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Healer accused in teen’s abuse
Oregon police said Wednesday that a faith healer wanted in connection with the imprisonment and rape of a 16-year-old boy in Richmond last month is a charismatic figure among migrant farmworker camps near the California border.
“This guy has been pretty well respected in the Hispanic community,” said Sheriff Tim Evinger of Klamath County, Ore. “I’d almost describe him as riding a circuit … around the West.”
Evinger said 33-year-old Maximiliano Ramirez of Richmond has practiced for several years as a curandero, a folk doctor who performs holistic and ritualistic treatments of common ailments among the people of rural Mexico.
Richmond police say Ramirez took a 16-year-old boy on a trip from Merrill, Ore., on July 13 to cure him of chronic seizures but, once across the California border, began sexually abusing the boy. Ramirez imprisoned his victim at his home on McLaughlin Street for several days before returning him to his family July 26.
Although police say Ramirez lived in Richmond off and on for the past 12 years, local health officials said they were not aware of him or any other curanderos practicing in East Bay Latino communities.
“You will not likely find them overtly. Their presence is not given out,” said Jose Martin of the Contra Costa Health Services Department. “Someone within the culture might receive a word-of-mouth referral.”
Curanderos and similar practitioners of ethnic, non-traditional medicine play an important role in cultures that do not share Western medicine’s assumptions about the cause of common medical problems, such as sexual dysfunction, Martin said. Healers might serve as apothecaries, spiritual counselors, magical shamans and doctors in rural Mexican communities.
A spokeswoman for the Alameda County Public Health Department said her agency was likewise unfamiliar with curanderos.
But in Southern California, public health officials view them and their equivalents in other Spanish-speaking cultures as a growing problem.
“We see a whole gamut of people who claim to be doctors from Mexico, or pharmacists … it’s pretty common down here,” said Los Angeles County sheriff’s Sgt. Steve Opferman, a supervisor in the county’s Health Authority Law Enforcement Task Force.
The task force has encountered faith healers who defraud their customers or sexually molest them, and others who provide harmful or even lethal medicine, Opferman said. They are more commonly found among new immigrants and farmworkers.
Police are aware of only one victim in the Ramirez case, Richmond police Sgt. Enos Johnson said.
Ramirez has West County ties but also has lived in Chicago and travels extensively throughout the West, Evinger said. Authorities say he is well-known among agricultural workers in Klamath County and other areas along the California-Oregon border, and they would like to know where else he frequents.
Klamath County has issued a $100,000 arrest warrant for Ramirez on suspicion of sexual assault. Richmond is also seeking a warrant, police said.
Authorities say Ramirez may be traveling with his 2-year-old adopted son. Records show he uses numerous aliases.
Ramirez was once deported to his native Mexico but re-entered California several years ago by using fraudulent documents, police said. Federal immigration officials also are seeking him.
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