  Recent scanning tunneling spectroscopy experiments have provided evidence
that dopant impurities in high- Tc superconductors can strongly modify the
electronic structure of the CuO2 planes nearby, and possibly influence the
pairing. To investigate this connection, we calculate the local magnetic
superexchange J between Cu ions in the presence of dopants within the framework
of the three-band Hubbard model, up to fifth-order in perturbation theory. We
demonstrate that the sign of the change in J depends on the relative
dopant-induced spatial variation of the atomic levels in the CuO2 plane,
contrary to results obtained within the one-band Hubbard model. We discuss some
realistic cases and their relevance for theories of the pairing mechanism in
the cuprates
