Chupacabras

This project explores the impact of the Chupacabras myth in Mexico as a media-constructed smokescreen. Recreating news images, I seek to reveal how fear and fiction were used by the media as tools of distraction and control.

Mexico, 1996. A mythical and surreal creature took over prime-time television and the front pages of widely circulated newspapers: the Chupacabras. Described as a cryptid that attacked animals—and sometimes humans—by draining them of all their blood, the Chupacabras quickly became a media sensation.

This project originates from the hypothesis that the myth of the Chupacabras, initially sensationalized by the media, and later co-opted by the Mexican government, was a smokescreen to divert public attention during a period of deep political, social, and economic crisis.

Through staged photography, based on a compilation of media imagery and interviews, I recreate and reframe the visual narratives originally presented as “real.” These images aim to expose how fear and fiction were deliberately constructed and amplified by the media, and later instrumentalized by those in power to manipulate public perception and enforce a politics of fear.

In this work, the Chupacabras is not shown directly. Instead, the absence of the monster invites the viewer to reflect on their own associations with it. For some, it may be a childhood nightmare or urban legend; for others, it may symbolize government corruption, the economic collapse, or even the infantilization of the Mexican people by state-controlled narratives.

These images serve as the fragments of a puzzle—pieces that, when assembled, reveal the mechanisms of myth-making used by media and political power to distort reality.