This text analyzes the discourses and social significance of poisoning in the jurisdiction of Nirgua, Province of Venezuela, during the first half of the eighteenth century, when it was taken up as a cause in 1735. The study details the complex relationship between those who died of poisoning and a body of superstitions and moral transgressions scandalous for the period, as well as the intrinsic association of the crime to the “natural” villainy of those who carried it out: pardos (those of mixed European-indigenous-black races) and blacks. A cultural approach to the social discourses of the witnesses shows that poisoning implied a powerful and often inadvertent negativization in eighteenth-century Nirgua society, in addition to an alternative mechanism of justice to that imposed by colonial Hispanic order. This negativization of the “vice of giving death”—attributed to blacks and other mestizos—arose in a society composed almost entirely of a pardo population.