Mexico's Indians Face New Conquistador:
Drugs
The New York Times, June 2, 1995
There are basically two ways to get to this town in northern Mexico -- by small plane or a trek over horrible roads. Twenty-five years ago the place hardly existed. Then the drug trade invaded the heart of the western Sierra Madre and transformed the lives of some of the most traditional of Mexico's Indian people.
Now Baborigame (pronounced bah-bore-ee-GAH-may) is one of the biggest towns in the mountains, and probably the most dangerous. How it got that way is a story of violence, temptation and tragedy.
For the Indians, drugs now signify death," said Maria Teresa Jardi, the outspoken former federal prosecutor for the state of Chihuahua, where Baborigame is located. "This problem is national, and the chain of death has no end."
State police agents holding AK-47 automatic rifles ride through the town on the back of a blue pickup. Baseball caps embroidered with marijuana leaves are the rage. And on Saturday nights the dirt streets fill with flashy new pickups driven by red-eyed young men who have already found their vocation.
Down a side street is Fort Baborigame, a frontier outpost made of wood that looks like something from the Wild West. Green army helicopters take off almost every day on missions to spot marijuana or the opium poppies planted among the corn by the Tarahumara Indians who have lived in the hills above Baborigame for hundreds of years.
The Tarahumara were never conquered by the Spanish. But they could not resist the temptations of the latest conquistadors, who showed up 25 years ago with envelopes of strange seeds and promises to pay more for a single crop than the Indians could earn over several years.
For the most part, the Indians have no use for the drugs themselves; most barely understand what they are for. But in this area of towering mountains and deep chasms, a few acres of marijuana or opium poppy can bring 3,000 pesos (about $500) to a Tarahumara -- if he can stay alive.
In time those latest bosses stopped paying and simply threatened to kill anyone who did not follow their new rules. Some Indian leaders were killed, and the violence increased, practically wiping out some small Sierra settlements. When traditional Indian governors walked miles to complain, the Government generally ignored them.
In the harsh beauty of the Sierra, about 250 miles south of El Paso, two crippling ills of Mexican society have struck simultaneously.
One is the poverty and marginalization of the Indians, who are 10 percent of Mexico's population. These same forces were behind the uprising in the southern state of Chiapas. There are about 55,000 Tarahumara and Tepehuan Indians in the Sierra, nearly all of the inhabitants of the region.
The second element present here is the rampant drug trafficking that has destabilized large parts of Mexican society, corrupting officials and souring relations with the United States, the vast consumer market to which the drugs -- hundreds of millions of dollars' worth from the Sierra alone -- are headed each year.
On the edge of Baborigame, alongside the lumber mill, Fidel Torres, 56, spends most of his time building a small wooden house. He is a Tarahumara Indian who moved to Baborigame three years ago after deciding he could no longer stay in the only other place he has called home: a small fold of the Sierra called Coloradas de la Virgen.
"I didn't want to leave, but they killed my son and that's why I came here," Mr. Torres said. His son, Luis, was shot in the heart while attending a dance in a church at Coloradas de la Virgen on Nov. 7, 1992. He looks out of place among the less traditional Tepehuan Indians who predominate in Baborigame, and he misses home. But he cannot go back, he said, "not until all the robbing and stealing and killing stop."
One of the few people who is willing to go back to Coloradas de la Virgen is Edwin Bustillos, a 30-year-old half-Indian, half-white who for the last three years has been fighting to protect the mountains and the Indians who live in them.
Mr. Bustillos, a slight man with only one good eye, has been attacked several times by the drug traffickers he has challenged. They have run him off the road, and beat him so badly that he now has only partial use of his arm.
They beat him but did not frighten him, he said, as he prepared recently for the three-hour trip by four-wheel-drive vehicle from Baborigame to Coloradas. He brought two assistants, bulletproof vests, a 9-millimeter pistol, an AK-47 automatic rifle and an audiotape of weepy ranchera music to set the mood.
Mr. Bustillos passed the burned-out carcasses of several pickup trucks, testimony to the anger and vengeance that have come over this area where pine trees grow alongside cactus plants, and jaguar coexist with thick-billed parrots.
On this day, most of Coloradas is deserted. The walls inside the old church of adobe brick are pockmarked by bullet holes, the wooden floorboards still stained by blood spilled when men with wild eyes came to the door and loosed a deadly spray of automatic rifle fire, killing Luis Torres and severely wounding another Tarahumara.
"It was the drugs, that's what caused all the violence," Isidro Baldenegro said. He pointed out a spot behind the church where two small wooden crosses mark the spot where on another afternoon two men were cut down by an assassin.
There are no markers in the small plaza in front of the church, but the 29-year-old farmer pointed to no fewer than five spots where other men were killed in drug-related encounters over the last few years.
He could also show the place not far away where his father, an Indian leader, was shot through the stomach and killed, the school from which frightened teachers fled and never returned, the construction site of the new clinic where no mason has dared come back to lay a brick, the graveyard filled with young Tarahumara Indians who died violently in this dying place.
The federal prosecutor in Chihuahua, Arturo Chavez Chavez, said that in his first three months in office he arrested 400 people and destroyed more than 600 acres of marijuana and poppy plants, some in the Sierra. The state Attorney General, Francisco J. Molina, has discovered 819 clandestine airfields in the state that are used for the illegal transport of drugs.
But Mrs. Jardi, the former prosecutor, said that the army helicopters sometimes spray only water and that for every field that is supposedly destroyed, several others are untouched.
"This Government is not worried about the Indians," she said, "or about fighting the drug traffickers either."
The state penitentiary in the city of Chihuahua is one of the toughest prisons in Mexico, where the halls smell of sweat and the role of Jesus Christ during a recent Easter passion play was played by a drug dealer named Jesus.
An inmate there, Rogelio Fontes, is accused of killing the two men whose names appear on the crosses behind the church at Coloradas de la Virgen. He says he is innocent and, in an interview inside the prison director's office, he said he was framed by members of his own family.
"They're distant relatives, and they've killed many, many people," Mr. Fontes said. Even in prison he wears a thick gold chain, an expensive watch, a Looney Tunes cap that says on the brim "I Love My Friends."
Mrs. Jardi brought several charges against the Fontes family, identifying them as the moving force behind the drug problems in the Southern Sierra since 1970.
The head of the family, Artemio Fontes, has been charged with robbery and murder, according to state police records, but never served any time. Mrs. Jardi said a recent case against Artemio Fontes for murder, intimidation and drug trafficking, in which more than 60 Indians gave testimony, was halted in December 1993, when a federal judge granted him indefinite protection from prosecution.
"The police are in his pocket," Rogelio Fontes, in the state penitentiary in Chihuahua, said of his third cousin.
Artemio Fontes lives openly in Chihuahua, in a large two-story house covered in fake white brick. He could not be reached for comment, but a woman who said she was his wife, but would not give her name, answered one phone call and said her husband was simply a rancher who had left Coloradas long ago and had nothing to do with drugs.
"You should not listen to what people say about him," the woman said. "They're just lying. I can assure you that my husband is a man of good faith."
The federal prosecutor in Chihuahua called Artemio Fontes "one problem of many." The state prosecutor, almost three years in office, says he has never heard of him.
Edwin Bustillos, battered and bruised, knows Artemio Fontes all too well, and he says that as long as the Government is willing to turn its eyes from the problems in the Sierra, everything President Ernesto Zedillo says about creating a true state of law in Mexico is hollow talk.
Mr. Bustillos's organization, the Advisory Council of the Sierra Madre, is helped by Forest Guardians, a environmental group in Arizona that supports his efforts to protect the Tarahumaras' vanishing forest homeland from exploitation by large lumber companies.
Last year the Forest Guardians sent a letter to President Zedillo outlining some of the abuses taking place in Coloradas de la Virgen and other parts of the Sierra. It was also signed by 90 international environmental groups. So far there has been no response from Mr. Zedillo.
"It is absolutely clear to us that it doesn't mean anything to him that in the Sierra dozens of Indians are dying at the hands of drug traffickers," Mr. Bustillos said.
He finds it hard to square Mr. Zedillo's pledge to make Mexico a country of law with the image of Coloradas, the bullet holes, the sad crosses, the empty school rooms, the well-used cemetery.
"We cannot believe in the lies of the President of Mexico," he said. "I would believe in his deeds but never, never in his words."