Impunity and violence in Sierra Tarahumara

Ana Lozano brushes a hand across her face to stifle a tear. After three years she is still angry.

In August 2008 armed men entered the village of Creel, a mountain tourist town in the foot hills of the Sierra Tarahumara, and shot 12 young people and a baby to death at a village dance. Ana’s son Oscar was among them. He was 19-years-old and had just started University. The local police were inexplicably absent whilst the killing occurred.

Ana sits in her hair dresser salon as the shadows of dusk fall outside. Her face bears the signs of resignation. She speaks softly, almost gently of the obstacles she faced as she sought the killers of her son, of the policeman friend who told her early on to give up, that it had already been decided that the case was going nowhere. She speaks of finding out who the killers are and telling police, but in the end she concluded that it was useless to rely on the State authorities.

“My sister and I dedicated ourselves to finding out who did this for three years and we saw many things, how the drugs were distributed, and how the police was in complicity with the criminals, how the Government was involved and protecting them.”

She is the only relative of the murdered youths that we could find to talk to us. One of the other parents had himself been killed whilst investigating the killing of his son. Another parent said that the groups’ usual spokesperson, Yuriana Almendrez, had been forced to flee to the US in the last couple of weeks after being threatened. Al Jazeerarepeatedly tried to reach Yuriana on her cellphone, but without success.

A violent land

For many Creel is the entry point for the mountainous Sierra Tarahumara, part of the longer Sierra Madre mountain chain. It’s located in Chihuahua State in the North of Mexico, where homicide has been the leading cause of death in the last two years. The Sierra Madre itself has a murder rate far above the national average.

Conversely, it is also a tourist attraction; both national and international visitors flock to see the copper Canyon, the deepest in North America, and the Tarahumara indigenous people, famed for their ability to run huge distances.

However, behind the carefully constructed tourist scene lies the other business in the Sierra Tarahumara. Drugs are the local cash crop, and marijuana and heroin poppy plantations lie hidden in the folds of the mountains. Farmers here have been forced by economic necessity to grow “the crop that pays” which they then sell on to drug cartels. It is common to see them tending to their crops with a rifle slung over their shoulder.

Illegal drug production and it’s attendant problems have made the Sierra Tarahumara a highly violent region for the past 40 years. The rugged mountain zone is difficult for police to penetrate and problems are resolved by the gun, be it a family blood feud or a dispute over a drug haul.

But lately things have been getting worse.

Battling for drug routes

Miroslava Breach was born in these hills and has spent the last 15 years covering them for national newspaper La Jornada. In July of this year she reported on a startling phenomenon, plane loads of armed men descending into the region apparently with the objective of opening up new drug routes out of the mountains. Locals indicated that the men were from the Sinaloa cartel, under the control of Mexico’s most powerful drug Lord “El Chapo”.

Ms Breach says that violence has subsequently ignited in the region as the Sinaloa Cartel fights for the routes with “La Linea”, the armed wing of the Juarez Cartel.

“The cartel of Sinaloa has made inroads to most of the production areas. There are not too many zones now in which the Juarez cartel is in control.”

She adds that the gunmen brought in from outside the region by battling cartels have made the violence more generalised in the Sierra Tarahumara.

“Even though before the gangs were enemies, they were all from the sierra. They knew not to kill those not involved. They took more responsibility fortheir actions, because it’s where they lived. Now people are coming in from outside the region and they don’t care about this code.”

The violence unleashed has decimated some villages in the zone. Mexican investigative magazine Proceso reports the evacuation of one village threatened by armed men in April. At the end of June local newspaper El Heraldo de Chihuahua reported an ambush in which police and millitary were attacked by a criminal group who then fled, leaving a camp of 60 provisional houses and 50 vehicles behind them. At the end of August a grave was found with seven bodies in Guachochi, a municipality that Al Jazeera passed through on our visit.

A difficult task

The Governor of Chihuahua, Cesar Duarte is adamant that reforms to the legal system are now cutting down on violence in the State.

“Now more than 98 per cent of those arrested are not released, we’ve achieved a profound change in our judicial system that is allowing us to combat impunity.”

When asked by Al Jazeera what he planned to do to combat the wave of violence in the Sierra Madre he replied,

“In the last year the levels of violence have decreased. International and National Security organisations agree regarding this. In Chihuahua there has been a notable decrease in kidnapping and criminal homicides.”

However Chihuahua still sits comfortably in first place in the National Security Ministry table of criminal homicides with 2,147 so far this year.

Writer Richard Grant says that even with a better police system, enforcing law in the Sierra Tarahumara is impractical at best. He lived in the area for several months in 2008, writing a book about his experience, before being hunted through the woods by would be killers.

“Even with an honest police force, this would be a very difficult place to police. Geographically, the mountains are so rugged and remote, and drugs and the violence are so deeply entrenched. Given that the police and the army are involved in the drug trafficking themselves, law and order is clearly not a possibility.”

On our last afternoon in Creel, the sun beams down on the dusty main street. We are ready to leave, and so are several milk and bread delivery trucks parked outside the small police station.

They are waiting for their escort, policemen clad in camouflage fatigues and balaclavas. After four hold ups this year, even the big grocery companies are feeling the tension in the mountains. They only travel together, and with their borrowed armed guards now. The police pull on their bulletproof vests and strap on their machine guns. The convoy heads out at high speed, one police car in front, one behind.

The region they leave behind does not enjoy the same protection. Left to the mercy of fighting drug cartels, the people living in these mountains have little to look forward to but more violence ahead.

This article was first published by Al Jazeera English here.

Avocados and marijuana in the Sierra Madre

The small aircraft touches down in a tiny dirt track airstrip, hidden in the folds of the surrounding mountains. A crowd of men wait for us in pickup trucks. They are heavy set, clad in jeans and trucker hats. Strong hands grasp ours in greeting before we all clamber onto the pickups, and the strange convoy sets off. Our destination is a three hour ride away over a dirt road, weaving around the edges of giant canyons and plunging through clear mountain streams.

We are in the Sierra Madre, the ‘Mother Mountains’ of Northern Mexico. In a country currently struggling against a wave of drug led violence, these rugged lands have long been the apex of all that is wild, violent and illegal.

Here, blood feuds regularly erupt that can wipe out entire families. It’s not an uncommon sight to see farmers work with rifles swung on to their shoulders. Many of them are employed in producing the only crops that really pay here: marijuana and heroin poppies.

The cash cow of the Sierra Madre

Strangers are not welcome here. We arrive with Martin Solis, a man born in these mountains and who has twice been mayor in neighbouring town Guachochi. Now, he works for the Chihuahua state government. Slim, ruddy and sporting a Stetson hat, he greets a dark eyed, softly spoken man as we ease our way off the plane.

This man is Lico. He is the leader of the community, both in their legal and illegal activities, Solis tells us. Lico speaks softly, but carries an air of command. The land we are travelling in is all his, and the men perched in, and on, the other pickup trucks are all his relations.

After rumbling past boulders and up steep pothole ridden slopes for most of the morning, we finally arrive at an expanse of emerald green. The convoy lurches to a stop and we climb gingerly down, to be assaulted by the powerful aroma of thousands of marijuana plants.

In 2009, the US State Department estimated that around 12,000 hectares of marijuana were grown in Mexico, a 35 per cent increase on the year before. Much of it was cultivated here in the Sierra Madre. Farmers have been harvesting “the crops that pay” for four decades, seemingly impervious to repeated Mexican army campaigns to slash and burn the small parcels of marijuana that cover the mountains.

As we clamber amongst the chest high cannabis plants, Solis, the State government representative, watches on impassively from the sidelines. It’s difficult for the government to deny the existence of the main cash crop in this region, and it’s proved just as difficult to eradicate it.

However, recently the Chihuahua State Government has had a different idea to wean farmers away from their biggest cash crop.

Enter avocados

A series of factors have been driving marijuana prices down in the Sierra Madre, Solis says. The upsurge in marijuana production in California has reduced demand here. Drug gangs fighting over supply routes from the Sierra Madre have exacerbated problems. Whilst the battle continues, the farmers say it’s difficult to move crops, and this year’s harvest remains in the warehouse.

With the downturn in fortunes for marijuana growers, the state government spotted an opportunity. In January of this year, Solis was placed in charge of a programme to offer farmers the resources and support to grow alternative crops.

Avocados were chosen for the scheme. They grow well in the Sierra Madre soil and are currently fetching a high price, due in itself to a shortage from avocado farmers in the southern state of Michoacan, who are encountering problems with drug gangs.

Since the start of the programme, Solis has helped farmers plant 80,000 avocado trees in 200 hectares across the Sierra Madre. The state government provides the plants, along with fences and irrigation technology.

It has appeared to meet with early success; farmers in eight of the Sierra Madre’s 17 municipalities have joined in, but Solis is pragmatic about their reasons.

“We arrived just at the moment when growing drugs stopped being good business and people wanted something that gave them a better income. That’s why farmers are entering the scheme, not because of any social conscience, but because they want more money.”

Debating the future

We finally arrive to what he wants to show us, fields with sprouts of avocado crops growing a few hundred metres down from the marijuana plantations.

The avocado trees are flourishing in Don Manuel Loera’s plot of land. He shows us around, inspecting the plants with his large, work-stained hands. Speaking deeply from beneath an impressive moustache, he says that he had grown marijuana all his life but was tired of always looking over his shoulder.

“I wanted to grow something legal, to not be always looking out for the law.”

However, experts in drug policy remain sceptical as to whether the programme could eventually replace drug growth in the mountains. Edgardo Buscaglia, an international security expert, says there is little the government can do to affect trade.

“Even when considering that marijuana is just a minuscule proportion of total annual gross income for the Sinaloa organisation and other Mexican organised crime groups, one can say with confidence that international market forces have much more power to determine the relative attraction to farmers of marijuana growing than anything that the Mexican government could do locally regarding eradication or substitution programmes.”

However Alejandro Madrazo Lajous, a Mexican lawyer working on drug law reform, says that at least the programme marks a new direction for official policy.

“It is good that states take their own initiatives and break rank from simply following the federal government’s failed policy of repression as the first and last measure, to which President Calderon has stubbornly stuck to. A lot of state violence is directed towards producers of the crops, who are often the poorest in the supply chain, and it’s great if this means a change of approach. This programme is not going to solve the problem, but it shows a shifting of attitudes, which should be encouraged.”

The hopes of Martin Solis are more modest. He says the programme is designed to give farmers who depend solely on drug crops another option. Whether they take it is up to them.

As we head back to the tiny air strip, Lico and the rest of the convoy break out bottles of lechugilla, the bootlegged liquor famous in this region. Hurtling round the mountain curves, our increasingly boisterous escort becomes more enthusiastic about the avocado programme than ever.

Still, it will not be an overnight solution. It takes two years for the first crops to ripen, but even then, farmers such as 24 year-old Edmundo Loera, who currently grows marijuana, remain optimistic that a change could be afoot.

“My children won’t have to do what I do here if the avocado scheme takes off.”

Whether that enthusiasm is enough to break the habits of a lifetime for those in this hard and remote corner of Mexico is the real test of the programme.

This article was first published on Aljazeera English here.

Follow John Holman on Twitter: @mexicorrespond