Witchcraft accusations and wrongful convictions in Brazil
How do extraordinary allegations of black magic and Satanism lead to wrongful convictions?
Pedro Haram Colucci explores how moral panic, historical prejudice and media sensationalism shaped some of Brazil's most notorious miscarriages of justice - and how systemic reforms are finally trying to prevent them.
by Pedro Haram Colucci
Brazil has repeatedly experienced criminal cases in which accusations of black magic and Satanic rituals resulted in wrongful accusations, coerced confessions, and miscarriages of justice. Police investigators, forensic experts, prosecutors, courts, and the press have all played a role in these cases. Certain individuals come to be perceived as embodiments of evil, and at that point, ordinary standards of proof begin to lose their weight against collective fear.
The relationship between allegations of ritual crime and wrongful convictions has received little attention in Brazil. Nevertheless, several criminal cases reveal how fear and moral panic can shape police investigations and directly influence judicial outcomes.
The construction of witchcraft accusations
These episodes often begin with crimes that deeply disturb public opinion. Murders involving children, acts of extreme violence, or crimes that appear difficult to explain generate collective anxiety and an urgent demand for answers. Political authorities expect rapid results, the public expects arrests, and investigators come under considerable pressure to identify those responsible.
In this atmosphere, explanations involving black magic or ritual practices may gain credibility. In Brazil, suspicion frequently falls upon practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions, particularly Candomblé and Umbanda. Candomblé, brought to Brazil by enslaved West and Central Africans, centers on the worship of orixás, deities linked to natural forces and ancestral lineages, through music, dance, and offerings. Umbanda blends African traditions with Catholicism, Kardecist Spiritism, and Indigenous elements, and involves communicating with spirit guides, such as caboclos and pretos-velhos, for healing and guidance. Neither tradition involves devil worship or malevolent magic. Nevertheless, such traditions have long been associated in the popular imagination with witchcraft and Satanism. Historical prejudice makes allegations against their practitioners appear believable even when no evidence supports them.
Media discourse and the production of legal reality
The media can intensify this process. Crime reporting often depends heavily on information provided by police authorities during the earliest stages of an investigation, precisely when facts are uncertain and competing hypotheses remain open. Expressions such as "Satanic sect", "macabre ritual", and "black magic ceremony" do more than describe a possible line of inquiry. They present suspects as figures of exceptional evil and encourage the public to treat allegations as established facts.
Once these narratives become widely accepted, they are difficult to dislodge. Public opinion frequently reaches conclusions before any judicial determination has been made. Police theories are repeated by journalists, media coverage fuels public outrage, and the resulting outrage appears to validate the original suspicions. Weak evidence, inconsistent testimony, and confessions obtained under pressure may then acquire a credibility they would not otherwise possess.
The Witches of Guaratuba case provides one of the clearest examples of this dynamic. In 1992, six-year-old Evandro Ramos Caetano was found dead in the city of Guaratuba, in southern Brazil. The brutality of the crime and the absence of an obvious explanation encouraged investigators to pursue the theory that the child had been sacrificed in a black magic ritual allegedly involving the wife of the local mayor and practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions. Seven people were eventually convicted. The case gained renewed national attention decades later through the podcast Projeto Humanos, which dedicated an entire season to re-investigating the crime, and through the 2021 documentary series O Caso Evandro, produced by the Brazilian streaming platform Globoplay.
Many years later, recordings surfaced showing that confessions had been extracted through torture committed by members of the Military Police who had no formal authority to conduct the investigation. The defendants had repeatedly alleged coercion and maintained their innocence from the beginning. In November 2023, the National High Court of Brazil annulled all convictions. More than thirty years after the murder, the case remains unsolved.
A similar sequence of events occurred in Operation Revelation. In 2017, the dismembered bodies of two children were discovered near Novo Hamburgo in southern Brazil. Four men were arrested and accused of participating in ritual child sacrifice. During a press conference, the deputy police chief responsible for the investigation stated that his theory had originated from divine revelations communicated by self-described prophets. No physical evidence linked the suspects to the crimes. The case collapsed when key witnesses admitted they had fabricated their stories, and the officer in charge of the investigation was later convicted of witness tampering and ideological forgery. The murders remain unsolved.
Towards institutional intervention
These cases suggest that modern witch hunts do not depend on a literal belief in witches. They arise when fear, institutional pressure, and entrenched prejudices combine to produce convincing narratives about absolute evil. Under such circumstances, the demand for an explanation may become stronger than the demand for evidence.
The Brazilian cases discussed here demonstrate how easily criminal investigations can be diverted by moral panic and how difficult it becomes to correct errors once a public narrative has taken hold. Preventing wrongful convictions of this kind requires greater caution in the public communication of criminal investigations, careful scrutiny of confessions and witness testimony, and an unwavering commitment to the principle that extraordinary accusations require convincing proof.
In December 2025, following the final judgment in the Witches of Guaratuba case, Brazil's National Council of Justice (CNJ) created the Criminal Justice, Reparation and Non-Repetition Laboratory. Its mission is to study wrongful convictions and propose reforms to prevent their recurrence, marking an important recognition that such cases reflect systemic problems rather than isolated judicial errors.
Pedro Haram Colucci is a PhD Candidate in Law, University of São Paulo (FDRP-USP).
Images generated from prompts using Gemini.
