Caracas Is As Dangerous For The Dead As It Is For The Living

CARACAS, Venezuela — Milvia Santos went with her children to the Southern Municipal Cemetery in the Venezuelan capital on Mother's Day to pay her respects to her late mother, Astrid.

As they were about to lay a dozen red roses on the grave, however, they found a hole in the concrete slab. When they warily reached in to open the coffin, they saw that Astrid's skull had been stolen.

Santos fainted. When she came to, she sobbed uncontrollably.

Ana Sambrano holds the name plate from the vandalized grave site of her husband, son and nephew at Cementerio del Sur in Caracas.

Venezuelan officials raid business of TV news station owner

CARACAS, Venezuela — Government agents Thursday night raided a car dealership business here owned by the main owner of Globovision, an all-news television station that President Hugo Chavez has been threatening to close in recent days.

Guillermo Zuloaga Jr., son of Globovision’s main owner, told McClatchy Newspapers that the agents were illegally searching the business where his father managed his Toyota dealership.

"It's just another aggression from the government to try to scare us," Zuloaga said.

"This was supposed to be my grandmother's place to rest in peace for eternity," Yohan Camacho, Santos' son, said later by the grave site. "Instead, it was ransacked for black magic rituals."

Foreign Policy magazine last year called Caracas the world's homicide capital, and it isn't much safer for the dead than it is for the living.

Grave-plundering at the Southern Municipal Cemetery and others in Caracas has reached epidemic proportions. Priests, academics and the victims' families blame black-magic practitioners known as "paleros," who use skulls and other human bones to initiate members into an African-based cult that spread to Venezuela from Cuba and is growing rapidly here.