Others read kernels of corn like tea leaves. Still others are reputed to bring back straying husbands, help save failing businesses, cause fatal damage to enemies. Many Mexicans give credence to witchcraft. In every market in the country, there is at least one stall selling scented candles, mysterious oils and herbs, as well as boxes of soaps and packets of powders that promise, in words or pictures, good luck, success, protection for the home or new hair growth. Yet the witches of Los Tuxtlas have emerged as something of a tourist attraction.
Few foreigners come here, but Mexican vacationers are lured from all over the repubic.
When I visited Los Tuxtlas recently, I was determined to find out as much as I could about the witches. I was skeptical, but uneasy about the task. In his book A War of Witches, about brujer a in another region of Mexico, anthropologist Timothy J. Knab depicts people who kill and maim through the use of toxic herbs, poisonous bat droppings, or the slashing of the jugular vein with extracted jaguar's teeth. Dr. Jeffrey Wilkerson, who heads the Institute for Cultural Anthropology of the Tropics in northern Veracruz, looks upon the area's witches with great skepticism. Until then doctors and hospitals were scarce, and given the area's nature, there was a strong and longstanding tradition of healers who lived in the jungle and learned the medicinal properties of plants, herbs and even animals.