumulate.”

“What if the government invented it to distract us so that we wouldn’t think about the crisis anymore?” one of the professors chimed in. “These guys are capable of anything.”

“Or why not think of it as a messenger,” the other professor added, “that is coming here to tell us how to govern the country?”

And no one at the table laughed.

“Everyone was so serious. That’s why I was so scared when I left,” Loaeza recalled. “I think a lot of it is because of this economic crisis we’ve been living through for a year and a half now. . . . We’re all a little lost; we’ve lost our compass. And I think that mood makes us react this way.”

In the Mexican countryside, the impact of the reaction has been more severe than idle dinner chat.

Driven by genuine panic, peasants armed with torches have been attacking caves in some areas of the country to burn out bats, forcing a Mexican Cabinet secretary to publicly denounce the practice as a threat to rural ecosystems.

Environment Secretary Julia Carabias Lillo and other federal officials have been citing a battery of scientific reports and autopsies from throughout the country that have accounted for every alleged goat-sucker attack, attributing each to one of an array of drought-starved predators--coyotes, wild dogs, cats.

In the Sinaloa birthplace of Mexico’s goat-sucker legend, scientists from the biology department of a local university and experts from the state zoo formed a team of 15 investigators--backed by 25 members of a police SWAT team--to lay traps and gather the most minute evidence to support the official wild-predator hypothesis.

The team even put fresh sheep in the corral targeted in the first attack and posted two observers for an all-night vigil.

“Late at night, a few wild dogs showed up and attacked the sheep--leaving the same marks found on the first dead sheep,” said Aguilar, the civil protection chief. “They captured the dogs and showed them to the townspeople. They went to the other municipalities where there had been attacks and came up with the same results. And a man who claimed to have been attacked by the goat-sucker . . . later admitted he had gotten into a brawl.”

Still, science couldn’t dent the goat-sucker rumor.

“There is just this huge psychosis,” Aguilar said. “You see it everywhere, even though everywhere we go we prove that there aren’t any extraterrestrials or vampires.”