She wrapped 10 lemons in black silk, placed them in a plastic bag and doused them with an oil guaranteed to sap any sweetness out of the fruit. That night, she promised, she would visit a graveyard and bury the bitter bag near the tombstone of a woman named Maria, asking her spirit's help to drive a wedge between the wayward husband and the home-wrecker. At this most hopeful time of year, many Mexicans are seeking a change in their luck, not through New Year's resolutions, but through this nation's remarkably large number of witches. Mexico's witches offer their help, for a price. It's very busy these days.
Few places can boast a culture of witchcraft as thriving and lucrative as Mexico's.
Witches from all over Latin America hold annual conventions in Mexico, and bookstores are full of stories from the coven and recipes for black magic. Some witches wind up in the official limelight, hired by police departments to help find victims of kidnappings or retained by politicians to help plot strategy. Early last year, many top-ranking witches gathered at the National Press Club of Mexico City to announce they had cast a spell on the presidential election to make it, for the first time in recent memory, clean and fair. The gathered crowd of foreign journalists nearly choked on their skepticism, but the witches turned out to be dead on. And witchcraft is clearly big business.