The rise of the demons

There’s a simple way to look at the turmoil of the last 15 years or so.

We’re all more afraid than we were.

It’s so widespread and so total that it has happened almost without our noticing. It underpins the frantic news cycle. (As an experiment, see how many headlines you could effectively add the words “We Fear” or its binary “We Hope” in front of.) It colours every debate. It unites the two Anglo-American extremist political tribes, and any other organisation large enough to have something to lose.

Donald Trump is as much a symptom of this as a cause. He draws primal emotion from the crowd, becomes its Id. And underlying everything he says or does is an existential fear that verges on panic. He’s petrified of his political opponents, of immigrants, of judges, of Canada.

I could speculate about why we’re all so much more edgy, with anecdotes (pandemic, political instability, financial crisis) or with statistics (housing costs, the economics of superstars), but there’s no shortage of those fever-dream analyses.

I prefer to think of it as cyclical, perhaps magnified by the fact culture is now driven by interconnected online mobs, and look instead at its effects. Specifically, for this next series of stories, at the ways fear and superstition are linked.

Terrified people search for meaning, even if that's only naming their nemesis, and giving it form. In this case the oldest form we have for a fear embodied: demons.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll explore demons, and demonic possession — a topic that was once mostly reserved for movies and the Bible, but now pops up in the headlines as a serious phenomenon.

This series builds on one of the weirdest stories I ever reported, about an experimental exorcism in Mexico in 2017 whose effects still reverberate now. I always felt there was much more to it.

But even I had no idea where it would lead. Or, in the interim, how much American society would come to resemble that of its southern neighbor as its politics descended toward brutality and revenge.

ON A DEMONIC LEVEL the story of the cursed experiment and the evil it later loosed in Mexico City begins in early 2015.

It happened at the cathedral of San Luis Potosí in central Mexico, a massive ornate and carved sandy stone edifice, dotted with statues and carvings, and topped with two towers of such dark terracotta that they look blood-red in certain lights.

Inside, the archbishop, Monseñor Carlos Cabrero, splendid in his elaborate and rich garb, had begun to despair of Mexico. He made a difficult decision, and resolved to do what was necessary, no matter the risks. He picked up the phone, and began to make calls.

All around him, he saw evil. A nation beset by Satanic forces and great violence. He blamed monstrous accusations — of corruption, and pedophilia — against his beloved church. But a more objective eye than his would have to admit he had a point.

In the late 1990s the world celebrated the dwindling of the Colombian cartels which had dominated the global supply of narcotics. But in Mexico a far more insidious and terrifying evil began to form in the vacuum. The market was gradually taken over by new rival cartels, closely enmeshed with the Mexican government and police, who made the Colombians look humane and principled.

Their names and leaders changed every few years. But after the Mexican government stepped up its enforcement efforts in 2006, prompting an escalation in violence, their methods have been uniform. Each cartel tries to outdo the other in terms of horror, pain and fear.

That first year Los Zetas, a cartel that was formed when Mexican special forces soldiers assigned to combat the Gulf Cartel defected first to that cartel, and later to form their own, began to hang dead bodies, sometimes partly dismembered, from bridges over a roads, as a kind of message to the local population and authorities.

In 2007 they began adding banners, usually crudely painted on white sheets, claiming credit for the killings and attempting to establish themselves as a kind of invisible army of the people. Over time, as other cartels adopted the method, thousands of bodies and banners swayed from bridges across the country.

On a Sunday morning just before Christmas, 2008, eight black plastic bags were found outside a superstore in the southern city of Chilpancingo. Each contained the severed head of a Mexican soldier. A note beside the bags read "For every one of ours you kill, we will kill 10 of yours."

By 2009, the list of just the most wanted cartel bosses numbered 37, and encompassed complex and well-resourced cartels including Beltrán-Leyva, La Familia Michoacana, Gulf, Los Zetas, Sinaloa, Tijuana and Juarez, each effectively beyond the law.

By 2010 running gun battles between cartels, or between cartels and the Mexican authorities, meant that some towns were virtually abandoned. The Mexican Red Cross said it would no longer treat those shot. Its responders were too consistently caught in the crossfire.

In 2011, Los Zetas executed 193 people on a ranch near San Fernando. They feared that the people had planned to join another gang.

At around 4am on May 13, 2012, on the winding road from Monterrey to Reynosa, with a grass verge on one side and a line of towering pylons on the other, a driver began to see strange shapes looming out of the dark, some on the road, some in the grass. The beam of headlights revealed 49 dead bodies, some wrapped in plastic, most not. Their heads and hands had been cut off. There is no record they were ever identified.

In 2013, a gang of five masked men broke into the Acapulco holiday home of six tourists, tied up the men and systematically raped the women over the course of a night. The ground was littered with the butts of cigarettes the men had smoked while taking breaks.

Since then the violence had blurred into a horrific kaleidoscope of trucks filled with dismembered corpses, prison wars, shootouts, public officials executed, plausible threats to the very heart of the government, kidnappings, the murders of women and children as a matter of course.

The best estimates suggest that about 450,000 have died since 2006. There can be no knowing, of course. And Mexico, like any nation, is so much more than just its darkest headlines.

But horror on that scale does something to a society, and to its people. So many sins lavishly rewarded, so much innocence brutally punished. Upswings of violence with every new development. It seems fair to say that millions of Mexicans, linked somehow to this mass of death, will never feel fully safe again.

Monseñor Cabrero's solution had barely been tried before. And he felt he had to proceed with caution. The forces of evil were everywhere, and in the ascendancy. If they were alerted, who knew what might ensue.

So he began to call a select few that he trusted. They included Father José Antonio Fortea, a Spanish priest. Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, an impatient and imperious former Archbishop of Guadalajara. And Father Carlos Spahn, an Argentinian priest. All specialized, in various ways, in dealing with evil.

He asked them only to gather on May 19 in San Luis Potosí. No further details. They agreed and began making their travel plans.

On May 18, Father Spahn, a shaven-headed and intense man with a black-and-white beard, performed what should have been a routine exorcism. But the demon, speaking with a twisted version of the voice of the possessed, was unusually angry, he felt. It specified “that thing you’re going to do in two days in a gathering” and kept repeating “you’re going to do something.”

The next day, when the holy men gathered at the chapter house in San Luis Potosí, and Monseñor Cabrero began to explain his plan in detail, he understood the significance of those words. ⸭