ocial anthropologists have begun to pay attention to a phenomenon that specialists have spent years studying: terrorists, drug traffickers and assassins using witchcraft and Satanism to protect against police and maintain terror of their victims. Palo Mayombe a form of Santeria, has historical roots in Africa, somewhere along the line the sacrifices of animals and robbing
cemeteries for human skulls was replaced by a harsher form of human sacrifice and murder. In Mexico, some narcos practice Santeria and build shrines to honor Santa Muerte and fewer are followers of Palo. It is mostly found in Tamaulipas. Which brings us to the story below. The story of Rancho Diablo, with Matamoros as its backdrop, Adolfo de Jesus Costanzo, a Cuban American, practiced his macabre form of religion including human sacrifice. He demanded his followers refer to him as “Padrino” [godfather]. The downfall occurred when Costanzo’s hench men, ordered to find a “superior” brain, abducted American pre-med student, Mark Kilroy, from outside a Mexican bar taking him to the ranch, where he was killed within 12 hours. He was killed in a botched escape, Costanzo slashed the back of Kilroy’s neck with a machete. When authorities arrived at the ranch, dozens of mutilated corpses were found in both his Mexico City and Matamoros locations.
The Narcosatánicos of Matamoros-Extraction from El Ojo Critico
I first heard the incredible story of Adolfo de Jesus Costanzo with the help of Torcuato Luca de Tena.
In the middle of that year, 1989, fate had ABC’s [Spanish Newspaper] founder and author of the famous God’s Crooked Lines and this writer come together for a televised debate on the form of the Devil.
Luca de Tena had just returned from Mexico, where he had been living since the mid-seventies, and was still shocked by the news that broke in the Aztec media. A satanic sect of drug traffickers, who had made dozens of human sacrifices, had just been dismantled by the police. The scandal spread to famous and known singers, actors, politicians …
It all began, as these things begin, with a routine highway checkpoint. On Monday, April 10th of that year, David Serna Valdez, 22, was driving a Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck (registration number 1068RP) close to the Mexican border with the United States when he found a police checkpoint on the Matamoros A Reynosa road, bordering Mexico with the United States. He lost his temper. Instead of stopping he accelerated, resulting in a spectacular chase that ended at kilometer 39, already inside the Santa Elena Ranch. David Serna believed at the ranch he would be safe from the police … He was wrong.
In the van the agents found remains of marijuana and a 38 Special but arrested in the ranch was someone else: Domingo Reyes Bustmante. His behavior was suspicious. He looked confused. Neither Valdez nor he seemed to believe the police presence on the ranch. It was as if the systems of magical protection that in theory protected Santa Elena from the police had lost their power …
After intense interrogation, probably torture, Valdez collapsed confessing his membership to a drug cartel, and how they had just delivered 300 kg of marijuana in Rio Bravo. However, the most chilling detail of his confession exceeded all the expectations of the police: Valdez confessed that the capo of his organization was a Cuban witch who made human sacrifices in magic rituals, to obtain the protection of the spirits … Domingo Reyes confirmed the incredible statements of his buddy, and indicated the location of another base of the organization: a luxurious mansion in Matamoros where more members of the cartel were arrested: Elio and Ovidio Hernández Rivera and their cousin Serafín Hernández García.
Records began. Drugs, weapons … and a common grave with a dozen human bodies that had their heart or brain removed in macabre witchcraft rituals. They also found the Gnangas, very similar to those I have been able to examine in Cuba, the Dominican Republic or Haiti. But in this case the bones and skulls of animals sacrificed could be replaced with human remains … Then came more. The organization told of estates and flats in different spots of the country.
The police officers were overwhelmed. Never before had they faced something like that. Soon, in other parts of Santa Elena, and in the organization´s other properties like the Santa Liberada ranch, more corpses were found. And after checking out the mansion in the luxurious Obispado de Monterrey neighborhood, 47 Papagayos St., etc.
Impossible to stop the scandal, the police began an unprecedented deployment in the state, the search and capture of “El Padrino” and his most direct followers: Alvaro de León “Duby” Valdez, Omar Francisco Orea, Martín Quintana (his lieutenant) and the sculptural Sara Villareal Aldrete (muse and lover of “El Padrino ” whom some referred to as “The Madrina.”) The news could not be contained and at the top of the headlines:”narcosatánicos in Matamoros”. “El Padrino” and his most direct collaborators began the getaway, and for three weeks they managed to outwit the operation of more than 300 agents that kept on their trail throughout Mexico.
Meanwhile, forensics continued to unearth bodies in the properties of the organization. In autopsies, the first victims can be identified. Open cases of disappeared finally get solved. But the examinations show that some of them have been subject to heinous torments, presumably during the course of witchcraft rituals. The transsexual Claudia Ivette, for example was dismembered, they pulled out her eyes and tore off her skin.
The young American Mark Kirloy, they amputated his legs, his brain had been removed, and ´´El Padrino” made a pin for a necktie out of part of his spine.. Kirloy’s murder implicated the American authorities in the investigation.
Finally, on May 6, “El Padrino” and the group of more loyal followers were located in the historic
neighborhood of Cuauhtémoc, in the north of Mexico City. There, in the intersection of Rio Balsas St and Rio Serna, in Apt 11 on 19 Rio Serna St., the hard core of Matamoros’ narcosatanos had been holed up
Today, just in front, is a newsstand where they still remember that sunny day of May 1986, when the bullets began to rain down from atop the roof on the corner.
Surrounded, “El Padrino” and his men began to shoot at the police that tried to force surrender; but “El Padrino” was not willing to be caught. After 45 minutes of intense shooting he hands his machine gun to Leon “Duby” Valdéz, ordering him to shoot him, but the young man is not able to “murder” his beloved Godfather. He decides to make it easy for him and goes inside a closet so that Duby does not see his face when he pulls the trigger and gives his ruling: “Kill me or it will be very bad in hell” … Duby nods resignedly.
Martín Quintana, faithful until the death to his Godfather, decided to die by his side in the closet
receiving a shower of bullets. By the time the rest of the band, including “The Madrina” surrendered, and the police entered the apartment, the Godfather and his faithful lieutenant were already dead. He had promised that he would not go to prison and kept his word.
Torcuato Luca de Tena, as he told me at our meeting, followed day by day the evolution of the case that held the headlines of all the Mexican and international press. The Godfather, whose real name was Adolfo de Jesus Costazgo, was born in Miami in 1962. He had begun with Palo Mayombe or Regla Conga, an Afro-Cuban religion, being barely a teenager and for years had survived thanks to his knowledge of this religion, and to his practice as a tarot card reader. But after establishing himself in Mexico, he began to use the contacts that his card reading offered him -policemen, actors, criminals- to start his own business of drug trafficking, perverting the principles of an ancestral and legitimate religion like Regla Congo and turning Palo Monte into a particular form of Satanism to retain loyalty to his followers, terrorize his enemies, and obtain “magical protection” against the authorities. Obviously it did not work either.
As Torcuato Luca de Tena explained to me at the time, and I could verify as the news arrived in Spain, The Godfather was very well connected with Aztec high society. Soon the scandal spread to politicians, actors, singers, etc, who were linked to the Matamoros drug traffickers: From the singer Oscar Athie, to the famous actress Irma “La Tigresa” Serrano, to Lucía Méndez, the hairdresser Alfredo Palacio or the singer Yuri, who shortly before had triumphed in Spain with support by Juan Pardo.
But who was the focus of attention of the world press was she … “La Madrina”. Sara María Aldrete Villareal. She was born in Matamoros in 1964. She was almost six feet two inches tall and her natural beauty did not make her go unnoticed. And a US citizen, Miguel Zacarias, managed to marry her on Halloween in 1983, but the marriage lasted only five months. Nevertheless Sara had already obtained American citizenship.
An exemplary student of physical education, she was granted a scholarship from Texas Southmost College, where she met Costazgo in July 1987 on a street in Matamoros. He would become her lover and begin his complex ritual mix of Palo Monte, Aztec witchcraft and Satanism, deeming her “The Madrina.”
Sentenced to 647 years in prison, she is serving her sentence in a prison in Mexico, but if she were to be released one day she would have to face another trial in the United States for the murder of Mark Kirloy. A few years ago she published her own version of the story in the book “They Call Me The
Narco-Satanic,” and has granted different interviews to Mexican and international media claiming that she was always a victim, kidnapped by Costazgo, and that her confession, during the trial, was forcibly coerced by torture and rape by the police.
Nevertheless their history was very fascinating, and there have already been several films produced about their connection with the narcosatánicos of Matamoros.
In 1997 the Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia was also captivated by the incredible story of Sara Aldrete, directing the dilm Perdita Durango in which actress Rosie Perez plays a bloodthirsty and ambitious Aldrete, and our Oscar-winning Javier Bardén, the inspired character Adolgo de Jesus Costazgo. In one of the interviews he gave to Pepe Navarro during the promotion of the film, full of torture, blood and guts, he said that after thoroughly documenting the history of Sara Aldrete and Costazgo, he had decided to soften the scenes of the rituals …
“If I tell you how it really happened,” he said, “nobody would believe it.”
