Skulking in the dead of night in the remote and overgrown Las Pavas section of the Southern Municipal Cemetery in Caracas, robbers armed with crowbars and sledgehammers shattered the tomb's concrete vault and the granite marker that read: "To our dear wife and mother in heaven, Maria de la Cruz Aguero."

Then they lifted the coffin lid and stole leg bones and the skull of the woman. They sold the bones for $20 each, the skull for as much as $300, said Father Atilio Gonzalez, the cemetery's resident Roman Catholic priest.

Sometimes entire skeletons, particularly those of children, are stolen from crypts in this final resting place of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, including three former presidents.

"These people are committing a mortal sin," Gonzalez says, adding that graves in the city's largest cemetery are robbed every night.

The desecration of the woman's tomb was part of a ghoulish crime wave, including assaults and rapes, that has made the cemetery so dangerous that funeral home workers say they carry weapons whenever they have to go there. Parts of the cemetery, particularly the sections reserved for the poor, are in ruins and choked with weeds, providing perfect cover for thugs and the homeless.

When graves were robbed in the past, the primary objective was to steal personal effects such as jewellery or gold dental fillings, said Odalys Caldera, an investigator in the judicial police of Caracas. Today, thieves are pillaging the graves for darker reasons.

Dark truths

The buyers of the bones are paleros, the practitioners of a black magic cult related to Santeria, whose rise in popularity is fuelled by a brew of faith and politics.

"Santeria, witchcraft and black magic are much more out in the open now. That's the reason," Caldera said. "Of course, the state is aware of the robberies but hasn't taken the necessary steps to impede them."

Santeria, which combines Catholicism and African and indigenous spiritualism, was brought to the New World by slaves from Africa centuries ago and still thrives in Cuba, Haiti, Brazil and, increasingly, Venezuela. It is also popular in regions of the United States with strong Caribbean immigrant communities — south Florida, Washington and Los Angeles.

Although most Santeria followers steer clear of the use of human remains and Satanism, the paleros embrace them. They use bones in black magic rituals in which the objective is to cast evil spells on enemies: to induce bad luck for an unfaithful spouse, a car accident for unwanted in-laws, a serious illness for a business competitor, Gonzalez said.

Police, church officials and historians offer a variety of theories for the rise of black magic in Venezuela. Some, including anthropologist Rafael Strauss, point to the vacuum left by the Roman Catholic Church, which, as in many other Latin American countries, has lost believers to evangelical and other Protestant religions.

Church rolls also are suffering from a lack of interest among younger people.

"We are seeing a new syncretism that is uniting parts of different religions," Strauss says. "It's how people make it easier to meet their spiritual needs."

Others see politics at work. Father Manuel Diaz is a parish priest in the El Hatillo suburb of Caracas where three Santeria babalaos, or shamans, have opened centres. He says the government of Leftist President Hugo Chavez is encouraging the rise of Santeria to counter the authority of the Catholic Church, which Chavez has traditionally viewed as his enemy.

In a letter to his parishioners in August, Diaz said the government has a "concrete objective to undermine the authority of the church and align its faithful with certain ideologies".

In the letter he wrote that leaders of the movement were coming from an unnamed "Caribbean country", presumably Cuba, to discredit the church.

Although Santeria and other spiritualist religions have been present in Venezuela since Spanish colonial days, the rise of black magic, including that practiced by paleros, is relatively new, said Maria Garcia de Fleury, a comparative religions professor at New Sparta University in Caracas.

"We've always had a little witchcraft but nothing like what has been unleashed recently," De Fleury said. "This is not Venezuelan."

Gonzalez, whose parish could be said to include the hundreds of thousands of dead that populate the Southern Municipal Cemetery, made a baleful round of the grounds recently to assess the losses.

Bizarre gang ritual

Several more graves had been "profaned" over the weekend in the Black Road section of the cemetery, a place of paupers graves where 70 per cent of the tombs have been robbed, he said.

On a recent day, the cemetery was the scene of a macabre ritual that has become a regular occurrence whenever a young gang member is buried, Gonzalez said. During the funeral procession for a 25-year-old gunshot victim, friends halted the cortege and removed the corpse from the coffin to give it one last joy ride around the cemetery on the back of a buddy's motorcycle.

As a final homage, the dead man was given a 30-gun salute. One of the bullets punctured the umbrella of Gonzalez, who was officiating at the burial.

"I suffer not just from the pain felt by the loved ones of the dead," Gonzalez said, "but for the lack of respect for this holy place."

By Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service

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