Under names ranging from Santería and sorcery to ancestral knowledge, witchcraft has forged a powerful connection with politics in Latin America — a connection that has intensified in recent decades.

Manifesting everywhere from literary movements to the halls of government, this trend carries implications that are both spiritual and political. It functions as a declaration of rejection against Western civilization and the order stemming from it — an order encompassing everything from meritocracy and innovation to the nuclear family.

It is no coincidence that, in contrast to the widespread Christianity brought to this part of the world by Spanish conquistadors during Christopher Columbus’s early voyages, the political Left has embraced witchcraft as a banner. Today, the chasm between groups on that side of the political spectrum and the rest of society is more pronounced than ever — aesthetically, ethically, and philosophically.

Latin America and the Caribbean are the regions with the largest Christian population in the world, surpassing both Europe and Africa. We are talking about a figure between 590 and 640 million people, representing roughly 24–26% of all Christians globally.

From Magical Realism to Tyrannical Magic

The literary movement known as magical realism transformed the Americas south of the Rio Grande into a space where stories blended extraordinary events into a thoroughly realistic world — a world where both narrator and characters accepted these events as normal. The magical element did not break the world’s rules but rather coexisted with them.

In his novel “The Kingdom of This World” (El reino de este mundo), Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier depicts revolutionary, anti-French Haiti and the tyranny that followed independence, weaving a narrative rich in Afro-Caribbean rituals and characters capable of transforming into animals.

In real life, however, the “magical realism” that surged during the 1960s boom may have been pointing toward a Hispanic-American society increasingly drifting away from the Western Christian ideal. And that story does not begin in the 20th century, but in the 18th. On the night of August 14, 1791, the sky over the Bois Caïman forest in Haiti (then Saint-Domingue) was rent by thunder. There, hundreds of enslaved people gathered around the Voodoo priestess Cécile Fatiman. She raised a machete and sacrificed a black pig. Its blood was shared in a collective pact; whoever drank it pledged to rebel, to set fire to plantations, and to kill the Europeans — who made up five percent of the island’s population. That ritual ignited the bloody Haitian Revolution.

In the 1950s, as attested by the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, General Fulgencia Batista’s regime turned to brujería — or witchcraft, as Cubans (including practitioners themselves) commonly call it — hoping it would keep him in power.

In the summer of 1958, at Batista’s request and expense, musicologist Odilio Urfé organized what is known in Santería as a “grand Ekbó” at the Guanabacoa stadium in Havana, enlisting the help of devotees and babalaos (priests) dressed in white. The goal was to “gather all of Cuba’s santeros in a plea to Olofi (the Santería deity)” to halt the “river of blood” that threatened to flood the island as the rebels led by Fidel Castro advanced.

There were chants, incantations, and sacrifices. “The entire field was awash in blood — an attempt to exorcise blood with blood,” recounted Cabrera Infante, describing dead animals, entrails, and tongues hanging from a tree.

The 1959 Revolution did not change much in this regard. The links between the socialist tyranny and witchcraft are widely known.

Indeed, recent high-level political events — such as the final phase of the campaign to free the Castro-aligned spies known as the “Cuban Five” and the re-establishment of relations between the Obama administration and Raúl Castro — incorporated colors and dates significant to syncretism; for instance, the announcement made on December 17, 2014, coincided with the Feast of Saint Lazarus, a figure identified with the Yoruba deity Babalú Ayé.

Neither Haiti nor Cuba has truly recovered since their respective revolutions — the war of independence and the socialist revolution. Yet, while the Caribbean was the epicenter of the use of sorcery in politics during the 19th and 20th centuries, the phenomenon has spread across the entire region in recent decades.

Part of 21st Century Socialism

It would be remiss not to mention the deep connection between sorcery and “21st century socialism” — that wave of leftist governments spawned by the São Paulo Forum that emerged in Latin America following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And the link makes sense. This group of new regimes was not merely anti-capitalist but also anti-Western and, consequently, anti-Christian. In the vision of society sought by 21st century socialism, Christianity was viewed as a potential mask to attract voters, yet once the regimes were in power, it was seen as an outright obstacle.

Consider the persecution of the Nicaraguan church or the attempts to co-opt the Venezuelan one.

In the first case, Managua is effectively “co-governed” by a witch: Rosario Murillo. Born in the city that houses Nicaragua’s oldest church, she wears numerous rings, necklaces, and bracelets featuring gemstones like lapis lazuli and turquoise, using them as amulets against bad luck.

A profile in Semana magazine described her attire thus: “she wears up to five rings on each finger, or has her forearm covered by a silver bracelet engraved with the Hand of Fatima — a symbol of protection among Jews and Muslims.”

The Colombian publication notes that her mother, Zoilamérica Zambrana Sandino, hailed from Niquinohomo, the birthplace of Nicaragua’s most renowned spiritualists and sorcerers. She read palms, consulted Ouija boards, and claimed to communicate with the spirit of her relative, the national hero Augusto César Sandino. Today, Murillo asserts that her son Juan Carlos is his reincarnation.