More than that.
From my own experience, a bokkor’s (or houngan’s) curse/hex is a form of finely crafted psychological warfare that comes from the thousands and thousands of years of guerrilla warfare that was practiced between the many African tribes and kingdoms.
As an example, you may get a doll left on your porch with pins sticking in the crotch . . . and while you’re out shopping, the bokkor breaks into your house and rubs poison ivy leaf in the crotch of your underware, with the end result that you get a rash and leisons on your private parts after getting a doll with pins in the crotch.
There is much, much more to this process than my overly-simplistic explanation, but I’m sure you get the gist.
Psychotropic herbs can be incorporated into this process, and toxins from fish (like tetrodotoxin from puffer fish and other toxins from paralytic shellfish) can also be used to drive hallucinations, paralysis that the target recovers from after an incantation from the voudun priest (timed for when the poison wears off), and other substances that impair judgment and increase suggestibility when used in conjunction with a form of mass hypnosis (from the chanting and repetitive movement in their rituals). We see a similar dynamic with Christian revival preachers who convince an audience that they can heal the sick, drive out demons, and get people to do their bidding in the name of God.
If this seems unlikely to you, then consider how a skilled stage magician deceives his audience, and imagine this skill combined with hallucinogenic plants and fungi along with hypnosis and episodes of partial paralysis.
The Haitian slave revolt is the only time in recorded history when slaves rose up and took control of the government and freed themselves.
A part of this was the French underestimating the “African savages” . . . and their oral tradition of guerrilla warfare that goes back thousands of years into the past, and their expertise with vegetable poisons and psychological manipulation.
So no, I don’t underestimate a trained and sanctified bokkor.
It is often claimed that hypnosis cannot make a person do something against their will, but consider how plants that contain scopolamine (an anticholinergic drug that occurs in several plants, with Datura stramonium being one example) have been used in South America to rob tourists by asking them to empty their bank accounts.
Such a use would be beneath the dignity and professional standards of a bokkor, but these plants have been corrupted into use by common criminals for money . . . which a bokkor would find highly offensive.
See below: