Smugglers called upon ritual magic

When U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officers arrived at Rancho Santa Elena, west of Matamoros, on April 11, 1989 they were not quite sure what to think.

The officers, who were investigating drug dealers, discovered mass graves of victims they sacrificed. However, they also found evidence of "Palo Mayombe," an imported Afro-Caribbean religion. It would be engrained into their memories.

Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, the ringleader of the drug gang, gave the religion a "bad name" in the "self-styled" manner in which he practiced it, anthropologist Tony Zavaleta said.

"You might have a tradition that runs through a ritual, but it is basically going to be self-styled. A Catholic priest or evangelical minister has rituals, but then they have their individual personalities, likes and dislikes and the manner of delivering their message and that brings another overtone in what they do," Zavaleta said.

"It is no different in these practices," he added.

Zavaleta, who now serves as vice-president of external affairs at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, described Palo Mayombe as a "first cousin" of "Santería," also an Afro-Caribbean religion with its own set of rituals and initiation rites.

"It's all directly related to magical beliefs that you can control spirits to do your bidding, to effect the outcome of something," he said.

Constanzo, leader of the group that kidnapped and killed Mark J. Kilroy in March 1989, was an initiated "palero," a person who practices Palo Mayombe. He also was a "padrino," one who has reached the level of a high priest in Palo Mayombe.

Palo Mayombe "requires a blood sacrifice, generally a chicken or goat. You have to go to the forest and cut certain sticks or "palos" that are believed to have medicinal and magical properties and stick them into the ‘nganga,' " said Zavaleta.

"And you have to be constantly feeding it," he said of the nganga, or cauldron, a principle component in the practice of Palo Mayombe.

But in Constanzo's twisted mind, it was through human sacrifice that he captured spirits in his nganga.

The spirits were then able to protect him and his followers. His followers believed they were invisible to law enforcement and that bullets wouldn't hurt them.

Fifteen bodies were ultimately uncovered. Some of the victims had been killed in the conduct of the drug trade, but others, as Kilroy, were randomly selected and sacrificed to feed the nganga.

As Zavaleta sees it, what Constanzo and his followers practiced went beyond black magic. "In black magic, you can hire someone to do a spell to kill someone, but they don't kill them with their hands," Zavaleta said.

Constanzo was a "psychopathic serial killer," Zavaleta assessed. "He went to the dark," Zavaleta said.

He has met with Palo Mayombe practitioners during the past 20 years in the Rio Grande Valley, other Texas locations and Mexico City and, "They all, with no exception just lament what Constanzo did and he caused them so much harm and so much damage (to their religion)."

Zavaleta said he recently talked to a "santero," a person who practices Santería, who also is a "palero" and a "padrino." And in talking about the 20th anniversary of the Rancho Santa Elena massacres "he went into a rant about Constanzo, about ‘ese loco,' " Zavaleta recounted.

"There is evil everywhere. In Catholicism, we have this flip side of what is called folk Catholicism. While we have the Catholic priest denounce ‘curanderismo,' everybody nods - and then they see the ‘curandero' (healer)," he added. Curanderismo is a mixture of religious and folk treatments for physical and spiritual ills.

Santeria also has a presence in the Rio Grande Valley.

Just less than a month ago, Zavaleta was traveling on U.S. Highway 4 on a Sunday morning when he spotted a white bag in the middle of the highway's intersection with FM 802. " ‘Oh, I gotta see this,' " he told himself.

He pulled to the side of the road, picked the bag up and pulled it to the side of the street. "Inside the street, there was a decapitated rooster," he recalled. "I said, ‘Oh, my goodness.' "

In some rituals, the sacrifice is placed in the middle of crossroads. "That's less than 30 days ago. There is some sort of witchcraft or some sort of Santeria ritual going on in Brownsville, Texas," he said.

Insofar as the bag, "I left it by the side of the road. I wasn't going to put it in my truck."