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The Psychedelic Shamans Market of Peru

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Deep in the Peruvian Amazon, one market aisle sells cures, curses, and everything in between.

In “Inside Peru’s Shamanic Market | Iquitos, Peru,” creator Joseph P. Kauffman walks Pasaje Paquito, a narrow corridor tucked inside Iquitos’ sprawling Belén Market that locals simply call the witch doctor market. It’s the commercial engine room of Amazonian curanderismo — where jungle tree bark, psychoactive vines, and hex-breaking tonics get sold off the same folding tables, no prescription or permit required.

• Pasaje Paquito, in Upper Belén, functions as the regional hub for curanderos and locals seeking plant medicines, folk remedies, and spiritual tonics.
• Vendors stock the raw components of ayahuasca brew — Banisteriopsis caapi vine and Psychotria viridis (chacruna) leaves — alongside rolled Mapacho jungle tobacco used for ritual cleansing smoke.
• Beyond medicinal bark like uña de gato and chuchuhuasi, stalls sell esoteric tonics: love potions, curse-breaking brews, and an aphrodisiac known locally as “RC,” or Rompe Calzón.

Current Negotiating Priorities Defined

Kauffman’s footage moves stall to stall through a market that mixes hard botany with hard sell. Bundled sections of the ayahuasca vine sit chopped and stacked next to chacruna leaves — the two plants that, brewed together, produce the DMT-bearing tea used in Amazonian ayahuasca ceremonies. Nearby, thick rolls of Mapacho tobacco, far stronger than commercial cigarette leaf, are sold specifically for shamanic smoke cleansing rather than casual smoking.

The medicinal side of the market is just as dense. Vendors sell uña de gato (cat’s claw) and chuchuhuasi bark, both long used in Amazonian folk medicine for inflammation and general vitality, brewed as tinctures or steeped directly into rum-based extracts sold by the bottle.

Love Potions, Curses, and Rompe Calzón

Not everything on the table is about physical ailments. Pasaje Paquito’s vendors specialize in tonics meant to attract money, ward off bad energy, or curse a rival outright — folk concoctions bottled and labeled with the same casual confidence as a cough remedy.

They call the aphrodisiac tonic “RC” — Rompe Calzón, or “panty-ripper” — and it’s mixed and sold right there at the stall.

That kind of blunt branding runs through the whole market. There’s no regulatory body checking these formulas and no pharmacy license involved — just generations of curandero knowledge passed stall to stall, sold to whoever’s willing to buy.

Upper Belén Versus the Floating Slum Below

The shaman’s market sits in Upper Belén, on solid ground, which puts it in sharp contrast with Lower Belén just downhill along the Itaya River — a stretch of stilted housing that floods for months at a time and is often cited as one of the poorest districts in Iquitos. Kauffman’s video draws that line explicitly: one side of Belén trades in ancient plant medicine and folk commerce, the other is a flood-prone settlement scraping by on the riverbank.

Readers who’ve followed Kauffman’s other Amazon coverage will recognize the pattern — the same region shows up in his look at an isolated Amazonian tribe, where indigenous plant knowledge and modern life collide in similarly unregulated fashion. The market’s medicinal tinctures also echo the kind of hands-on cultivation covered in pieces like gourmet and medicinal mushroom growing, just with jungle bark and vine standing in for fungi.

An Unregulated Trade That Keeps Running

Nothing in Pasaje Paquito requires a license, a doctor’s note, or age verification. Ayahuasca vine sits next to tourist trinkets; curse tonics sit next to cat’s claw extract. It’s the same open-air arrangement it’s reportedly been for generations, run by curanderos who learned the trade from their own elders rather than any formal institution.

Kauffman’s camera doesn’t linger on judgment — it just walks the aisle, stall after stall, letting the vendors explain what’s actually in the bottles. For a market that sells DMT-bearing vine bark next to panty-ripper tonic without so much as a raised eyebrow, that’s really the whole story right there.