Sightings - S3E07 - Halloween Special - “Santeria” - October 23rd, 1994
“The day after the invasion of Panama in 1989 US forces discovered a strange house in the Panamanian jungle, owned by then-General Manuel Noriega. Inside, rooms had been turned into occult shrines. There were remains from animal sacrifices, jars filled with blood, bone, and herbs, and cryptic curses defaming Noriega’s enemies, including then-President George Bush. It was a rare glimpse at the international power of a little-known and much-misunderstood religion.”
Very similar to the Vodou segment from last season, here is a segment about the African diaspora religion of Santería...though with a twist, as this is a classic bifurcated segment.
Santería shares a similar belief in orishas (or orichas in Spanish); while vodou developed in Haiti, santería developed in Cuba. Both are syncretic to Catholicism.
Raúl Cañizares says “the religion was originally practiced by the Yoruba in what is today southwestern Nigeria, mainly. When the Yoruba came to Cuba as slaves they had to make certain adaptations to the environment, and the resulting religion was Santería.”
Jackie Rodriguez was a Cuban-American woman, raised Catholic, who found Santería after she was told she could never have a child. Shortly after she began practicing she gave birth to a son who is now eight and being initiated into Santería himself.
“We don’t kill cats and dogs. Okay? No pets. We use goats, we use lambs and chickens and we do eat these animals. We don’t torture these animals. The person who does the animal sacrifice is trained so the animal is killed instantly.”
Jesus Christ even sleazy paranormal tabloid shows were saying "it is wrong and bad to say Caribbean immigrants eat cats and dogs" back in the 90s. Sigh.
The fact that animal sacrifice gets such an emotional reaction to people despite killing the same animals killed for food every day is such a fascinating example of framing, isn't it? It's alright to kill a chicken to make into a nugget, but not okay if you invest the chicken's death with sacred meaning.
“Anybody can be initiated. The religion has people from all kinds of social background. It is a family religion.”
But there's a splinter religion, Tim White says:
“With more than five million followers in the US, Santería tries to distance itself from Palero, where the power of Orishas are used for evil.” The rituals that create life in Santería create death in Palero.
(Actually, Palo is a religion that developed around the same time as Santería based on Kongo religion and not some evil splinter group, and many people practice both, and the religion is Palo and its followers called Palero but nontheless...)
A palero discusses how palo revolves around the nganga, a pot believed to contain spirits. Controversially, the pots often contain human bones. This priest claims to disinter bodies and ask their spirits if their bones can be used, and says he gives them back if the spirit says no.
On the subject of curses, an element of palo, he says:
“The majority of the Paleros do not do evil. Most of the spells they do is to cure and heal people. The only time you see them doing evil is in self-defense, if someone else is trying to hurt them.”
“When you’re dealing with this elemental force it’s very dangerous, if you don’t know what you’re doing you can hurt yourself. So when I go and do a spell on somebody I go in front of my pot and ask my pot if I am justified in doing this spell for this person. If the pot tells me no, no matter how much money no matter how much they try to persuade me I will not do it.”
And here we have the other twist.
When Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was overthrown by maybe-illegal US invasion in 1989 - due to spend the rest of his life serving separate prison sentences in the United States, France, and Panama, where he eventually died - a so-called "witch house" owned by him and full of occult objects and curses was discovered. However, here the story becomes messy, because the majority of artifacts found in the house were actually related to a Afro-Brazilian diasporaic religion called Candomblé. And, of course, all of these were black magic off-shoots of the faiths in question that no more represent the vast majority of practitioners than tradcaths represent the average Catholic.
“Jim Dibble was the US Army’s leading occult expert…” Tim White says, and Dibble says “I encountered a number of workings that involved George Bush" - though it appears Noriega's witches were trying to control him.
According to the Washington Post, when they discovered the witch house they initially thought the objects wrapped in banana leaves in the freezer were bricks of cocaine. Then tamales. Then they realized there were curses written inside them.
Dibble, a professor at a university in Tennessee (what, did he teach Satanic Panic Studies?), says that he was working with a Brazilian witch whose whereabouts are unknown, though it's assumed she escaped back to Brazil.
I really wanted to find out more about the "army occult expert" but he seems to have vanished from the record after Panama, as all references to him are from this incident. Apparently, the military made Dibble shut up and stop talking about witchcraft before the trial began, after a whole write up in People Magazine. Well, something had clearly changed by '94 given this show talking with him and showing us the original army footage.
“Santería has no aspect that needs to be feared by people living in the United States," says James Dibble, a professional Satanic Panic promoter working for the military who would get drummed out of the military for being a radical leftist for saying that in 2026
