A 1989 photograph of a newspaper page revealing the “Los narcosatánicos” case. HBO Max
“Terrible”. “Felfest” “Macabre”. “Terrorism in Matamoros”. These were some of the headlines that made the Tamaulipas, Tamaulipas, and Mexican newspapers following the discovery on April 11, 1989 at the Santa Elena ranch. An audio recording by a journalist at the time confirms that “there were signs of a bloodbath of people everywhere” at the site. Hidden beneath the ground was “The Altar of the Gods,” a pit in which 13 severed bodies were buried within the grounds of the estate. Those were the days when the country’s violent war on drugs only began to take shape 17 years later. Secret graves and massacres are “very rare” and even rarer if they have a satanic background.
An oversight by David Serna, aka La coqueta, by bypassing a checkpoint on the Matamoros-Reynosa highway allowed authorities to locate the location after his arrest and questioning of the 22-year-old, to whom he returned with a load of marijuana delivered across the border. The confession not only revealed the existence of a criminal gang dedicated to drug trafficking, but also specialized in human sacrifice. In the shed at the ranch, according to the story in the Red Book of the Administration of Justice — based on the version shared by law enforcement agencies — agents found 250 pounds of marijuana, guns of various calibers, and everything that had been modified. taken to a torture house where limbs have been amputated and organs removed from the victims for the past nine months.
Inside the shed was a huge metal cauldron, said José Lira — a journalist and staffer at Mexico City’s Supreme Court — in which human and animal remains were rotting. According to various reports from the authorities of the time, the organs, amputated limbs and animal parts were boiled in this container in a concoction ingested by the members in order to gain “magical powers and immunity from the dangers of law enforcement”. The building’s horror painting also featured pentagrams, knives, saws, cloves of garlic, bottles of burning water, and bloodstains. Serna and three other inmates that day pointed to Adolfo Constanzo, known as El Padrino, associated with the Gulf Cartel and calling himself a witch, and his accomplice Sara Aldrete, nicknamed “The Priestess” as the leaders of the operation, a group of criminals and cult that the press dubbed los narcosatánicos.
Adolfo Constanzo, leader of the cult Los narcosatánicos, in 1989. HBO Max
More than 30 years after this event, director Pat Martínez’s documentary miniseries La narcosatánica, available on HBO Max since July 13, presents the testimonies of previous authorities responsible for the case to journalists who covered the events , and the voice of Aldrete , the only surviving member of the crime gang, to unearth unprecedented details and reconstruct the events of that horrific period that terrified Mexico in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Martínez has been with the project for 15 years when he met Aldrete, who has been in prison for 31 years and now lives at the Tepepan Women’s Social Reinsertion Center in Mexico City. She was sentenced to 647 years and five months in prison for burial, exhumation and desecration of corpses and the murder of 13 people. “Sara will always carry the stigma of being a narco-satanic, but I wanted to bring her closer and present her as I knew her, as a person. You can believe the rituals or not, but Sara is telling them in this way for the first time, about the magic, what was being practiced inside, what caught her, about the hook that Adolfo used on her. He was interested in the supernatural and that is what sets this case apart from many other crimes. How did she get this Santero?” explains the director.
In the notebooks and diaries Adolfo Constanzo found, among his clients were the names of important politicians from states such as Nuevo León, Tamaulipas and Oaxaca, as well as chiefs of the extinct federal criminal police, celebrities and the head of the Gulf Cartel Juan Garcia Abrego. Anyone who believes in the power of witchcraft. “In this country, drug trafficking doesn’t work if the police aren’t on your side. Most of the commanders were involved,” said Humberto Huerta, a La Prensa reporter responsible for covering the case in 1989, in a fragment of the first episode.
Sara Aldrete, center, was presented by authorities in 1989 as one of the accused in the murder of 13 people. HBO Max
Constanzo, who learned the Palo Mayombe cult from his mother, according to Carlos Monsivais in the Red Book of the Judicial Administration, “does nothing to brutally liquidate transvestites, marijuana users and judicial officers.” “Annihilated” the death of young American Mark Kilroy, who was vacationing in the pink zone of Matamoros during spring break and was kidnapped there. His brutally severed body was one of 13 found in Santa Elena. The arrest of those responsible for the death of the 21-year-old University of Texas student became a matter of state for US President George HW Bush and Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. After discovery and under pressure from the neighboring country to the north, the high priest died in a shootout with police in Mexico City a few months later.
At this point, the details of these crimes are known, but according to the protagonists, there are still pieces of the puzzle that are unfinished or not told at this point, and these are exactly what the miniseries wants to reveal. True crime, or genuine crime in Spanish, of which La narcosatánica belongs, is a genre that has become popular in recent years, aiming to explain, reconstruct and provide new data to important criminal cases. This non-fiction format has a wide audience that likes this type of content, but there are also voices that question it because it is morbid and revictimizing for the environment of the families affected by such events. Claudia Fernández, in charge of developing unscripted audiovisual content at HBO Max Mexico, says the point isn’t to redeem Aldrete, but rather to allow the public to draw their own conclusions.
“It’s important to keep a balance between the different protagonists that gives it realness. It’s quite a serious, in-depth investigation, and we’re not wallowing in crime. We present the information in a way that was not presented at the time, avoiding the distortion on the part of some media, the judiciary itself, the authorities themselves and a multitude of other factors that did not allow the case to be told in a “That’s a lot closer to the truth,” adds Fernández.
Even if accessing the archives of the time was “rather complicated” since most of the material from that period belongs to a few TV channels that don’t want to license the content, both Martínez and Fernández are convinced of the journalistic quality They want the rigor of the series and hope that the public can go beyond the usual issues surrounding and clouding the case, so that they question themselves and question what was already known about the others involved and about Aldrete himself.
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