Lake Catemaco, southern Veracruz
Several decades ago, tracts of dense, impassable rainforest consumed the southernmost stretches of Veracruz state, barely penetrated by roads or humanity. Only a few obscure settlements lay hidden in the miles of ravenous foliage, teeming canopies and bursting vegetation skirting the Gulf of Mexico.
Today, southern Veracruz is a less dramatic land of rolling cattle pastures, remote highways and terminally poor, sluggish villages.
Yet you can still encounter vestiges of that dark world of old: crocodile-infested lagoons, jungle-shrouded rivers, abundant bird life and luxuriant swimming holes all punctuate the deep green – and stiflingly humid – tropical landscape.
But it is the region’s continued adherence to traditional medicine that really distinguishes it.
Historically divorced from the outside world, the area’s inhabitants learned to rely wholly on local remedies – the multitude of exotic plants, roots, fruits and barks supplied by the rainforest – which were far easier to acquire (and often more effective) than conventional medicines.
A culture of shamanism flourished, which many consider indistinct from brujería or witchcraft.
The traditional brujo, or sorcerer, was widely revered as a Man of Knowledge, conversant not only with plants and medicines, but with nature’s unseen spiritual forces. He was a creature of two worlds – the physical and non-physical – a custodian of great secrets, an initiate in astonishing mysteries, and an emissary to weird lands.
Brujería is still widely practised throughout the area of Southern Veracruz known as Los Tuxtlas, named after two of the region’s three major settlements – San Andrés Tuxtla and Santiago Tuxtla.
The region’s third and most important population centre is Catemaco, an economically depressed, but not unfriendly town, nestled on the shores of a great lagoon. Here, brujería enjoys its most fervent support.
