Poor Look to Botanicas for Magic Cures : Religions: Healers’ shops offer colored candles and blessings they claim soothe woes from cancer to heartbreak. Critics say they take advantage of clients’ ignorance.

Tucked away behind an El Rio gas station, atop a short flight of stairs and past a storefront window displaying crystals, herbs and religious ornaments, Senora Delia was busy at work performing her magic.

Olga, a regular customer, had just walked in the store with a red candle in her hand for the senora to “prepare.” Olga’s husband has stomach cancer, and “he wasn’t feeling good today, so I thought I’d light a candle for him,” she said softly in Spanish.

The candle, inside a glass with the image of Jesus stamped on the front and a prayer on the back, looked much like the dozens of multicolored candles neatly stacked on the shelves behind the counter. Only the images stamped on the glass varied--a white saint, a green cross, a black skeleton.

Senora Delia turned to her right and studied her collection of oil bottles at the Botanica Santa Elena for a moment before settling on a pink one next to the statuettes of the Virgin Mary. From under the counter she grabbed a small container full of red wax and a white aerosol can with the image of the Virgin of Santa Barbara painted on it in red.

She poured some oil into the candle. With her right index finger, she covered the saint’s face on the candle with a small ball of wax. Then she spread more wax around the rim of the candle glass. Finally, she sprayed the candle with rose-scented “holy” perfume.

Olga lowered her head respectfully while Senora Delia put the candle in a shopping bag, then took the $2 she received for her services and plunked it into the cash register.

Business is thriving at Ventura County’s botanicas, where healers promote and proclaim cures for everything from a broken heart and gossip to AIDS and cancer.

Combining magic rituals with occasional bits of common-sense advice, placeboes and amulets with conventional herbal remedies, Buddhism and Christianity with Santeria and voodoo, botanica healers serve as the poor man’s doctor, pharmacist, psychologist and priest.

Some botanicas are open about what they do; others threaten to put a curse on reporters who express interest in writing about them. Until recently, Botanica La Mercedes in downtown Oxnard was the best-known in the county.

But the market has gotten competitive since Senora Delia’s Botanica Santa Elena opened in El Rio last year and Botanica El Indio opened in South Oxnard five months ago.

All of them are doing brisk business, catering mostly to farm workers who seek spiritual help for a relative facing a deportation hearing, herbs to combat a common cold or advice on how to handle a husband’s apparent loss of romantic interest.

The Roman Catholic Church and state health officials say botanica operators deceive and take advantage of ignorant people, but prosecutors say no complaints about these businesses have been filed with the Ventura County district attorney’s office.

The healers say they provide relief at prices that poor people can afford--even free if a customer doesn’t have any money.

“Doctors are good and sometimes they do cure, but they don’t give out medicine--only prescriptions,” said Senora Ilma, Botanica El Indio’s healer.

“With the money it takes to pay a doctor, they can get everything they need here. . . . My clients are farm workers, poor people who make barely enough money to pay for their food and rent.”

El Indio occupies a small room next to a hardware store in a typical working-class, Latino neighborhood in Oxnard. Inside, along with the usual fare of religious mementos and folk medicine items, Senora Ilma also peddles soda pop stored in a refrigerator that looks at least 30 years old.

She also offers a snack food inventory consisting of six small and dusty bags of potato chips hanging precariously on a rack above the counter.

On a shelf between the refrigerator and a collection of plaster Buddhas, Senora Ilma has set up a shrine for her late mother, surrounding a framed black-and- white photograph of the woman with seven glasses of water, representing the so-called Seven African Spirits.

Like most botanica operators, Senora Ilma is a Santeria devotee. The religion originated with the Yoruba tribe in Southern Nigeria, came to the American continent through the slave trade, and spread from the island of Cuba to the rest of the Latin world.

In order to continue their religious practices without being punished by their Christian masters, Santeria followers disguised their beliefs under a cloak of Catholic symbolism.

Thus Oggun, the West African patron of metals and minerals and one of the seven spirits, poses as St. Peter. The Virgin of Santa Barbara, patroness of the Spanish artillery, is really Chango, the warrior deity. Traditional Yoruba holidays were moved in time to coincide with Christmas, Easter and other Christian celebrations.

This practice, called syncretism, is also widely used in other Yoruba-based Afro-Caribbean religions, such as voodoo in Haiti, Shango in Trinidad, and Candomble and Macumba in Brazil.

In recent years Santeria has been linked by law enforcement agencies in the United States to cocaine trafficking, ritual animal killings and even human sacrifices. Manuel Noriega, the deposed Panamanian leader and accused drug trafficker, was reportedly a Santeria follower before recently becoming a Southern Baptist while awaiting trial in a Florida jail.

Adolfo de Jesus Costanzo, a Cuban-American who ordered 15 ritual killings before ordering one of his followers to kill him as police closed in on his sect’s Mexico City hide-out in 1989, also professed to be a Santeria believer.

Senora Ilma says she stays away from evil spirits.

“There is white Santeria and black Santeria, and I only invoke good spirits,” she said. Animal sacrifice, a widespread practice among Santeria believers, has no place at Botanica El Indio, she said.

“It’s illegal, and you can use other cures,” she said.

Senora Ilma does, however, keep a healthy stock of black candles with the image of a python on the front. On the back, there’s a list of blank spaces numbered 1 to 10 where believers write down the names of people who have harmed them.

“Oh, that’s just to protect yourself from gossip,” Senora Ilma said, laughing.

Senora Ilma’s specialty is Santeria-inspired “spiritual cleansings,” which she performs in a small room attached to her store, behind a sheet of blue plastic that serves as a curtain.

For bone aches, she rubs clients with cow bones purchased at the nearest butcher shop. For broken hearts, she uses egg yolks and cigar smoke. For infidelity, the ruda herb.

Other problems demand different treatments. Eye sores, for example, are treated with the purchase of a $5 glass pyramid with an eye illustration on it.

Crushed rattlesnake powder--at $10 for 50 capsules, one of Senora Ilma’s favorite remedies--treats hemorrhoids and assorted cancers with equal effectiveness. Horse tails take care of kidney problems. Coyote grease makes skin burns disappear. Quartz rocks somehow combat headaches.

For the most part, though, Senora Ilma’s clients seek free advice. Her phone is constantly ringing with people who need help taking control of their lives--battered wives, abandoned mothers, unemployed farm workers with families to feed.

Others seek face-to-face counseling. Elvira, for example, walked into the store distressed. Senora Ilma took one quick look at her and nodded toward her daughter, 19-year-old Teresa, who took Elvira behind the blue plastic curtain.

“She was having marriage problems,” Teresa explained after a 10-minute private rap session. “Her husband comes home with his friends and leaves a mess, and expects her to clean up after them. But he won’t have sex with her. I told her she doesn’t have to clean after her husband’s friends if he is not kind to her.”

“She needs a spiritual cleansing to relax her nerves,” Senora Ilma commented absent-mindedly after Elvira left the store. That would cost her $25.

At the botanica, Teresa is the designated listener, while Senora Ilma performs all the rituals. However, the healer hopes her daughter will replace her someday.

She was born 40 years ago in Izalco, a small village in El Salvador, where “everybody is a witch or a warlock,” she said.

Senora Ilma said she began practicing her trade in El Salvador almost by chance, when a cancer victim came to her for help and she cured him by cooking up an effective herb potion.

She immigrated to Los Angeles in 1976 and worked as a domestic for several years. Six months ago, she was able to borrow enough money for her botanica and moved to Oxnard to open the shop.

Delia Marcos, 43, Botanica Santa Elena’s healer, followed a similar path. She too, was born in a small rural village--in her case in the state of Michoacan, Mexico--and found out she was a healer after a sick person came to her and she gave him a miraculous herbal potion, she said.

After crossing the border in Tijuana, she cleaned houses for 17 years before opening her store last year.

But her methods differ. For $20 spiritual cleansings she favors red carnations, except when she is trying to diagnose a disease. In those cases, she uses egg whites.

“If the person is sick, worms will grow in the egg white,” she said.

Unlike Senora Ilma, who said “my people are still working on it,” Senora Delia is confident she has found a remedy that cures AIDS if the disease is not too advanced. Even if it is, her remedy keeps AIDS symptoms in remission, she claimed.

It’s hierba blanca-- the same $1 envelope of white powder she recommended to the wife of the stomach cancer victim to help him.

Senora Delia does not claim she has ever cured an AIDS patient. But in her one year in business, she has developed a faithful following--especially on Tuesdays and Fridays, when she doubles as a Tarot card reader, attracting about 30 clients.

“She’s helped me tremendously,” said Maria Reyes, 25, a strawberry picker. “If I’m feeling all messed up I come in for a cleansing. I’ve only known her for a few months and I feel better already. I can tell the difference.”

On this day she settled for a blue powder that serves both as an aphrodisiac and a floor cleanser.

Not surprisingly, what takes place inside botanicas is a cause of concern to both state health officials and the Roman Catholic Church. Driven in part by increasing cutbacks in state and federal aid to the poor, botanicas are mushrooming in barrios everywhere, serving thousands of people who don’t qualify for health benefits, experts say.

“Botanicas are certainly a growing problem,” said Frank Nava, chief of field operations for the food and drug branch of the state Department of Health Services in Sacramento. “The problem is, a lot of people don’t have and can’t afford health insurance, so they are forced to resort to these kinds of medication.”

The botanicas pose two types of dangers, Nava said. First, some of them sell prescription drugs such as penicillin over the counter. Second, they make unsubstantiated claims that their potions cure AIDS, cancer and other diseases.

“It’s not appropriate to make unfounded claims,” he said. “That’s clearly illegal.”

Worst of all, Nava said, not much can be done about it. Nava’s department is charged with overseeing botanicas, but it is severely understaffed, he said.

“We control food processing, the medical industry, bottled water and all the canneries, including pet food,” Nava said. “And we have only one supervisor and three inspectors for Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.”

In the best of cases, health department inspectors may conduct an occasional botanica sweep when time permits. But more often they take action only when they receive complaints, Nava said.

Officials of the Ventura office of the state Department of Health Services and the Ventura County district attorney’s office said they have never received such complaints. In fact, they said, they had never even heard of such a thing as a botanica.

The Catholic Chuch’s problem extends to other areas of concern. As Catholic officials see it, botanica owners are a pack of impostors peddling Catholic paraphernalia.

“A lot of them handle Catholic religious artifacts, and they don’t represent the church,” said Father Gregory Cairo, indignantly.

“For the most part, they are used in Santeria, a superstitious religion that imputes powers to articles that have no such powers,” said Cairo, special assistant in the Office of Information of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. “We look at those practices as idolatrous.

“Botanicas exist as a support system for what is characterized as superstition. Herbs are sold as magic potions, for example. The Catholic Church totally rejects the use of magic,” he said.

Senoras Ilma and Delia are not sure about that. The church certainly sanctions miracles, they said. And, in a way, that is what they are both selling.

But for all her claimed successes, the one person Senora Ilma has been unable to cure so far is none other than her husband, Mario, 50, who left his McDonald’s job to go on disability several months ago with a prostate problem.

So why can’t she cure him? The question threw the healer slightly off guard, but she recovered quickly.

“He’s been taking two rattlesnake capsules and he’s beginning to feel better,” she finally said.

WHAT IS A BOTANICA?

Botanicas are shops selling magic charms and herbs that the proprietors claim have the power to ward off everything from gossip to AIDS. Botanica healers combine magic rituals with common sense advice; placeboes and amulets with conventional herbal remedies. Some health officials say botanica operators deceive and take advantage of ignorant people, but the healers say they provide relief at prices that poor people can afford.