It Could Happen Here - ¡El Chupacabras!

Episode Date: October 28, 2026

Carlos hunts down the origin of the chupacabra, then explains how U.S. imperialism andPuerto Rico’s many crises gave rise to the bloodsucker. Follow Carlos @vaquero2XL Sources: Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction and Folklore by BenjaminRadford Governing Spirits: Religion, Miracles, and Spectacle in Cuba and Puerto Rico,1898-1956 by Reinaldo L. Román En Qué Quedó Ep. 6 “El Chupacabras”https://open.spotify.com/episode/2r9ISXwgY7zTpWj2EJWcF1 Radio Ambulante “El vampiro entre nosotros”https://open.spotify.com/episode/0hvdSD4aXHwoOWoMYAdN9x Sucking Vulnerability: Neoliberalism, the Chupacabras, and the Post-Cold War Years byWilliam A Calvo-Quirós https://web.archive.org/web/20230814111741/http://www.barriology.com/uploads/2/3/2/7/23276452/calvo-quiros_sucking_vulnerability_rev.pdf El Chupacabra: Icon of Resistance to US Imperialism Species (1995) dir. Roger Donaldson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MGZnLsPSRc La Operación (1982) dir. Ana María García https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoJoWMbRxvM&t=36s La Operación -Background https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6XEuu_auR8&t=8s https://www.elnuevodia.com/noticias/locales/notas/se-registran-dos-ataques-del-chupacabras/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/30/vieques-puerto-rico-us-navy-base-training https://www.navfac.navy.mil/Portals/68/Documents/Business-Lines/Environmental/Environmental-Restoration/NAVFAC-Atlantic/Vieques/Vieques_Fact_Sheet_03_Depleted_Uranium_in_LIA_Eng.pdf https://www.fs.usda.gov/r08/elyunque/recreation/discover-history/us-military-and-el-yunque-national-forest https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24816374-the-history-of-the-us-department-of-defense-programs-for-the-testing-evaluation-and-storage-of-tactical-herbicides-agent-orange-in-pr/?q=puerto+rico&mode=document#document/p5 https://www.elvocero.com/actualidad/otros/las-grandes-sequ-as-que-marcaron-a-puerto-rico-durante-el-siglo-xx/article_e6a37bce-5269-4040-836d-799a04358fc2.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/12/26/mystery-creature-ravages-puerto-rican-livestock/b7704250-dae0-4fa3-a886-561db637b463/ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-12-03-mn-9730-story.html “Monsters and Messiahs by Mike Davis”  “Beast of Borikén" by Julio Anta, Daniel IriZarri, Patricio Delpeche, and Lucas Gattoni See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. I'm Melissa Jeltson, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police rode off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing in disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an I-Heart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to IHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for IHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today. 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 Chupa Cabras.

I'm Carlos Berrios 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 claimed 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 froats or biting the necks of their cows, then attributing it to something that they could not explain. If you spent 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 run me the wrong way because it's cabras as in multiple goats. so it should actually be goats 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 Chupacabaras on the History Channel, but my first interaction with the Chupacaras as a cultural artifact was probably the 2003 direct-to-div-d-d-D-Doo in 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. Per 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 is free versions of this bloodsucking 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 Kanobanas in 1995. The second is more of a dog-slash-koyote-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, citing of the Chupacabara 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 Torentino, claimed that.

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 Corales, which I cannot find an e-book 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 free separate

toes like a goose. It never opened its mouth and had feathers running down its back that were flat. Solentino even got a close enough look to see its genitals, or I should say lack thereof. According to Corales' 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 an impromptu dental inspection because he opened its mouth and saw fangs. However, it eventually got away. From seeing the covers of Corales's 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, 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 Corales. And in some instances of the book, you can really see the contempt come through. Anyway, dragging the Chupacro points out several inconsistencies in Torentino'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 generals. 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 Sill from the 1995 Roger Donaldson film Species. Sill was played by Natasha Hensstrich and designed by H.R. Geiger. 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 Sill and the chupacabra drawn from, 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 Plah and Jose Manuel Rodriguez, highlighted by tracking the Chupacabra, Tolentino said that Sills' 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 Tolentina. 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, their head. been other attacks that were retroactively attributed to the chupacabras, and it slowly became 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 Peres, although that's disputed by some. Shortly after Tolentino's encounter with the Chupacabra, she described the Chupacabra to artist Jorge Marting, whose drawing made the front page of El Nouveau diya, according to tracking the Chupacara. And no idea 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,

Christina Saralegi aired a story about the Chupacabra on The Show of Christina, which aired across the Spanish-speaking world. Saralegi even had the mayor of Canovanas, Jose Chemosoto, 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 to 1956, by Renal Romang, 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 29th, 1995. Wait, you hear that? Is that something moving in the woods? Wait, no, no, no.

It's just the ads. Radio presents the soundtrack to your October. From spooky podcasts and chilling playlists to non-stop Halloween radio and more. We have all the thrills and chills you're craving this season. I'm Melissa Jeltson, and in my new podcast what happened to her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled as suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival.

The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that.

And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing in disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's J.O. from Laugh with Me, the podcast. So why would you choose laugh with me? Well, great question. Maybe you like comedy. Maybe you like sports.

Maybe you like movies, ridiculous stories, terrible opinions, questionable rankings, and a grown man somehow turning everyday life into a personal emergency. Or maybe you just want to hear from a podcast host who has survived. bad bosses, angry customers, questionable career decisions, and a pepper spray attack? Yeah, that's right. Other podcasts have hosts with broadcasting degrees. Laugh with me has a survivor. I'm Jeremy Odom, and every week I'm joined by comedians, friends, athletes, weirdos, experts, and occasionally people who probably should have stopped answering my text.

Authentic, raw, and just like you. Just jokes, stories, arguments, sports, pop culture, and whatever. happen to be this week. Listen to laugh with me, a podcast with Jeremy Odom, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case has a story. Every victim has a voice, but will it be heard? I'm Nancy Grace. On crime stories, we go beyond headlines to examine evidence, challenge the story we're fed, and pursue justice for victims and their families. Please join us. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your podcasts.

Hope you join us. I'll see you there, friend. Hey, everybody, it's me, W. Kamau Bell. This season of my podcast who's with me, I speak with two-time Emmy winner and weirdly one of my best friends, Kevin Avery. Everything up to that point, build you as a comic, us going on the road, doing Battle Mountain and Ely. Yeah, you took me, you were one of the first people who took me on the road, which is funny

because at the time I was like, I don't know if I like this guy. With rapper, actor, David Diggs. The jump off for me was Hamilton, and it was the most popular thing in a very long time. But it was still, for me, it was me and my friends making something dumb. Bruce Lee's daughter and Brandon Lee's sister, Shannon Lee. Back to your initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that.

You're lending your life to stewarding. somebody else's life. Listen to Who's With Me with with Debbie Kumabelle on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 almost always portrayed these rural folks as being a massive 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 hyperbola 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 goad 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 Nauodia and Christina 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 Vosero lifted dozens and dozens of stories about chubacabra attacks, adding details to every single one that in hindsight were clearly just kind of made up. One such story highlighted in tracking the chubacabra 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, Tu Elbocero, 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 Elbocero newspapers

at the time. When I spoke to a friend who was alive at the time this was happening, he told me that Elbocero's tabloidness and propensity for publishing the most lurid pictures of action. accidents and murders, led people to say that if you squeeze the newspaper, it would bleed. Ironically enough, per tracking the chupacabra, the majority of claims that animals were left without blood were published by Elbocero, 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.

lighter 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 Chupacara, 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 recommend. El Vosero has a long history of making up stuff to sell papers. In fact,

El Vosero'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 Mocha that also reportedly left animals without blood. This creature was called El Vampiro de Mocha, the vampire of Mocha. El Vosero latched onto the story like a tick and published dozens of stories that would come to foreshadow their coverage of El Chupacabara. 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 buck ton for a small tabloid

in an archipelago that at the time had a population of less than three million people. So we see how history kind of repeats itself with El Chupacabra by analyzing El Vosero's actions during the time of El Vampiro de Mocha. 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 Ilo, did an episode in March of this year about El Vampiro de Moca,

called, quote, El Vampiro Entre Nosotros. 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 Mocha 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 Mocha 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 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 Vieches 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 ordinance in Vykes 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 ordinance 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 re-burying 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 Vieches in 2003 after years of sustained and massive protests. And, per Jordan's thesis, Chupacabara 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, but maybe watch out a little bit. Harry Pod Radio presents the soundtrack to your October. from spooky podcasts and chilling playlists to non-stop Halloween radio and more. We have all the thrills and chills you're craving this season. Press play. I'm Melissa Jeltson, and in my new podcast, what happened to her,

I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her.

No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's J.O. from Laugh with Me, the podcast. So why would you choose laugh with me? Well, great question. Maybe you like comedy. Maybe you like sports. Maybe you like movies, ridiculous stories.

terrible opinions, questionable rankings, and a grown man somehow turning everyday life into a personal emergency. Or maybe you just want to hear from a podcast host who has survived bad bosses, angry customers, questionable career decisions, and a pepper spray attack? Yeah, that's right. Other podcasts have hosts with broadcasting degrees. Laugh with me has a survivor. I'm Jeremy Odom, and every week I'm joined by comedians, friends, athletes, weirdos, experts, and occasionally people who probably should have stopped answering my text. Authentic, raw, and just like you.

Just jokes, stories, arguments, sports, pop culture, and whatever happened to me this week. Listen to laugh with me, a podcast with Jeremy Odom, on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case has a story. Every victim has a voice,

but will it be heard? I mean, it's He Grace. On crime stories, we go beyond headlines. to examine evidence, challenge the story we're fed, and pursue justice for victims and their families. Please join us at Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your podcasts. Hope you join us. I'll see you there, friend. Hey everybody, it's me, W. Compte Bell. This season of my podcast who's with me, I speak with two-time Emmy winner and weirdly one of my best friends, Kevin Avery.

Everything up to that point Bill G you as a comic. Us going on the road, doing Battle Mountain and Ely and all this shit. You were one of the first people who took me on the road, which is funny because at the time I was like, I don't know if I like this guy. With rapper, actor, David Diggs.

The jump off for me was Hamilton and it was the most popular thing in a very long time. But it was still, for me, it was me and my friends make him something dumb. Bruce Lee's daughter and Brandon Lee's sister, Shannon Lee.

Back to your. initial point of stewarding my father's legacy and giving my energy to that. You're lending your life to stewarding somebody else's life. Listen to Who's With Me with me with Debbie Kumal Bell on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Junkie, which is the largest rainforests 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 in hiking the two to three hours or so that it takes to reach the top is something I would recommend to everyone. While the Chubukabra definitely did not emerge from a secret lab in a junke, 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 Junket 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 Adjunke. 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 Junkah'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 Junkie. 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 Junkah 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, in 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. Her 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. Those who are close enough to touch the walls and halls of power, comma, the skin of the secrets and yet are still denied real access. end quote. These are mostly retired army personnel or police. I would wager to guess that like many other cryptids, the tale of the Chupacabra was used whether consciously or unconsciously

to keep people away from these restricted government areas. Essentially, El Chupacabra was a sci-op. 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 an ethical 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 fees, years of overpopulation, women who got La Operacion, 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 that 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 Operacion by Anna Maria Garcia 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 Operacion happened decades before the first Chupacara citing, it's within this belays of government secrets and conspiracy in U.S. colonialism that tall tales of the Chupacara bursting out of the woods and laying waste of 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 Chupacouacouacou MIF started. The archipelago had been undergoing a drought that lasted from mid-1994th, 1997, per reporting from El Vosero. 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 Chibokabas. Meanwhile, a hurricane was also bearing down on the archipelago in 1995. Hurricane Mariling hit Puerto Rico in September 1995 as a category two 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 moved 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 Kanavanas 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, Ourokobis were 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 Chupacara 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 in imperialism that the symbol of the symbol of the symbol of the chubalabra, quote, it was within this desperate environment of perceived U. 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 Chemo Jones, he even used it as a way to ride into re-election for free more cycles. However, for the people actually affected by the drought and the random attacks on their livestock, probably by wild dogs. The Chupacara 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 Christina 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 of American Free Trade Agreement.

Her an essay by William Calvoquitos 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 Calvoquitos 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,

Chupacabras calls attention to the atrocities experienced by small farmers and those at the vulnerable and peripheral edges of. 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 the alleged sightings were happening.

Culturally, this has remolded the Chupacabra from Predator of the Night to Protect her in some stories, like the comic Beast of Burikang, where the Chupac Outas 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, while 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 Chubacabra mass hysteria died down at the turn 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'd 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 Vacero 2x.L. It's about it.

It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. I'm Melissa Jeltson, host of the What Happened to Her Podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police rode off as a suicide in a snowstorm.

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