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Speaker 1: Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is normally about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. However, as I think you can tell by the opening music, you're listening to a very special episode today about El Chupacabras. I'm Carlos Barrios Polanco, and I'm at an undisclosed location outside somewhere in Puerto Rico where my only company are the creatures of the night and the sweet music that they make. Also, my dog is here with me, and she's pretty chill. The reason that I'm out here is that I wanted to set the scene for this episode by being in the same headspace and meat space as all of those people that claim to have seen something eating their livestock and draining their blood 32 years ago. And so far, I can definitely see why a person might see something, probably a dog or a mongoose, ripping the throats or biting the necks of their cows, then attributing it to something that they could not explain. If you spend any time in the middle of the woods, away from the noise and lights of the city, it's easy for your mind to play tricks on you. Especially if hundreds of years of colonialism and societal and economic stress have your mind reeling. it would be easy to think that something was stalking you out here. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So what even is a chupacabras anyway? Well, in Spanish, it's called chupacabras, which often gets translated as goat sucker in English, which has always rubbed me the wrong way because it's cabras as in multiple goats. So it should actually be goat sucker. That's just a quibble I've had for ages that I'm happy to share with you right now. I'm sure that I must have seen something about the chupacabras on the History Channel, but my first interaction with the chupacabras as a cultural artifact was probably the 2003 direct-to-DVD movie Scooby-Doo and the Monster of Mexico, which is like really funny to me because it's actually the monster of Puerto Rico and everybody else just ripped us off. I should say up front that I'm not a believer. Although I think the truth is out there, the truth is that the Chupacabra is fake, a shape-shifting creature of the mind, not an extraterrestrial creature of the night. However, while it's not real, the animal attacks and the hysteria they caused, as well as the enduring obsession with it in some circles, I think, is really interesting because it is kind of the perfect boogeyman manifestation of a lot of the colonial history here and all over the world, honestly. Heard the book Tracking the Chupacabra, the Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore by Benjamin Radford, which was a huge source for this episode and was way more serious than I expected it to be, there's three versions of this blood-sucking beast. The first is the original, the Puerto Rican version that is about three to four feet tall with spines or feathers running down its back that also has some kind of reptilian look to it that was first quote-unquote seen in the small town of Canoanas in 1995. The second is more of a dog-slash-coyote-looking thing that's been seen up and down the American continent, but mostly on the Mexico-US borderlands and Latin America. Several corpses of this type of chupacabra have been found in that area, and pretty much every single time it ends up being some type of animal with mange. Meanwhile, the third version is a catch-all for any type of unidentified animal that can carry the blame for an unexplained attack pretty much anywhere in the world. For this episode, I'm mainly going to be talking about the Puerto Rican version with a little bit of context here and there about the other versions. So the first quote unquote sighting of the Chupacabra occurred in August 1995 in the small town of Canoanas in the center north part of the archipelago. There had previously been attacks on livestock that year that had left them with two bite marks in the neck and without a single drop of blood. But this was the first time that it was seen. The woman who saw it, Madeline Torrentino, claimed that she saw the beast from a window from her house alongside her mother. And she didn't get a sighting of a piece of it caught in the moonlight as it slipped into the darkness. No, she got such a good look that she was able to describe it in incredible detail. Her tracking the chupacabra, quoting the book Chupacabra and Other Mysteries by Scott Corrales, which I cannot find an ebook for, so I'm trusting Radford on this. It had dark gray or black eyes that ran up its temples, and went up into its sides. It walked like a human and its arms were, quote, drawn back in an attack position as though it were a TV monster, end quote. Keep that in mind for later, by the way. It had long skinny fingers and close cropped hair all over its body and skinny legs that had three separate toes like a goose. It never opened its mouth and had feathers running down its back that were flat. Tolentino even got a close enough look to see its genitals, or I should say lack thereof. According to Corrales' book, she somehow got on the floor from her window and managed to see that its genitals were sealed, even having time to make a joke to her mom about how it might have pooped through its mouth. According to the book, a young boy who worked for Tolentino's husband was also in the house and he sprinted out to catch the beast, even managing to do so and get close enough to perform a an impromptu dental inspection, because he opened its mouth and saw fangs. However, it eventually got away. From seeing the covers of Corrales' books, they are truly wild-looking, and from what I can tell, they're pretty much all written from the perspective of a person who believes, or at least wants you to believe, that the cryptids and aliens described in them are real. Meanwhile, Radford's book is written by a skeptic, a person who's open to the idea and but is actually trying to use a scientific method to see if the chupacabra is real. From reading Radford's book, he kind of has some serious beef with Corrales. And in some instances of the book, you can really see the contempt come through. Anyway, tracking the chupacabra points out several inconsistencies in Tolentino's statement. First, it moved like a robot, but then it ran, then hopped, then seemed to float. Also, she was watching from the window but was able to get to the floor to see its genitals. It's possible that she said window but she meant like a sliding door in her house. But yeah, it's improbable. Also, the fact that the boy managed to catch the creature and inspect it is wild. And when Radford interviewed Tolentino in 2010, she said that that never happened. The kid went out to find it, but he didn't actually see it. So it's unclear where that description came from. To let the cat out of the bag quickly, per Radford's book, the creature that Tolentino saw in the darkness was actually a half-remembered and more reptilian version of the creature Sil from the 1995 Roger Donaldson film Species. Sil was played by Natasha Henstridge and designed by H.R. Giger. Yeah, the guy who designed the xenomorphs is the reason that the chupacabra exists. Tolentino quote-unquote saw the chupacabra in August, and Species had come out just a month before, in July. And if you look at pictures of Syl and the chupacabra drawn from Tolentino's memories, there's an uncanny resemblance there. I know that this is an audio medium, but I'll publish pictures on Blue Sky whenever this episode drops, and you'll see it. Part of the movie had even been filmed in Puerto Rico, and one of the first images presented in the film is the Arecibo telescope, a gigantic radio telescope that was destroyed by Hurricane Maria in 2017 that had actually been used to send the first ever signals into space in 1974. Tolentino was even asked about the film, but her reaction was interesting, to say the least. In a 1996 interview with Lucy Pla and José Manuel Rodríguez, Highlighted by tracking the Chupacabra, Tolentino said that Sill's resemblance to the Chupacabra was, quote, really impressive, end quote. And she wondered, quote, how can they make a movie like that when these things are happening in Puerto Rico, end quote. I really do not want this to come off as being mean to Tolentino, because we've all seen weird stuff in the woods that we can't explain, told a few friends, and then forgot about it. But the reason that Tolentino's tall tale became the myth that it did is because the news media absolutely pounced on her story and took it to insane heights, attributing any and all mysterious occurrences involving cattle mutilation or unexplained attacks or anything along those lines to the chupacabra. Before Tolentino saw, quote unquote, the chupacabras, there had been other attacks that were retroactively attributed to the chupacabras, and it slowly became known. a boogeyman that was at the scene of everything that could not have an easy or normal explanation. I should also say that the name Chupacabras was reportedly coined by comedian Silverio Perez, although that's disputed by some. Shortly after Tolentino's encounter with the Chupacabra, she described the Chupacabra to artist Jorge Martín, whose drawing made the front page of El Nuevo Día according to Tracking the Chupacabra. And Noelia is our paper of record, so this was a big deal. And although I can't find this front page anymore, as a nation, we're pretty bad at archiving the past and it's not really easily accessible online. From reading the book, their coverage seems to have been significantly less sensationalist than other local papers. Although I did manage to find an article from 2010 whose headline reads, quote, two chupacabra attacks reported, end quote. So your mileage may vary. However, the chupacabra reached worldwide fame when talk show host Cristina Saralegui aired a story about the chupacabra on El Show de Cristina, which aired across the Spanish-speaking world. Saralegui even had the mayor of Canobanas, José Chemo Soto, who was up for re-election to talk about his experience hunting the chupacabra in his municipality, which is something that he became super famous for in that late 90s period. And it helped him a lot because he was re-elected all the way to 2004. It was a publicity stunt, clear and simple, but it worked. Per the book, Governing Spirits, Religion, Miracles, and Spectacles in Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1898-1956, by Renaldo Román, he eventually came to be called Chemo Jones because of his hunt for the bloodsucker. It was clear to everyone this was a publicity stunt, but everybody went along with it, including more than 200 volunteers, scores of journalists, and off-duty police officers that accompanied him on a hunt on October 29, 1995. Wait, you hear that? Is that something moving in the woods? Wait, no, no, no. It's just ads. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, where we're talking about the chupacabra. Even though not all Puerto Ricans believed in this blood-sucking beast, urban and international media believe almost always portrayed these rural folks as being a mass of fools that believed in mysticism and this extraterrestrial beast. So there was always a very real class aspect to the whole coverage of this Chupacabra. Per the book Tracking the Chupacabra, quote, when reading accounts of the Chupacabra in Puerto Rico, I often came across phrases like, quote, the Chupacabra terrorized the island, end quote, or quote, fear gripped Puerto Rico, end quote, or, quote, the island populace was near fever pitch, end quote. There is, of course, some truth to this description, but mystery-mongering hyperbole aside, it is not accurate to suggest that the entire Puerto Rican population, or even a majority of it, was gripped in terror over the goat sucker. Of course, some individuals and groups grew very concerned over the mystery, but most Puerto Ricans especially city dwellers, went about their daily lives giving little thought or concern to the creature that they had heard about, mostly in backyard gossip and tabloids. If El Nuevo Día and Cristina brought the creature to mainstream attention, El Vocero, which is now a respectable newspaper but was a lurid tabloid back then, is what quote-unquote created the chupacabra in the popular imagination. Per Governing Spirits, El Vocero lifted dozens and dozens of stories about chupacabra attacks, adding details to every single one that in hindsight were clearly just kind of made up. One such story highlighted in Tracking the Chupacabra is about a five-year-old girl almost being abducted by the beast, but then she managed to escape and it raised her IQ to a genius level. This story was seemingly confirmed by a police officer to El Vocero, which saw it fit to print. We're going to talk a little bit more later about people in positions of authority confirming Chupacabra, but this was the type of thing that flooded El Vocero newspapers at the time. When I spoke to a friend who was alive at the time this was happening, he told me that El Vocero's tabloidness and propensity for publishing the most lurid pictures of accidents and murders led people to say that if you squeezed the newspaper, it would bleed. Ironically enough, per Tracking the Chupacabra, the majority of claims that animals were left without blood were published by El Bosero, without really any proof or an autopsy being performed. Quoting from Radford here, It is likely that if the animal's owners expressed any doubts that their animals had been vampirized, the tabloid reporter would have no reservations about massaging the facts and selecting the quotes that would make for a better story. A farmer or housewife who excitedly swears that the goat they found had absolutely been drained of every single drop of blood makes for a better story than one who isn't sure, or who admits he or she didn't really look. End quote. Mass hysteria is often caused by mass media covering an event badly, essentially a failure to perform journalism. Each instance of the chupacabra getting attention made it spread wider and wider until it was absolutely inescapable. Yet very little of this coverage attempted to show that it wasn't real. Any mysterious thing was now the result of the Chupacabra because it was the new thing that everybody knew about and the creature that everybody was telling you to be very, very, very afraid about all the time. Actually, the animated 100% real documentary Paranoia Agent deals with mass hysteria spreading throughout Japan as a result of a mysterious boy attacking people with a bat. Highly recommended. El Vocero has a long history of making up stuff to sell papers. In fact, El Vocero's first year of publication was marked by another vampire creature boosting its numbers. In 1975, there were unexplained attacks in the western municipality of Moca that also reportedly left animals without blood. This creature was called El Vampiro de Moca, the Vampire of Moca. El Vocero latched onto this story like a tick and published dozens of stories that would come to foreshadow their coverage of El Chupacabra. Although they were admonished for their coverage at the time by editors from other newspapers, they said they were just reporting the stories out, just effects. Although they later acknowledged it did lead them to reach a circulation of nearly 90,000 in their first year, according to Governing Spirits. which is a fuckton for a small tabloid in an archipelago that at the time had a population of less than 3 million people. So we see how history kind of repeats itself with El Chupacabra by analyzing El Vocero's actions during the time of El Vampiro de Moca. Both times, they knew that by focusing on sensationalism and obscurantism, it could make money, which is a lot of the reason that these myths spread. By the way, if you speak Spanish, the great podcast El Hilo did an episode in March of this year about El Vampiro de Moca called, quote, El Vampiro Entre Nosotros, end quote. That's excellent and was a big source for this section of the episode. So, 20 years before the Chupacabra struck, Puerto Ricans were already familiar with another bloodsucker. And although the natural inclination is to think that the Vampiro de Moca is just the Chupacabra, from what I've read, people mostly view them as two separate creatures. that show there are unexplained things going bump in the night in Puerto Rico, and that the government was either mostly powerless to do something about it or largely uninterested in doing so. Speaking of the government, there's an even older story than the Vampiro de Moca that had already created a strong association between the government and vampirism on the archipelago. First, to set the scene, Puerto Rico has been an important U.S. military stronghold since the late 1930s because of its strategic location that allows the military to project force towards Latin America. The archipelago eventually became an incredibly important part of U.S. military strategy in the Atlantic. At its peak, there were 20 separate installations that occupied roughly 13% of all arable land in the archipelago. Per a master's thesis written by Robert Jordan in 2008, for the University of Texas at Dallas titled El Chupacabra, Icon of Resistance to U.S. Imperialism. The biggest installation was the Roosevelt Road's Naval Station, which was eventually closed in 2004 but was reopened last year. The U.S. military also occupied the island municipalities of Vieques and Culebra, which they used for all types of training, including using it as a bombing range. Per The Guardian, they dropped up to 3 million pounds of ordnance in Vieques per year. This includes 263 rounds of depleted uranium-tipped munitions that were quote-unquote accidentally expended during a training exercise on February 19, 1999 per Navy Facilities Command. Today, about two-thirds of Vieques are natural reserves that the public can't access because of all the unexploited ordnance there, and its people have sky-high cancer rates compared to the rest of the archipelago's population. I talk a little bit more about all this in my episodes about U.S. colonies, so check that out if you want to learn more. Vieques and Culebra were so important to U.S. military strategy that in the 1960s, the U.S. government attempted to purchase the entirety of the two island municipalities for bombing practice. This would have involved moving the nearly 9,000 people that live there to another part of the archipelago, as well as exhuming all the bodies in the cemeteries, some which had been there for over 200 years, and reburying them somewhere else. Because of this wild and weird ask, the negotiations were codenamed the Dracula Plan, Plan Dracula, by Puerto Rican officials. Although the plan never came to pass, for El Chupacabra, icon of resistance, this early association between the U.S. government with a blood-sucking monster was prophetic for the way it viewed the bloodsuckers to come. Before I continue citing all the ways U.S. presence influenced the Chupacabra, It's worth noting that the Navy left Culebra in 1975 and Vieques in 2003 after years of sustained and massive protests. And per Jordan's thesis, Chupacabra sightings dropped off massively after Puerto Ricans were able to wrestle more control over their land from the U.S. But you know what you can't wrestle away control from? These products and services. And also, I'm sure they won't suck your blood out like the Chupacabra did. But maybe watch out a little bit. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, where we are diving into the origin story of the Chupacabra. Since the Chupacabra came into the popular imagination, its origin has always been linked to the U.S. government. The most prominent rumor goes that it was created for genetic experimentation on extraterrestrial life at a secret laboratory in El Junque, which is the largest rainforest on our small archipelago. Many people consider it to be the last bastion of pristine and untouched Puerto Rico. And while that's not really true, it certainly is beautiful, and hiking the two to three hours or so that it takes to reach the top is something I would recommend to everyone. While the Chupacabra definitely did not emerge from a secret lab in Ajunque, there were definitely strange experiments taking place there, but of the man-made horrors beyond my comprehension variety. There are two big ones. The first was related to Project Plowshares, wherein the Atomic Energy Commission was attempting to quote-unquote peacefully employ atomic explosions to create canals and harbors in Panama. As part of this project, scientists from the University of Puerto Rico injected trees and other vegetation in El Yunque with radioactive isotopes to see what would happen to them. Meanwhile, the second big one is the testing of Agent Orange, Agent White, and other tactical herbicides there and in six other locations because our vegetation resembled that of Southeast Asia. According to a document titled, quote, the history of the U.S. Department of Defense programs for the testing, evaluation, and storage of tactical herbicides, end quote, written by Alvin L. Young in 2006 and submitted to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense. As far as I've been alive, there's always been rumors of creepy things going on in Ajunque. It's a popular spot for UFO sightings as well, which people often attribute to the presence of U.S. military installations there. It's worth noting that El Junque's facilities were also used as a guided missile operations control unit and a joint surveillance site in the latter half of the 20th century, which is part of the reason that people always thought there was some secret spy shit going on that was calling the aliens to El Junque. Actually, my dad has this story that he's told me and my siblings maybe a dozen times over our lives where him and his best friend were confused for men in black at an El Junque stargazing slash UFO event. Because he was wearing aviators at night and a bomber jacket? Just the type of beliefs that can be inspired by something you can't quite explain. The Chupacabra being from a secret facility also ties in well enough with the plot of Species, which inspired that first sighting. Lauren Derby, in a paper titled, quote, Imperial Secrets, Vampires, and Nationhood in Puerto Rico, end quote, says that, quote, The Chupacabras reflects a contradiction very peculiar to Puerto Rico, which is a very small island with an extraordinarily pervasive array of U.S. military installations, most of which are called as top secret and therefore declared off-limits to locals, end quote. Per Derby's paper, quote, disproportionate number of Chupacabra narratives have been generated by the inside-class outsiders who have some access to the secrets of power or police its margins. End quote. These are mostly retired army personnel or police. I would wager to guess that, like many other cryptids, the tail of the chupacabra was used, whether consciously or unconsciously, to keep people away from these restricted government areas. Essentially, el chupacabra was a psyop. You heard it here first. Tales of government experimentation weigh heavy on the Puerto Rican mind. In 1941, the American doctor Cornelius Rhodes, who worked on Puerto Rican patients, wrote a letter saying that he had, quote, done his best to further the process of extermination by killing eight and transplanting cancer into several more. Although an investigation found no evidence of unethical human experimentation, The rumor that he did inject people with cancer cells remains very permanent in Puerto Rican society. Meanwhile, between the 1930s and the 1970s, Puerto Rican officials, with support of the U.S. government, pushed a massive campaign of sterilization because of fears of overpopulation. Women who got la operación, the operation, as it was colloquially called, were promised a solution to poverty and economic stability. Many were also led to believe that the operation was reversible. but this proved not to be the case. About a third of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age were sterilized during that time. There's a very good documentary that I'll link in the sources called La Operación by Ana María García that talks about the sterilization campaign. Really recommend you take a look at it if you're interested in more context. Although both the peak of militarism and La Operación happened decades before the first Chupacabra sighting, it's within this blaze of government secrets and conspiracy and U.S. colonialism that tall tales of the Chupacabra bursting out of the woods and laying waste to livestock came about all throughout the archipelago. It's worth highlighting that economically and socially, things were not going very well for Puerto Ricans at the time that the Chupacabra myth started. The archipelago had been undergoing a drought that lasted from mid-1994 to 1997, per reporting from El Vocero. It's respectable now, I swear. This drought was one of the worst for PR in the 20th century, and it reached its peak in 1995. It caused 300 million in damages, and approximately 165 million corresponded to the agricultural sector, aka the rural communities who owned the livestock that was being attacked by the Chupacabras. Meanwhile, a hurricane was also bearing down on the archipelago in 1995. Hurricane Mariling hit Puerto Rico in September 1995. as a Category 2 hurricane and caused about $ 2. 5 billion in damages between PR and the U.S. Virgin Islands and 13 deaths between the two. At the same time, rural communities who largely depended on agriculture to sustain themselves had been forced to leave that work behind and move towards industrial jobs as part of Operation Bootstrap. This fragmentation was built on by the encroachment of urbanism throughout much of the region surrounding the capital municipality of San Juan. It's important to point out that Canovanas has experienced marked urban and commercial development over the past 30 or 40 years, to the point that what the municipality is most known for to people like me who don't live there is because of its gigantic outlet mall that started construction in 1998. Meanwhile, Orocovis and Morovis, where the first unexplained livestock attack happened, are still isolated rural communities that have been more or less forgotten by the central government. to the point that in 2019, Morovis had to sue our central water utility because of continued lack of access to potable water. So when rural communities composed mostly of lower or middle class people started seeing their livestock, a kind of physical manifestation of what little wealth they had, being attacked by something, it caused a panic. And within that panic, the Chupacabra emerged as the quote-unquote real thing that was hurting them, that they could theoretically find and stop, versus the growing environmental, societal, and economic crisis built on top of centuries of colonialism. Through the creation of the chupacabra, people were able to maintain their collective identity and impose a sense of control at a point where they felt powerless. Per tracking the chupacabra, quote, it was within this desperate environment of perceived U.S. intrusion and imperialism that the symbol of the chupacabra became the vessel into which many of the rural people of Puerto Rico poured all their fears and apprehensions about the strange industrial world seemingly thrust upon them by the United States. However, those rural municipalities of Puerto Rico where the U.S. lacked a major military or economic presence during this drought period did not receive any visits from the Chupacabra. Furthermore, large urban areas such as San Juan, where industrial or service-based livelihoods were less affected by the drought found elsewhere in the country, did not report sightings of the creature, end quote. In a sense, the creation of the Chupacabra also left the government that was not doing anything at all about the crisis its people were facing off the hook. For Chema Jones, he even used it as a way to ride into re-election for three more cycles. However, for the people actually affected by the drought and the random attacks on their livestock, probably by wild dogs... The Chupacabra was a way to explain their misery, but it didn't provide a solution to their problems. They were left to fester and just have to take even more pressure onto themselves. The other countries in Latin America where chupacabra sightings were also reported after the Cristina show aired were also suffering from economic and social turmoil at the time. In Mexico, the agricultural industry was suffering... because of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Per an essay by William Calvoquiros titled Sucking Vulnerability, Neoliberalism, the Chupacabras, and the Post-Cold War Years, NAFTA caused the Mexican government to change their constitution to allow the privatization of communal land, which displaced several rural communities. It also deregulated import restrictions and caused an increase in unemployment. The reality of a monster attacking them was undeniable. It wasn't just chickens and goats, but entire communities were displaced because of NAFTA. Similar things were happening up and down the American continent. In the U.S. borderlands, the myth of the Chupacabra came to embody the government's war against the welfare state and rising anti-immigration sentiment. The historian Mike Davis described the Chupacabra phenomenon in California as a byproduct of the increasingly hostile environment for migrants and the violence that the state was imposing on them. Quoting Calvo Quiroz here, at a base level, monsters and the phantasmagoric allow for the out-of-this-world atrocious experiences in daily life to become a collective spectacle that comes to represent the social relations and realities imposed over the community. Therefore, as a collective entity, the Chupacabras calls attention to the atrocities experienced by small farmers and those at the vulnerable and peripheral edges of society. However, as Jordan talks about in his thesis, the Chupacabras can also be seen as a symbol of resistance against the very imperialism that kind of created it. The Chupacabras was a creature so powerful that it could escape the ever-present eye of the state and the encroaching militarism that was affecting Puerto Rico at the time. alleged sightings were happening. Culturally, this has remolded the Chupacabra from predator of the night to protector in some stories, like the comic Beast of Barikeng, where the Chupacabras is actually physically fighting colonialism. To wrap up, Puerto Rico has always had vampires on it, except that they've never been beasts. The most visible of these vampires is the simple mosquito, a vicious bloodsucker that I've been attacked by at least once in the course of writing this essay. It is the deadliest animal in the world and is a victim of dengue fever in my youth. That shit sucks ass. Meanwhile, the second vampire is the continued colonization of the archipelago that has stripped it of so many resources for centuries and continues to do so to this day. Colonialism has always been vampiric, extracting as much as it can with little care to the corpses it leaves in its wake. Although the chupacabra mass hysteria died down at of the century, the forces that shaped its creation are still here and they've become even more acute. Whether it be the unelected fiscal control board imposed by the U.S. government or corrupt Puerto Rican officials, there have always been vampires walking among us. They're just not beasts. They look just like us and their system of oppression has harmed more than any single chupacabra ever could. Thanks for listening. You can find me pretty much everywhere online at Vaquero2XL. That's about it. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is normally about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. However, as I think you can tell by the opening music, you're listening to a very special episode today about El Chupacabras. I'm Carlos Barrios Polanco, and I'm at an undisclosed location outside somewhere in Puerto Rico where my only company are the creatures of the night and the sweet music that they make. Also, my dog is here with me, and she's pretty chill. The reason that I'm out here is that I wanted to set the scene for this episode by being in the same headspace and meat space as all of those people that claim to have seen something eating their livestock and draining their blood 32 years ago. And so far, I can definitely see why a person might see something, probably a dog or a mongoose, ripping the throats or biting the necks of their cows, then attributing it to something that they could not explain. If you spend any time in the middle of the woods, away from the noise and lights of the city, it's easy for your mind to play tricks on you. Especially if hundreds of years of colonialism and societal and economic stress have your mind reeling. it would be easy to think that something was stalking you out here. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So what even is a chupacabras anyway? Well, in Spanish, it's called chupacabras, which often gets translated as goat sucker in English, which has always rubbed me the wrong way because it's cabras as in multiple goats. So it should actually be goat sucker. That's just a quibble I've had for ages that I'm happy to share with you right now. I'm sure that I must have seen something about the chupacabras on the History Channel, but my first interaction with the chupacabras as a cultural artifact was probably the 2003 direct-to-DVD movie Scooby-Doo and the Monster of Mexico, which is like really funny to me because it's actually the monster of Puerto Rico and everybody else just ripped us off. I should say up front that I'm not a believer. Although I think the truth is out there, the truth is that the Chupacabra is fake, a shape-shifting creature of the mind, not an extraterrestrial creature of the night. However, while it's not real, the animal attacks and the hysteria they caused, as well as the enduring obsession with it in some circles, I think, is really interesting because it is kind of the perfect boogeyman manifestation of a lot of the colonial history here and all over the world, honestly. Heard the book Tracking the Chupacabra, the Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore by Benjamin Radford, which was a huge source for this episode and was way more serious than I expected it to be, there's three versions of this blood-sucking beast. The first is the original, the Puerto Rican version that is about three to four feet tall with spines or feathers running down its back that also has some kind of reptilian look to it that was first quote-unquote seen in the small town of Canoanas in 1995. The second is more of a dog-slash-coyote-looking thing that's been seen up and down the American continent, but mostly on the Mexico-US borderlands and Latin America. Several corpses of this type of chupacabra have been found in that area, and pretty much every single time it ends up being some type of animal with mange. Meanwhile, the third version is a catch-all for any type of unidentified animal that can carry the blame for an unexplained attack pretty much anywhere in the world. For this episode, I'm mainly going to be talking about the Puerto Rican version with a little bit of context here and there about the other versions. So the first quote unquote sighting of the Chupacabra occurred in August 1995 in the small town of Canoanas in the center north part of the archipelago. There had previously been attacks on livestock that year that had left them with two bite marks in the neck and without a single drop of blood. But this was the first time that it was seen. The woman who saw it, Madeline Torrentino, claimed that she saw the beast from a window from her house alongside her mother. And she didn't get a sighting of a piece of it caught in the moonlight as it slipped into the darkness. No, she got such a good look that she was able to describe it in incredible detail. Her tracking the chupacabra, quoting the book Chupacabra and Other Mysteries by Scott Corrales, which I cannot find an ebook for, so I'm trusting Radford on this. It had dark gray or black eyes that ran up its temples, and went up into its sides. It walked like a human and its arms were, quote, drawn back in an attack position as though it were a TV monster, end quote. Keep that in mind for later, by the way. It had long skinny fingers and close cropped hair all over its body and skinny legs that had three separate toes like a goose. It never opened its mouth and had feathers running down its back that were flat. Tolentino even got a close enough look to see its genitals, or I should say lack thereof. According to Corrales' book, she somehow got on the floor from her window and managed to see that its genitals were sealed, even having time to make a joke to her mom about how it might have pooped through its mouth. According to the book, a young boy who worked for Tolentino's husband was also in the house and he sprinted out to catch the beast, even managing to do so and get close enough to perform a an impromptu dental inspection, because he opened its mouth and saw fangs. However, it eventually got away. From seeing the covers of Corrales' books, they are truly wild-looking, and from what I can tell, they're pretty much all written from the perspective of a person who believes, or at least wants you to believe, that the cryptids and aliens described in them are real. Meanwhile, Radford's book is written by a skeptic, a person who's open to the idea and but is actually trying to use a scientific method to see if the chupacabra is real. From reading Radford's book, he kind of has some serious beef with Corrales. And in some instances of the book, you can really see the contempt come through. Anyway, tracking the chupacabra points out several inconsistencies in Tolentino's statement. First, it moved like a robot, but then it ran, then hopped, then seemed to float. Also, she was watching from the window but was able to get to the floor to see its genitals. It's possible that she said window but she meant like a sliding door in her house. But yeah, it's improbable. Also, the fact that the boy managed to catch the creature and inspect it is wild. And when Radford interviewed Tolentino in 2010, she said that that never happened. The kid went out to find it, but he didn't actually see it. So it's unclear where that description came from. To let the cat out of the bag quickly, per Radford's book, the creature that Tolentino saw in the darkness was actually a half-remembered and more reptilian version of the creature Sil from the 1995 Roger Donaldson film Species. Sil was played by Natasha Henstridge and designed by H.R. Giger. Yeah, the guy who designed the xenomorphs is the reason that the chupacabra exists. Tolentino quote-unquote saw the chupacabra in August, and Species had come out just a month before, in July. And if you look at pictures of Syl and the chupacabra drawn from Tolentino's memories, there's an uncanny resemblance there. I know that this is an audio medium, but I'll publish pictures on Blue Sky whenever this episode drops, and you'll see it. Part of the movie had even been filmed in Puerto Rico, and one of the first images presented in the film is the Arecibo telescope, a gigantic radio telescope that was destroyed by Hurricane Maria in 2017 that had actually been used to send the first ever signals into space in 1974. Tolentino was even asked about the film, but her reaction was interesting, to say the least. In a 1996 interview with Lucy Pla and José Manuel Rodríguez, Highlighted by tracking the Chupacabra, Tolentino said that Sill's resemblance to the Chupacabra was, quote, really impressive, end quote. And she wondered, quote, how can they make a movie like that when these things are happening in Puerto Rico, end quote. I really do not want this to come off as being mean to Tolentino, because we've all seen weird stuff in the woods that we can't explain, told a few friends, and then forgot about it. But the reason that Tolentino's tall tale became the myth that it did is because the news media absolutely pounced on her story and took it to insane heights, attributing any and all mysterious occurrences involving cattle mutilation or unexplained attacks or anything along those lines to the chupacabra. Before Tolentino saw, quote unquote, the chupacabras, there had been other attacks that were retroactively attributed to the chupacabras, and it slowly became known. a boogeyman that was at the scene of everything that could not have an easy or normal explanation. I should also say that the name Chupacabras was reportedly coined by comedian Silverio Perez, although that's disputed by some. Shortly after Tolentino's encounter with the Chupacabra, she described the Chupacabra to artist Jorge Martín, whose drawing made the front page of El Nuevo Día according to Tracking the Chupacabra. And Noelia is our paper of record, so this was a big deal. And although I can't find this front page anymore, as a nation, we're pretty bad at archiving the past and it's not really easily accessible online. From reading the book, their coverage seems to have been significantly less sensationalist than other local papers. Although I did manage to find an article from 2010 whose headline reads, quote, two chupacabra attacks reported, end quote. So your mileage may vary. However, the chupacabra reached worldwide fame when talk show host Cristina Saralegui aired a story about the chupacabra on El Show de Cristina, which aired across the Spanish-speaking world. Saralegui even had the mayor of Canobanas, José Chemo Soto, who was up for re-election to talk about his experience hunting the chupacabra in his municipality, which is something that he became super famous for in that late 90s period. And it helped him a lot because he was re-elected all the way to 2004. It was a publicity stunt, clear and simple, but it worked. Per the book, Governing Spirits, Religion, Miracles, and Spectacles in Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1898-1956, by Renaldo Román, he eventually came to be called Chemo Jones because of his hunt for the bloodsucker. It was clear to everyone this was a publicity stunt, but everybody went along with it, including more than 200 volunteers, scores of journalists, and off-duty police officers that accompanied him on a hunt on October 29, 1995. Wait, you hear that? Is that something moving in the woods? Wait, no, no, no. It's just ads. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, where we're talking about the chupacabra. Even though not all Puerto Ricans believed in this blood-sucking beast, urban and international media believe almost always portrayed these rural folks as being a mass of fools that believed in mysticism and this extraterrestrial beast. So there was always a very real class aspect to the whole coverage of this Chupacabra. Per the book Tracking the Chupacabra, quote, when reading accounts of the Chupacabra in Puerto Rico, I often came across phrases like, quote, the Chupacabra terrorized the island, end quote, or quote, fear gripped Puerto Rico, end quote, or, quote, the island populace was near fever pitch, end quote. There is, of course, some truth to this description, but mystery-mongering hyperbole aside, it is not accurate to suggest that the entire Puerto Rican population, or even a majority of it, was gripped in terror over the goat sucker. Of course, some individuals and groups grew very concerned over the mystery, but most Puerto Ricans especially city dwellers, went about their daily lives giving little thought or concern to the creature that they had heard about, mostly in backyard gossip and tabloids. If El Nuevo Día and Cristina brought the creature to mainstream attention, El Vocero, which is now a respectable newspaper but was a lurid tabloid back then, is what quote-unquote created the chupacabra in the popular imagination. Per Governing Spirits, El Vocero lifted dozens and dozens of stories about chupacabra attacks, adding details to every single one that in hindsight were clearly just kind of made up. One such story highlighted in Tracking the Chupacabra is about a five-year-old girl almost being abducted by the beast, but then she managed to escape and it raised her IQ to a genius level. This story was seemingly confirmed by a police officer to El Vocero, which saw it fit to print. We're going to talk a little bit more later about people in positions of authority confirming Chupacabra, but this was the type of thing that flooded El Vocero newspapers at the time. When I spoke to a friend who was alive at the time this was happening, he told me that El Vocero's tabloidness and propensity for publishing the most lurid pictures of accidents and murders led people to say that if you squeezed the newspaper, it would bleed. Ironically enough, per Tracking the Chupacabra, the majority of claims that animals were left without blood were published by El Bosero, without really any proof or an autopsy being performed. Quoting from Radford here, It is likely that if the animal's owners expressed any doubts that their animals had been vampirized, the tabloid reporter would have no reservations about massaging the facts and selecting the quotes that would make for a better story. A farmer or housewife who excitedly swears that the goat they found had absolutely been drained of every single drop of blood makes for a better story than one who isn't sure, or who admits he or she didn't really look. End quote. Mass hysteria is often caused by mass media covering an event badly, essentially a failure to perform journalism. Each instance of the chupacabra getting attention made it spread wider and wider until it was absolutely inescapable. Yet very little of this coverage attempted to show that it wasn't real. Any mysterious thing was now the result of the Chupacabra because it was the new thing that everybody knew about and the creature that everybody was telling you to be very, very, very afraid about all the time. Actually, the animated 100% real documentary Paranoia Agent deals with mass hysteria spreading throughout Japan as a result of a mysterious boy attacking people with a bat. Highly recommended. El Vocero has a long history of making up stuff to sell papers. In fact, El Vocero's first year of publication was marked by another vampire creature boosting its numbers. In 1975, there were unexplained attacks in the western municipality of Moca that also reportedly left animals without blood. This creature was called El Vampiro de Moca, the Vampire of Moca. El Vocero latched onto this story like a tick and published dozens of stories that would come to foreshadow their coverage of El Chupacabra. Although they were admonished for their coverage at the time by editors from other newspapers, they said they were just reporting the stories out, just effects. Although they later acknowledged it did lead them to reach a circulation of nearly 90,000 in their first year, according to Governing Spirits. which is a fuckton for a small tabloid in an archipelago that at the time had a population of less than 3 million people. So we see how history kind of repeats itself with El Chupacabra by analyzing El Vocero's actions during the time of El Vampiro de Moca. Both times, they knew that by focusing on sensationalism and obscurantism, it could make money, which is a lot of the reason that these myths spread. By the way, if you speak Spanish, the great podcast El Hilo did an episode in March of this year about El Vampiro de Moca called, quote, El Vampiro Entre Nosotros, end quote. That's excellent and was a big source for this section of the episode. So, 20 years before the Chupacabra struck, Puerto Ricans were already familiar with another bloodsucker. And although the natural inclination is to think that the Vampiro de Moca is just the Chupacabra, from what I've read, people mostly view them as two separate creatures. that show there are unexplained things going bump in the night in Puerto Rico, and that the government was either mostly powerless to do something about it or largely uninterested in doing so. Speaking of the government, there's an even older story than the Vampiro de Moca that had already created a strong association between the government and vampirism on the archipelago. First, to set the scene, Puerto Rico has been an important U.S. military stronghold since the late 1930s because of its strategic location that allows the military to project force towards Latin America. The archipelago eventually became an incredibly important part of U.S. military strategy in the Atlantic. At its peak, there were 20 separate installations that occupied roughly 13% of all arable land in the archipelago. Per a master's thesis written by Robert Jordan in 2008, for the University of Texas at Dallas titled El Chupacabra, Icon of Resistance to U.S. Imperialism. The biggest installation was the Roosevelt Road's Naval Station, which was eventually closed in 2004 but was reopened last year. The U.S. military also occupied the island municipalities of Vieques and Culebra, which they used for all types of training, including using it as a bombing range. Per The Guardian, they dropped up to 3 million pounds of ordnance in Vieques per year. This includes 263 rounds of depleted uranium-tipped munitions that were quote-unquote accidentally expended during a training exercise on February 19, 1999 per Navy Facilities Command. Today, about two-thirds of Vieques are natural reserves that the public can't access because of all the unexploited ordnance there, and its people have sky-high cancer rates compared to the rest of the archipelago's population. I talk a little bit more about all this in my episodes about U.S. colonies, so check that out if you want to learn more. Vieques and Culebra were so important to U.S. military strategy that in the 1960s, the U.S. government attempted to purchase the entirety of the two island municipalities for bombing practice. This would have involved moving the nearly 9,000 people that live there to another part of the archipelago, as well as exhuming all the bodies in the cemeteries, some which had been there for over 200 years, and reburying them somewhere else. Because of this wild and weird ask, the negotiations were codenamed the Dracula Plan, Plan Dracula, by Puerto Rican officials. Although the plan never came to pass, for El Chupacabra, icon of resistance, this early association between the U.S. government with a blood-sucking monster was prophetic for the way it viewed the bloodsuckers to come. Before I continue citing all the ways U.S. presence influenced the Chupacabra, It's worth noting that the Navy left Culebra in 1975 and Vieques in 2003 after years of sustained and massive protests. And per Jordan's thesis, Chupacabra sightings dropped off massively after Puerto Ricans were able to wrestle more control over their land from the U.S. But you know what you can't wrestle away control from? These products and services. And also, I'm sure they won't suck your blood out like the Chupacabra did. But maybe watch out a little bit. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, where we are diving into the origin story of the Chupacabra. Since the Chupacabra came into the popular imagination, its origin has always been linked to the U.S. government. The most prominent rumor goes that it was created for genetic experimentation on extraterrestrial life at a secret laboratory in El Junque, which is the largest rainforest on our small archipelago. Many people consider it to be the last bastion of pristine and untouched Puerto Rico. And while that's not really true, it certainly is beautiful, and hiking the two to three hours or so that it takes to reach the top is something I would recommend to everyone. While the Chupacabra definitely did not emerge from a secret lab in Ajunque, there were definitely strange experiments taking place there, but of the man-made horrors beyond my comprehension variety. There are two big ones. The first was related to Project Plowshares, wherein the Atomic Energy Commission was attempting to quote-unquote peacefully employ atomic explosions to create canals and harbors in Panama. As part of this project, scientists from the University of Puerto Rico injected trees and other vegetation in El Yunque with radioactive isotopes to see what would happen to them. Meanwhile, the second big one is the testing of Agent Orange, Agent White, and other tactical herbicides there and in six other locations because our vegetation resembled that of Southeast Asia. According to a document titled, quote, the history of the U.S. Department of Defense programs for the testing, evaluation, and storage of tactical herbicides, end quote, written by Alvin L. Young in 2006 and submitted to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense. As far as I've been alive, there's always been rumors of creepy things going on in Ajunque. It's a popular spot for UFO sightings as well, which people often attribute to the presence of U.S. military installations there. It's worth noting that El Junque's facilities were also used as a guided missile operations control unit and a joint surveillance site in the latter half of the 20th century, which is part of the reason that people always thought there was some secret spy shit going on that was calling the aliens to El Junque. Actually, my dad has this story that he's told me and my siblings maybe a dozen times over our lives where him and his best friend were confused for men in black at an El Junque stargazing slash UFO event. Because he was wearing aviators at night and a bomber jacket? Just the type of beliefs that can be inspired by something you can't quite explain. The Chupacabra being from a secret facility also ties in well enough with the plot of Species, which inspired that first sighting. Lauren Derby, in a paper titled, quote, Imperial Secrets, Vampires, and Nationhood in Puerto Rico, end quote, says that, quote, The Chupacabras reflects a contradiction very peculiar to Puerto Rico, which is a very small island with an extraordinarily pervasive array of U.S. military installations, most of which are called as top secret and therefore declared off-limits to locals, end quote. Per Derby's paper, quote, disproportionate number of Chupacabra narratives have been generated by the inside-class outsiders who have some access to the secrets of power or police its margins. End quote. These are mostly retired army personnel or police. I would wager to guess that, like many other cryptids, the tail of the chupacabra was used, whether consciously or unconsciously, to keep people away from these restricted government areas. Essentially, el chupacabra was a psyop. You heard it here first. Tales of government experimentation weigh heavy on the Puerto Rican mind. In 1941, the American doctor Cornelius Rhodes, who worked on Puerto Rican patients, wrote a letter saying that he had, quote, done his best to further the process of extermination by killing eight and transplanting cancer into several more. Although an investigation found no evidence of unethical human experimentation, The rumor that he did inject people with cancer cells remains very permanent in Puerto Rican society. Meanwhile, between the 1930s and the 1970s, Puerto Rican officials, with support of the U.S. government, pushed a massive campaign of sterilization because of fears of overpopulation. Women who got la operación, the operation, as it was colloquially called, were promised a solution to poverty and economic stability. Many were also led to believe that the operation was reversible. but this proved not to be the case. About a third of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age were sterilized during that time. There's a very good documentary that I'll link in the sources called La Operación by Ana María García that talks about the sterilization campaign. Really recommend you take a look at it if you're interested in more context. Although both the peak of militarism and La Operación happened decades before the first Chupacabra sighting, it's within this blaze of government secrets and conspiracy and U.S. colonialism that tall tales of the Chupacabra bursting out of the woods and laying waste to livestock came about all throughout the archipelago. It's worth highlighting that economically and socially, things were not going very well for Puerto Ricans at the time that the Chupacabra myth started. The archipelago had been undergoing a drought that lasted from mid-1994 to 1997, per reporting from El Vocero. It's respectable now, I swear. This drought was one of the worst for PR in the 20th century, and it reached its peak in 1995. It caused 300 million in damages, and approximately 165 million corresponded to the agricultural sector, aka the rural communities who owned the livestock that was being attacked by the Chupacabras. Meanwhile, a hurricane was also bearing down on the archipelago in 1995. Hurricane Mariling hit Puerto Rico in September 1995. as a Category 2 hurricane and caused about $ 2. 5 billion in damages between PR and the U.S. Virgin Islands and 13 deaths between the two. At the same time, rural communities who largely depended on agriculture to sustain themselves had been forced to leave that work behind and move towards industrial jobs as part of Operation Bootstrap. This fragmentation was built on by the encroachment of urbanism throughout much of the region surrounding the capital municipality of San Juan. It's important to point out that Canovanas has experienced marked urban and commercial development over the past 30 or 40 years, to the point that what the municipality is most known for to people like me who don't live there is because of its gigantic outlet mall that started construction in 1998. Meanwhile, Orocovis and Morovis, where the first unexplained livestock attack happened, are still isolated rural communities that have been more or less forgotten by the central government. to the point that in 2019, Morovis had to sue our central water utility because of continued lack of access to potable water. So when rural communities composed mostly of lower or middle class people started seeing their livestock, a kind of physical manifestation of what little wealth they had, being attacked by something, it caused a panic. And within that panic, the Chupacabra emerged as the quote-unquote real thing that was hurting them, that they could theoretically find and stop, versus the growing environmental, societal, and economic crisis built on top of centuries of colonialism. Through the creation of the chupacabra, people were able to maintain their collective identity and impose a sense of control at a point where they felt powerless. Per tracking the chupacabra, quote, it was within this desperate environment of perceived U.S. intrusion and imperialism that the symbol of the chupacabra became the vessel into which many of the rural people of Puerto Rico poured all their fears and apprehensions about the strange industrial world seemingly thrust upon them by the United States. However, those rural municipalities of Puerto Rico where the U.S. lacked a major military or economic presence during this drought period did not receive any visits from the Chupacabra. Furthermore, large urban areas such as San Juan, where industrial or service-based livelihoods were less affected by the drought found elsewhere in the country, did not report sightings of the creature, end quote. In a sense, the creation of the Chupacabra also left the government that was not doing anything at all about the crisis its people were facing off the hook. For Chema Jones, he even used it as a way to ride into re-election for three more cycles. However, for the people actually affected by the drought and the random attacks on their livestock, probably by wild dogs... The Chupacabra was a way to explain their misery, but it didn't provide a solution to their problems. They were left to fester and just have to take even more pressure onto themselves. The other countries in Latin America where chupacabra sightings were also reported after the Cristina show aired were also suffering from economic and social turmoil at the time. In Mexico, the agricultural industry was suffering... because of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Per an essay by William Calvoquiros titled Sucking Vulnerability, Neoliberalism, the Chupacabras, and the Post-Cold War Years, NAFTA caused the Mexican government to change their constitution to allow the privatization of communal land, which displaced several rural communities. It also deregulated import restrictions and caused an increase in unemployment. The reality of a monster attacking them was undeniable. It wasn't just chickens and goats, but entire communities were displaced because of NAFTA. Similar things were happening up and down the American continent. In the U.S. borderlands, the myth of the Chupacabra came to embody the government's war against the welfare state and rising anti-immigration sentiment. The historian Mike Davis described the Chupacabra phenomenon in California as a byproduct of the increasingly hostile environment for migrants and the violence that the state was imposing on them. Quoting Calvo Quiroz here, at a base level, monsters and the phantasmagoric allow for the out-of-this-world atrocious experiences in daily life to become a collective spectacle that comes to represent the social relations and realities imposed over the community. Therefore, as a collective entity, the Chupacabras calls attention to the atrocities experienced by small farmers and those at the vulnerable and peripheral edges of society. However, as Jordan talks about in his thesis, the Chupacabras can also be seen as a symbol of resistance against the very imperialism that kind of created it. The Chupacabras was a creature so powerful that it could escape the ever-present eye of the state and the encroaching militarism that was affecting Puerto Rico at the time. alleged sightings were happening. Culturally, this has remolded the Chupacabra from predator of the night to protector in some stories, like the comic Beast of Barikeng, where the Chupacabras is actually physically fighting colonialism. To wrap up, Puerto Rico has always had vampires on it, except that they've never been beasts. The most visible of these vampires is the simple mosquito, a vicious bloodsucker that I've been attacked by at least once in the course of writing this essay. It is the deadliest animal in the world and is a victim of dengue fever in my youth. That shit sucks ass. Meanwhile, the second vampire is the continued colonization of the archipelago that has stripped it of so many resources for centuries and continues to do so to this day. Colonialism has always been vampiric, extracting as much as it can with little care to the corpses it leaves in its wake. Although the chupacabra mass hysteria died down at of the century, the forces that shaped its creation are still here and they've become even more acute. Whether it be the unelected fiscal control board imposed by the U.S. government or corrupt Puerto Rican officials, there have always been vampires walking among us. They're just not beasts. They look just like us and their system of oppression has harmed more than any single chupacabra ever could. Thanks for listening. You can find me pretty much everywhere online at Vaquero2XL. That's about it. Thanks for listening.
