Witchcraft in Mexico
As told to Daniel New
Sometimes we read the newsletters from missionaries and they ask us to pray for them, and they list things like safety in travel and getting the work done correctly, for health, etc. It takes on a sameness that often causes us to take it for granted that they are slogging away, in a job little different from ours, just in a foreign location.
And then you hear about the taxi driver that my friend, Pedro 1, casually asked if he had ever been robbed. It’s a small city, and he had not, but he had once had someone beat him out of a fare. The story startled me as much as it did Pedro.
It was late at night about two years ago – about 10 p.m. – when he was hailed by a woman, who asked him to wait, she had another passenger. She quickly returned to the taxi with a box and a young woman of surpassing beauty. In fact, the taxi driver said, “She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.” They got in and directed him to another house, where he picked up a man. They then went out into the country several miles, down a gravel road until it dead-ended, and a chain was stretched across the roadway. There were no houses, no lights, nothing around.
They asked him to wait, so he did – for more than an hour, after which time he decided that was too long, they weren’t coming back, or something, so he started the car, got it turned around to return to town, when the lady came rushing out of the bushes and asked him to not leave yet, they were almost done. He turned off the motor, and she asked him to come join them (presumably so that he wouldn’t go off and leave them).
Following her lead into the brushy area, he was startled to see a circle of (13?) candles set up in a small clearing, in the middle of which was a cooked turkey!
The lady said, “We’re about to have a drink, so we’ll share with you.” She gave him a cup and he reluctantly took a drink, as did they. The man then went into some kind of an incantation, a prayer of some sort, in a language this man had never heard before. He said, “I know it wasn’t Spanish, it wasn’t Aztec, and it wasn’t English. I don’t know what it was.”
After that, they all had what looked like a prayer – they held hands and prayed in Spanish, directing their prayer to “El Malo” – “the Bad One”, or “the Evil One.” They asked that he honor their sacrifice and prayers, and that he would help their goats become the envy of the entire city.
That was it! They all headed for the taxi, leaving the candles and the turkey, and headed home. The taxi driver was rattled, to say the least. Not a religious man, he knew that he was involved with something very religious, and very bad.
When they got home, the lady said she didn’t have the forty pesos tonight (it was now after midnight), but he could come back in the morning and she would pay him. Rather unhappily, he agreed to return in the morning.
On the way home the taxi driver began to feel numbness in his legs, getting worse as he drove. By the time he got home, he could not get out of the car. He honked and woke up the house and they came and carried him in. He felt horrible, asked to be taken to the bathroom, where he not only made a big mess, but became violent, tearing the back of the toilet off its fasteners and throwing it down and shattering it. He then collapsed and blacked out.
In the morning he woke up, and could only open his eyes. His entire body was numb and would not respond to any attempt to move. The family began to massage his hands and legs and as circulation restored, he gradually became able to sit up and then stand. Immediately he went to the curandera, the herbalist and perhaps we might also call her a witch doctor, we don’t know.
He recounted what had happened. Whether he was poisoned or cursed, he did not know. She gave him some native medicines, and told him that it was most definitely devil worship, that she knew the people involved, and that the beautiful woman was no woman at all, but a demon, perhaps Satan himself! She also told him that some of the richest people in the town, outwardly devout Catholics, frequent this house and this demonic worship.
He decided he didn’t really need the forty pesos bad enough to go ask for it.
A year later, the taxi picked up a fare who gave him the address of this same lady, so on the way over, he asked why he was going there. The man told him that he was going to buy a goat, because they had the very best goat in the entire town!
We see people in all cultures and all walks of life who are living in this sort of spiritual darkness, and in many cases they cannot read the Word of God because it simply is not available to them – not in a language they can read and understand! You may think it’s enough that Mexicans can purchase a Spanish Bible, but even most Mexicans don’t realize that over 25 million Mexicans speak Spanish only as a second language, and if they read at all, it’s on a very simple level.
Appreciate your Bible; read it often, and pray for it to come alive for you.
And while you’re praying, pray that translators and missionaries around the world can make progress in each of their endeavors that will penetrate this spiritual darkness and help build up a body of Christian Disciples who will be able to stand strong for the Kingdom of Yahweh.
1 Not his real name.
© Daniel D. New, Permission to copy, with credits, is hereby granted.-
