A historian of witchcraft and rituals ventures into the Bolivian Amazon to meet Humberto, a man seeking shamanic protection from his cursed family lineage. In her portrait of Humberto, Irina unveils a dark story of heartbreak, human sacrifice, and ayahuasca visions.
A group of shamans had cursed Humberto’s family. His hardworking grandparents, uncles, and cousins had built a large house, and the townspeople were jealous of it. Four shamans came together to curse his grandfather, the head of the family. Humberto spoke about illness coming with the wind–a ‘malviento,’ a bad wind which blew over his grandfather like a warm gust and suddenly struck him down with fever.
He went to the hospital and, because he was strong, rallied and did not die. But the curse was then passed on to the grandfather’s children, Humberto’s uncles. Its poisoned thread ran through his family, wreaking its harm in the male line like something from a grim fairytale. It claimed his uncles, one by one, with every passing year. The first died when a tree collapsed on his head as he was motorcycling. The second passed away the following year, while they were still mourning the first, from an electric shock while plugging in a lamp. Another uncle followed the year after that.
Humberto described how his frightened family tried to get help from a shaman, but the fact that four shamans were working against one meant that he couldn’t help. Instead, the shaman advised them to move to the village where he himself came from, where he was friends with other shamans who could protect them. Humberto’s family followed this advice and moved, but the grandfather stayed behind to earn money to support them. Within a few weeks, he too was dead.
It wasn’t immediately apparent whether Humberto feared that he would follow in the footsteps of his uncles and grandfather. But an air of sadness hung about him, and he had the weary, backwards glance of the hunted. Humberto had moved far from his town, but the fear clung like wet mud to his footsteps.
He told me this story while showing me a ‘shaman tree’ deep in the Bolivian rainforest, a mighty 300-year-old tree which he claimed used to be a place of power among shamans before tourism took over the region. When I pressed him for details, he said that the tree gave power to the shamans in exchange for blood, absorbed rapidly by the sprawling roots. Naively, I asked, “What kind of animals were usually sacrificed here?” Humberto’s dark eyes narrowed. “No. Human,” he said quietly. “Usually, one of the children of the shaman.”
Humberto had a dry humour, the kind that often divulges a melancholic personality. I’m certain that he derived some sort of amusement from seeing my eyes widen in shock. I reminded myself that there was, of course, a possibility that he was exaggerating, or even lying to me outright. And yet, I believed him. Being a historian of ritual and witchcraft, I knew that magical power never comes from nothing. It is only in fictional literature that witches and wizards can make magic by merely waving their wands. In any society, ‘real’ magic has always been understood to come from transgressing, draining, or depleting. Sometimes, such wellsprings of power can be as dark or extreme as human sacrifice.
Rumours of human sacrifice continue to haunt Bolivia. The Ethnography Museum in La Paz, Bolivia’s dizzyingly high-altitude capital, explained that miners working a dangerous job deep in the bowels of the earth would leave offerings before heading down into the mines. These offerings, called sullu, are sacrifices for Pachamama (mother earth), in exchange for safety and protection.
You can buy all manner of sullu at the Mercado de las Brujas, the Witches’ Market, in La Paz. There, stalls in all the colours of the rainbow sell offerings prepared for Pachamama: coca leaves, alcohol, iridescent candles, and dried llama foetuses hanging by their question-mark necks. But the most notorious sullu are human sacrifices. The Ethnography Museum explained that miners were known to kidnap homeless people and bury them alive as offerings. Even today, there are rumours that this practice continues covertly. Every few years, people come forward claiming to have clawed their way out of the earth or otherwise escaped being buried alive as a sullu. Those who are homeless or itinerant continue to fear being snatched during the night.
It was my first day in the Bolivian Amazon. In the early morning, I had taken a boat upstream from the closest town to reach the jungle. It was winter, and the water level was low, so the boat motor groaned and dragged across the riverbed. Once in the rainforest, the thick, damp canopy protected me from the burning sun. You could almost hear the sunlight pouring thickly, like condensed milk, through layer after layer of canopy to reach the shady ground.
My cabin in the rainforest had no hot water or electricity. Instead, I was given candles and a lighter for the evenings. I showered with cold water and with a fatty bar of soap in the reddish candlelight, wiping the sweat and bugs and the congealed blood from the mosquito bites, which left bloody welts all over my body. Outside, huge purple flowers pressed against the windows of the cabin. At night-time, the forest was abuzz with the clamour of insects and birds. Never in my life have I had such deep, sound sleep, against the vivid tapestry of sound.
My guide was Humberto, a short, handsomely built man, 38 years old. Compared to the other guides, he was a taciturn man and did not speak frequently unless he had something to show me. He only became excited when talking about the wildlife. Earlier in the year, he had spotted a jaguar. He showed me videos on his phone screen of the creature dozing in the sun before waking up, pricking its ears, alert to the fact that it was being watched. I did not spot a jaguar while I was there, but one day, while walking along the banks of the river, we saw fresh jaguar footprints on the red silt. They were still wet, so they couldn’t have been more than half an hour old.
***
One day, after hiking in the rainforest all morning, we sat on some logs overlooking the river to rest. The midday sun split through the sky, cracking it into two. With just a little bit of questioning, the taciturn Humberto decided to open up and share his story.
He spoke of how he comes from a different–yet neighbouring–community, and was invited to be a guide here thanks to his English skills. I had noticed that he was solitary, something of an outsider, and did not really fit in with the other male guides and the female cook, who all came from the same local community. Humberto had only been working with them for six months. They had suggested that he take a girlfriend from the community, but in the end, Humberto decided against it.
He was nursing a broken heart. For several years, he was in a serious relationship with a younger girl whom he described as “very beautiful.” He helped her financially through administrative university, but as soon as she graduated, she left him. That was three years ago now. When she left, Humberto said he almost died. He stopped working, went broke, and stopped looking after himself. He no longer had someone to cook and care for him. After neglecting his body for many months, he had to have a stomach operation.
But now, he said, he was recovering and doing a lot better as a guide. “I like spending time with all my nephews. Sometimes I go for a few months to help my relatives, my grandmother, and aunts, to build for them or to help them farm the land. During these months, I earn no money.” Money for Humberto was always tight. On my last day, he was excited to take the boat back up to the nearest town before its Sunday market closed in the afternoon. He hoped to buy new shoes there. His hiking boot had broken, its sole peeling clean off. He didn’t say anything about it, but I saw that he was worried about shelling out money for a new pair. He had already just spent forty dollars buying a flashlight, having pawned his last one while grappling with unemployment and depression.
Humberto’s money and love troubles, his ill-defined status among the other guides, and his belief that shamans had cursed his family cannot have made for a happy and healthy state of mind. Nevertheless, as he sat on the log, a thin smile lit up his rather sad eyes. He enjoyed his work, enjoyed meeting visitors. He leaned forward and gestured at the expanse of rainforest around him. As his T-shirt sleeve rode up, I noticed that he had a fading heart tattoo on his forearm, with an arrow striking clean through it.
***
The training to become a guide is rigorous. For four years prior to being qualified as a guide, Humberto studied at the University of La Paz. There, he took a variety of classes, including English lessons, but also classes on flora and fauna, natural history, medicinal herbs, and local history and geography.
Here in the rainforest, he said, local communities often continued to do things their own way. He drew my attention to a tree whose white bark was covered in a colony of orange fire ants. “If you commit a crime such as a rape,” he said, “you are tied to the fire ant tree for thirty minutes as punishment.” Bitten over and over, the venomous bites would cause not only pain, but also a strong, delirious fever to kick in. The length of time depended on the severity of the crime. If bitten by enough fire ants, this punishment could end in death.
On my last day, we headed to a macaw cliff downstream. We climbed the crumbling mirador structure, left abandoned since Covid, to get a better view from up high. Green and red macaws dwelled in Swiss-cheese-like holes in the cliff, always in pairs. Macaws are monogamous creatures–when their partner dies, they also die within one or two days. Until they were protected by the law in the 2010s, macaws were hunted for their dazzling plumage, which was used in headdresses for the traditional ritual dance machetero. These days, hunting macaws is illegal, but in the past, they were shot with a bullet straight to the skull to avoid destroying the plumage. Humberto tells us that people would also steal macaw eggs and raise the birds from birth, just to kill them when fully grown. Nowadays, only a few hundred of these macaws are estimated to remain in the wild. I watched them spread their wings and fly out of their holes in a colourful spray of plumage.
***
One night, I asked Humberto about ayahuasca, the psychoactive beverage traditionally used by indigenous cultures in the Amazon. That night, the moon was full, and the sky was so bright when we switched our torches off. Everything was quiet, much quieter than usual. No monkeys vaulted through the canopy; no insects buzzed. Only a tarantula had ventured silently out of its hole and watched with beady blackcurrant eyes. Humberto explained that animals are far shier when the moon is full, not liking to be seen.
I was trying to collect some interesting stories or insights from Humberto about his experiences with ayahuasca. In the Peruvian Andes, another guide, Luis, had talked about his encounters with the beverage. Like Humberto, Luis had trained to be a guide at the University of Cusco. He had long dark hair that fell in thick waves around his round face. He had grown up in the Manu rainforest. His parents searched for gold for a living, but in the end, they left Manu and relocated to Cusco because “they had to move with the times.” Luis had once tasted jaguar meat. The jaguar had eaten two babies from a local community, and so it was killed. In traditional communities, he told me, the men hunt jaguar, turtles, and monkeys.
Luis spoke of how his grandfather had had his work tools stolen. The ayahuasca visions told him exactly where they had been hidden, and he went with the police and found them. When Luis’ mother drank ayahuasca, she clearly saw his sisters, who would only go on to be born sixteen years later. Another of Luis’ stories described how his friend, who had been betrayed by her boyfriend, drank ayahuasca and saw her boyfriend having sex with the other woman. The experience helped her confront what had happened and to process that her boyfriend hadn’t chosen to cheat because she wasn’t good enough for him.
Luis was very disapproving of tourists who tried ayahuasca as a novelty. He warned us: “Be careful with it. No one is ever the same after they take it. You really have to go in with a purpose.”
Humberto, on the other hand, had no such qualms. When he sensed, from my questions, that I was interested in ayahuasca, he became quite keen that we drink it together. He said he knew a guy in the neighbouring village. He seemed totally indifferent to the idea that you should only drink it when processing a significant life event and said that he often drank it for fun. I asked him what kind of things he saw. He admitted that his experiences had been unsettling. He spoke of visions of being eaten alive, in one gulp, by a terrifying snake. I kept it to myself, but I thought that such visions didn’t sound particularly fun.
***
Bolivia remains the most fascinating and perplexing country I have ever travelled to. The very name of the country is anchored in the Bolivians’ struggle for freedom, evoking Simón Bolívar, the leader of the rebellion that threw off the yoke of Spanish colonial rule in 1825. A landlocked country ever since Chile occupied its coastal territory in 1884, Bolivia has never given up the struggle to recover its beaches. The loss of access to the sea is annually commemorated on the 23rd of March, Bolivia’s Dia del Mar (Day of the Sea). The nation continues to maintain a navy force, which conducts drills on Lake Titicaca at nearly 4,000 metres above sea level, in the expectation that one day it will regain its access to the Pacific Ocean.
The golden, luminous yellow stripe in the Bolivian flag represents its mineral wealth. The Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain) in Potosí was once the world’s largest silver deposit, its rich reserves extracted through forced labour during colonial rule. At its peak in the late sixteenth century, Potosí’s population exceeded that of Paris, and its mineral wealth funded much of the Spanish Empire. The mountain has now been hollowed out and its bones picked over. There is no silver left, and the mining in its caves has weakened its foundations to the point that they are now prone to collapsing.
Bolivia remains a country of contradictions. Its mines produce tin, zinc, lithium, and copper, but rumours of human sacrifice continue to linger in stories of what goes on down in the mines. Its coca leaves are used to export refined cocaine, but they are also left as offerings to Pachamama. Its indigenous populations continue to live, as much as possible, by their own laws and customs, but there is no doubt that tourism is encroaching on this way of life.
Through the stories told to me by Humberto over the course of my week spent with him–stories about the rainforest and about the hardships of his own life there–I glimpsed a life in the Amazon through his eyes. Humberto’s is a story of resilience, much like the story of contemporary Bolivia; a country that finds itself standing at the crossroads between deep-rooted tradition and large-scale modernisation.
