Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean, Religion

RELIGION-VENEZUELA: Santeria Scams?

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Dec 9 2008 (IPS) - In a ritual that includes sacrificing goats or fowl, a “babalawo” priest of the Yoruba religion in Venezuela can “mount a saint” (attract blessings from forces of nature) on an initiate willing to pay up to 10,000 dollars, and sometimes even more.

The ancestral faith of the West African Yoruba people – who inhabit present-day Nigeria, Benin, Ghana and Togo – “has been distorted, turned into a religion used to make a profit through scams,” Pablo Acosta, president of Venezuela’s Ile-Ife Foundation, told IPS.

Ile-Ife is the mythical original city of the Yoruba, who were brought to the Americas in great numbers during the slave trade. The slaves managed to keep their religious traditions alive, practicing their beliefs through secretly celebrated rituals and a form of religious syncretism that especially took root in Brazil and in Cuba and other Caribbean countries, forming faiths alternative to the dominant Catholic religion.

In Venezuela, a set of beliefs in the powers of the saints and their priests known as “Santería” developed from Yoruba rituals, and today it is experiencing a boom that has not been quantified but which is visible everywhere. Boxes with dead, sacrificed animals can be seen strewn on beaches, along the side of roads, or on river banks.

Santería followers are easily identified through the typical ribbons, bracelets, necklaces and white clothing they wear. According to the Catholic priest Otty Aristizábal, Venezuela currently has thousands of babalaos or babalawos, a Yoruba term that literally means ‘father or master of the mysteries’ and is the title that denotes a priest of Ifa, or system of divination. Apprentices are recruited among high school students.

The Santería faith has reached such a level of sophistication that babalawos are being brought over from Cuba, and even Nigeria, to “mount saints” for believers among the wealthier population, and important figures in Venezuela’s political circles have been swept away by this “new wave.”

It has also opened the door to “palería” rituals – known in Cuba as Palo Monte or Palo Mayombe -, which are considered to be black magic or witchery practices and use human bones stolen from desecrated graves.

“Practices that combine ancestral African beliefs with Venezuela’s dominant religion have spread widely, drawing large numbers of believers. Although there are no reliable studies or statistics available, perhaps up to 30 percent of the population has turned to these faiths,” Vice President of the Ile-Ife Foundation Marjorie Montiel told IPS.

The Archbishop of Caracas Jorge Urosa told IPS that “the Catholic Church is naturally concerned by such a surge in followers of these practices, which we reject because they deviate from our creed and our guiding principles.”

“But they also deviate from the traditional values that Venezuelan society has been built on, and they’re often used as a means to swindle people, obtaining favours and benefits for individuals who are nothing but con artists,” Urosa said.

Shops that sell herbs, icons and articles used in the celebration of Santería and similar rituals are mushrooming throughout Caracas and other cities of Venezuela. The local newspaper El Universal reports that there are 150 of these stores in the capital alone.

Aura Meza, the manager at one of these shops in the downtown district of Quinta Crespo, told IPS that they haven’t seen changes in what people are buying, as “they’re still taking the same herbs and products to use in their baths and mix with their rubbish, following recipes to bring health, love or fortune, or for initiation with babalawos; but we have seen a growth in sales.”

For her part, Montiel said that “if people feel the need to resort to these African-based beliefs, they have the right to do it.” She added that there “must be a reason why they don’t find what they need in faiths such as that of the Catholic Church.”

Superstitions are very much present in cultures across Latin America, and they have always made it into the high circles of social and political power. The late Luis Herrera Campins, who governed Venezuela from 1979 through 1984, was a devout Catholic but always carried with him a “zamuro pip” – the polished seed of a local tree – as a good luck charm.

Today, President Hugo Chávez wears a scapular that belonged to his great-grandfather Pedro Pérez, nicknamed “Maisanta,” who fought in the wars between conservatives and liberals in the early 20th century. Chávez’s critics have spread alleged reports and testimonies depicting the leader as a Santería follower.

“We have reports of people very high up in Venezuelan political, and also economic, circles, who have gone to babalawos and paid important sums to obtain the so-called protection of Ifá,” Acosta said.

Ifá is the orisa, or deity, of wisdom and knowledge, and it also refers to the system of geomantic divination of the Yoruba culture, which uses numbers and verses and is basically a corpus of values and instruments that relate human beings with elements of nature such as the sun, the moon, winds, tides or mountains, he explained.

The Ifa Divination system was added in 2005 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to its list of “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity”.

Acosta spent two decades studying the system of divination and travelled to southern Nigeria to become a babalawo and contact the heads of the International Council for Ifa Religion (ICIR).

“There I realised that I had been mistaken for years, and that Yoruba is above all a culture and the Santería practices that are so popular in Cuba, Brazil or Venezuela are perversions which in most cases are used to disguise a business,” Acosta told IPS. He criticised Venezuela “for allowing the free entry of babalawos or individuals calling themselves Yoruba priests who come to the country to make money, often deceiving people without assuming any responsibilities or paying taxes.”

Another negative aspect of this is the fact that “in some cases as many as 40 animals per ‘saint’ are sacrificed, and their mutilated carcasses are dumped in public places, such as river banks. They’re not just a horrible sight; they’re also an environmental and health issue,” Acosta said.

Montiel said that the Foundation plans to contact national legislators to discuss the need to legislate on the subject, with the aim of giving the authorities proper tools with which to regulate these practices. Acosta, for his part, said that it would be helpful if UNESCO issued firm statements on the matter.