`GOAT SUCKER' MYSTIFIES MEXICO : TRAIL OF BLOOD-DRAINED SHEEP SPARKS FLURRY OF FANTASTIC THEORIES.

Byline: Dudley Althaus Houston Chronicle

The roosters had not yet crowed when the fierce barking of dogs jolted Violeta Colorado from her sleep.

The dogs had an animal cornered at the rubbish pile behind Colorado's small concrete house in Zapotal, a farm village in the steamy oil country of southeastern Mexico.

When the canines growled, Colorado says, the besieged beast responded with a nerve-rattling hiss unlike any animal noise she had ever heard.

It was a full hour, she says, before the beast escaped the dogs and peace returned to the country night.

``The dogs were pursuing it. They had it trapped, but we couldn't see what it was,'' the 27-year-old mother of two toddlers says. ``I thought it was a coyote.''

But in the light of the early morning sun one day last week, Colorado learned that nine sheep had been killed in the pasture next to her house. None of the sheep had been eaten. Their throats had been punctured and their blood drained.

To their horror, Colorado says, she and her neighbors realized that the animals had tangled with a ``Chupacabras,'' a ``Goat Sucker,'' a much-feared yet never-seen beast that some say is Mexico's version of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.

Local reporters arrived in droves. Busloads of the curious trundled down the dirt lane to Colorado's house and the pasture. Several of the dead sheep were carried off to the state capital of Villahermosa 30 miles away for examination.

The local veterinarian who examined two of the dead sheep says a coyote never kills the way these sheep were killed. The coyotes and jungle cats in the area rip their prey apart and devour it. These dead sheep had only puncture wounds. And there was no blood left in them, no blood at all.

``I have never seen anything like it, ever,'' says Ramiro Santiago Lara, 34, who has practiced veterinary medicine in the area for eight years and has examined hundreds of animals killed by ordinary predators. ``It seems like a type of vampire.''

After making reported appearances in Puerto Rico last summer and then passing through Miami, the Chupacabras - pronounced chew-paw-CAH-bras - is said to have surfaced in Mexico 12 days ago in the northwestern state of Sinaloa.

Since then, people say, the beast, or, possibly, a horde of them, has been moving fast. At least 46 attacks have been reported so far in 14 states across the country, according to a tally published Sunday by the Mexico City newspaper El Financiero. More than 300 goats and sheep have been slain as well as several horses and calves.

Four people also have reported being attacked. But one of them, a married woman from northern Sinaloa state, has been publicly accused of trying to pass off a hickey given her by an illicit lover as the work of the Goat Sucker.

News of, and speculation about, the creature fills the pages of local newspapers and dominates the airwaves. Thousands of notes appear on World Wide Web home pages dedicated to the Chupacabras.

Cocktail party conversation in Mexico City focuses heavily on it. Goat Sucker jokes are the rage. But the subject is not funny to the goats and the sheep - or to the mostly poor farmers who own them.

``This is definitely a serious matter, one that we have never dealt with before but which is very real,'' says Enoc Leon Ramirez, 48, the owner of the sheep killed in Zapotal. ``The government is trying to say this was the work of coyotes. That is a lie. The only explanation is that it was this beast they are talking about, this Chupacabras.''

Everyone, of course, has a favorite theory. Some believe the beast is Mexico's latest national myth or a simple case of mass illusion.

Others think the Goat Sucker may have come from outer space or is the mutant progeny of some mad gene-splicing scheme.

Still others opine that the creature is part of a plot against Mexico launched for some unknown and evil purpose.

``It's from the neighboring country,'' says Andres Magana, a peasant farmer in La Venta, a town about 40 miles north of Zapotal. ``Neighbor country'' never refers to Guatemala or Belize in Mexican conversation. It always means the United States.

Local, state and federal officials, as well as scientific ``experts,'' have been trying to debunk the Chupacabras lore. They say the attacks are the work of common predators, such as coyotes and pumas, magnified by the imaginations of simple country folk and hyped by the sensationalist media.

But what government officials say carries little weight with most Mexicans these days. These are the same officials who have been claiming for the past 18 months that Mexico's economy is improving, when nearly everyone suspects it is getting worse. If the government says the sky is blue, many believe it must be green.

``The authorities are hiding something,'' says Santiago, adding that state investigators in Villahermosa have refused to release findings from their examination of one of the dead sheep.

In the many artists' renditions of the beast published in the Mexican press, the Chupacabras looks like anything from Hollywood's ET on a bad-hair day to former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari posing as Dracula.

Salinas, who left office 18 months ago, is almost universally blamed for the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. He is Mexico's bogeyman of choice. In one political cartoon published Sunday, a vampire-like Salinas commands a hapless peasant: ``Tell that Goat Sucker not to be messing on my turf.'' But such political imagery may well be lost on those who believe they have felt the Chupacabras' bite.

``As farmers, we are not interested in the politics and the jokes,'' says Leon, who lost his entire flock in the Zapotal attack. ``There has to be something to this.''