Black Spirituality Religion : Venezuela; graves robbed for bones for "Palo"??

Ankhur

Well-Known Member
REGISTERED MEMBER
Oct 4, 2009
14,325
2,956
Brooklyn
Occupation
owner of various real estate concerns
Is this real or propaganda against Chavez? and Cuba?

December 11, 2009
Caracas Journal
In Venezuela, Even Death May Not Bring Peace
By SIMON ROMERO
CARACAS, Venezuela — Bougainvillea shade the pathways at the Cementerio General del Sur, where the mausoleums of statesmen and movie stars stand next to the graves of aristocrats and thousands of commoners. Sculpted lions gaze down from sepulchers. Elegance, not anarchy, once defined this resting place.

No longer.

Now, crypts for once-feared military rulers have been ransacked. Coffins, twisted open with crowbars, lie strewn under samán trees. Cages with padlocked gates surround the burial sites of some families, as if that might protect them from a disturbing reality: not even Caracas’s city of the dead is safe.

Accompanying Venezuela’s soaring levels of murders and kidnappings, its cemeteries are the setting for a new kind of crime wave. Grave robbers are looting them for human bones, answering demand from some practitioners of a fast-growing transplanted Cuban religion called Palo that uses the bones in its ceremonies.

Critics contend the cemetery bedlam reflects a societal breakdown in which impunity is widespread. Violent crime and police corruption in the country are pervasive even as President Hugo Chávez is calling for the creation of a “new man” as part of his socialist-inspired revolution.

“The cemetery has become an iconic emblem of our national tragedy,” said Fernando Coronil, a respected Venezuelan anthropologist. “In our daily struggle to maintain a civil order against multiple transgressions against property and propriety, not even the dead can now rest in peace.”

Nowhere is the bone traffic thriving as in the Cementerio del Sur, as the necropolis founded in 1876 by the Francophile despot Antonio Guzmán Blanco is known. The grandeur of its tombs evokes, for some, Père Lachaise in Paris.

“I still cannot comprehend how this happened,” said Jesús Blanco, 42, a horse trainer who went into despair in February when he visited the grave of his father, Melecio, and found the coffin pried open and his entire skeleton missing.

Many families have given up on visiting the cemetery entirely. During the day, drunken thugs roam its passageways on foot or on motorbikes, sometimes assaulting visitors. The cemetery’s gruesome crimes, like a murder-suicide in November, fill newspaper crime pages.

Sullen police officers milling about the cemetery’s entrance do little against the disorder, said Armando Regalado, head of Aprofamiliares, a citizens’ group formed last year to protest the trade in human bones.

“The police are there to insult and intimidate, and to ignore the abuses they see every day,” said Mr. Regalado, whose son, shot dead three years ago at age 21, is buried in an area of the cemetery called El Artista. Sixteen skulls were reported stolen from caskets there this year.

The police grew alert on a recent morning when journalists appeared at the gate of the government-controlled cemetery with a permit to do interviews. They said the permit was worthless, and requested a bribe of 1,000 bolívars, about $464, to let the work proceed. They met a refusal to pay with a shrug.

José Francisco Ceballo, a former manager of the Cementerio del Sur, caused a stir in May when he said the cemetery was “in chaos.” That month, he said, inspectors found at least 475 coffins looted of remains.

Not much seems to have changed since then, despite pledges to clean up the cemetery, said Roman Catholic priests who oversee funerals and mourners who visit. Some taxi drivers refuse to enter its grounds, or do so only on the condition that they are escorted by armed guards.

Carolina Sanoja, Mr. Ceballo’s ....

full article;
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/world/americas/11venez.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
 

Donate

Support destee.com, the oldest, most respectful, online black community in the world - PayPal or CashApp

Latest profile posts

HODEE wrote on Etophil's profile.
Welcome to Destee
@Etophil
Destee wrote on SleezyBigSlim's profile.
Hi @SleezyBigSlim ... Welcome Welcome Welcome ... :flowers: ... please make yourself at home ... :swings:
Back
Top