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BUDDHA: 'Goat sucker' spreading fear across Mexico


Beware the Goat Sucker!

>From nando.net:
http://www2.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/world/051396/world4_6879.html


'Goat sucker' spreading fear across Mexico
-----------------------

Copyright © 1996 Nando.net
Copyright © 1996 Houston Chronicle

ZAPOTAL, Mexico (May 13, 1996 6:42 p.m. EDT) -- The roosters had not yet
crowed when the fierce barking of dogs jolted Violeta Colorado from her
sleep.

The dogs had an animal cornered at the rubbish pile behind Colorado's small
concrete house in Zapotal, a farm village in the steamy oil country of
southeastern Mexico.

When the canines growled, Colorado says, the besieged beast responded with a
nerve-rattling hiss unlike any animal noise she had ever heard.

It was a full hour, she says, before the beast escaped the dogs and peace
returned to the country night.

"The dogs were pursuing it. They had it trapped, but we couldn't see what it
was," the 27-year-old mother of two toddlers says. "I thought it was a
coyote."

But in the light of the early morning sun one day last week, Colorado
learned that nine sheep had been killed in the pasture next to her house.
None of the sheep had been eaten. Their throats had been punctured and their
blood drained.

To their horror, Colorado says, she and her neighbors realized that the
animals had tangled with a "Chupacabras," a "Goat Sucker," a much-feared yet
never-seen beast that some say is Mexico's version of Bigfoot or the Loch
Ness Monster.

Local reporters arrived in droves. Bus-loads of the curious trundled down
the dirt lane to Colorado's house and the pasture. Several of the dead sheep
were carried off to the state capital of Villahermosa 30 miles away for
examination.

The local veterinarian who examined two of the dead sheep says a coyote
never kills the way these sheep were killed. The coyotes and jungle cats in
the area rip their prey apart and devour it. These dead sheep had only
puncture wounds. And there was no blood left in them, no blood at all.

"I have never seen anything like it, ever," says Ramiro Santiago Lara, 34,
who has practiced veterinary medicine in the area for eight years and has
examined hundreds of animals killed by ordinary predators. "It seems like a
type of vampire."

After making reported appearances in Puerto Rico last summer and then
passing through Miami, the Chupacabras -- pronounced chew-paw-CAH-bras -- is
said to have surfaced in Mexico 12 days ago in the northwestern state of
Sinaloa.

Since then, people say, the beast, or, possibly, a horde of them, has been
moving fast. At least 46 attacks have been reported so far in 14 states
across the country, according to a tally published Sunday by the Mexico City
newspaper El Financiero. More than 300 goats and sheep have been slain as
well as several horses and calves.

Four people also have reported being attacked. But one of them, a married
woman from northern Sinaloa state, has been publicly accused of trying to
pass off a hickey given her by an illicit lover as the work of the Goat
Sucker.

News of, and speculation about, the creature fills the pages of local
newspapers and dominates the airwaves. Thousands of notes appear on Internet
homepages dedicated to the Chupacabras.

Cocktail party conversation in Mexico City focuses on almost nothing else.
Goat Sucker jokes are the rage. But the subject is not funny to the goats
and the sheep -- or to the mostly poor farmers who own them.

"This is definitely a serious matter, one that we have never dealt with
before but which is very real," says Enoc Leon Ramirez, 48, the owner of the
sheep killed in Zapotal. "The government is trying to say this was the work
of coyotes. That is a lie. The only explanation is that it was this beast
they are talking about, this Chupacabras."

Everyone, of course, has a favorite theory. Some believe the beast is
Mexico's latest national myth or a simple case of mass illusion.

Others think the Goat Sucker may have come from outer space or is the mutant
progeny of some mad gene-splicing scheme.

Still others opine that the creature is part of a plot against Mexico
launched for some unknown and evil purpose.

"It's from the neighboring country," says Andres Magana, a peasant farmer in
La Venta, a town about 40 miles north of Zapotal. "Neighbor country" never
refers to Guatemala or Belize in Mexican conversation. It always means the
United States.

Local, state and federal officials, as well as scientific "experts," have
been trying to debunk the Chupacabras lore. They say the attacks are the
work of common predators, such as coyotes and pumas, magnified by the
imaginations of simple country folk and hyped by the sensationalist media.

But what government officials say carries little weight with most Mexicans
these days. These are the same officials who have been claiming for the past
18 months that Mexico's economy is improving, when nearly everyone suspects
it is getting worse. If the government says the sky is blue, many believe it
must be green.

"The authorities are hiding something," says Santiago, adding that state
investigators in Villahermosa have refused to release findings from their
examination of one of the dead sheep.

In the many artists' renditions of the beast published in the Mexican press,
the Chupacabras looks like anything from Hollywood's ET on a bad-hair day to
former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari posing as Dracula.

Salinas, who left office 18 months ago, is almost universally blamed for the
country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. He is Mexico's
bogeyman of choice. In one political cartoon published Sunday, a
vampire-like Salinas commands a hapless peasant: "Tell that Goat Sucker not
to be messing on my turf." But such political imagery may well be lost on
those who believe they have felt the Chupacarbas' bite.

"As farmers, we are not interested in the politics and the jokes," says
Leon, who lost his entire flock in the Zapotal attack. "There has to be
something to this."



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