dead hummingbirds

Inside the Black Market Hummingbird Love Charm Trade

Catch a hummingbird. Kill it. Wrap it in underwear, cover it with honey—and sell it to arouse passion in a lover. The confiscated hummingbirds shown here are part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s reference collection to facilitate identification of newly seized birds intended to be sold as love charms called chuparosas.
Photograph by Luján Agusti, National Geographic

There’s a witch in San Diego who casts spells to “trap a man” and “dominate him” so “he’ll always come back.” She has a shop on San Ysidro Boulevard, one mile from the busiest Mexico border crossing in the United States, near a pawnshop, a liquor store, a furniture market, and the Smokenjoy Hookah Lounge, where DJ music thumps on Friday nights.

But you don’t need to go to her shop for magic—you can join the tens of thousands watching her on YouTube. Like a wicked Martha Stewart creating potions instead of potpourri, she provides step-by-step instructions for her spells.

“This is the honey jar,” she tells viewers while introducing the ingredients on her workbench: photographs of two would-be lovers, a piece

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