DRUG LORDS VS. THE TARAHUMARA : TRAFFICERS ARE INVADING MEXICO’S MOST SPECTACULAR FORESTS, DESTROYING ANCIENT TREES--AND ANY NATIVES WHO OBJECT

THERE WASN’T MUCH MORE THE OLD Tarahumara Indian healer, Agustin Ramos, could do for the man taking refuge in Pino Gordo, high in Mexico’s western Sierra Madre: All the medicine that grows in the Sierra couldn’t reverse the damage that automatic weapons had wreaked upon 30-year-old Gumersindo Torres. Nevertheless, he entered his dream to ask his god, Onuruame, what might bring the broken young man some relief.

Presently, the One Who Is Father appeared behind his closed eyelids, looking much like Ramos himself: headband, single-thonged sandals strapped to bare legs, a breechclout secured by a tasseled girdle covering his loins. Onuruame directed the old man to prepare poultices and teas of verbena and chuchufate , plants found in Pino Gordo’s ancient forest, to soothe Torres’ bruises and restore his tranquillity.

Torres had come because his own ancestral village, two days away either by foot or truck via the new logging road, was now the most dangerous place in the Sierra. His community, Coloradas de La Virgen, lies at the edge of a monstrous abyss in the Mexican state of Chihuahua called the Barranca Sinforosa, about 250 miles south of El Paso, Tex. Tarahumaras have lived and gathered there for at least 6,000 years, but until the family of murderers who now ruled the area could be brought to justice, no Indian in Coloradas de La Virgen was safe.

On that chilly night in November, 1992, when Torres was left for dead, two of the killers had burst into the church where Tarahumara men and women were swaying to the violins and drumbeats of their ritual prayer dance. First the gunmen shot Torres’ brother, the local Indian vice-governor, just as they had slain his uncle, a commissioner, a year earlier. With Torres, who they suspected was involved with environmental groups lately meddling in these mountains, they took their time, blasting him in the right shoulder, then the left, then shattering one of his hips with an AK-47.

He survived because their parting shot to his head, fired as he writhed on the floor, only creased his scalp. Afterward, unable to walk his fields or chop firewood, Torres was taken to Pino Gordo and then given a small stipend from funds that had trickled down to the Indians through a succession of international environmental organizations. Among his objectives: to help this community resist the scourge of opium and marijuana that had poisoned his own village and whose spreading cultivation now threatened one of the continent’s most crucial ecosystems and its people.

But how? The bullet holes that Torres insisted on showing me, sprinkled around his broken body by Coloradas de la Virgen’s narcotraficantes , were sickening reminders of how defenseless one of Mexico’s largest Indian tribes had become. For centuries, the Tarahumara, who today number 50,000, had mostly known peace and seclusion. They lived in tiny enclaves dispersed through the Sierra’s labyrinthine terrain, which they bridged by becoming the world’s greatest distance runners, often covering 60 miles between settlements in a single jaunt. (In their own language, the Tarahumara call themselves Raramuri--foot runner.) Now I was hearing that many non-Indians who had invaded this precipitous country in recent years to steal the Tarahumaras’ timber were also clearing their land to reap a growing harvest of pot and raw opium gum.

Indians who protested have been routinely shot, and local authorities have been either too intimidated or too implicated to protect them. Few of the mild, agrarian Tarahumara own firearms or would use them on humans if they did. Have any of their dream-healers, I asked, pressed God for a cure for the narcotic-induced death now spreading throughout the Sierra?

In fact, old Agustin Ramos told me, he had tried several times: lately, the dreaded plantios were blossoming even around his remote Pino Gordo, among freshly charred remains of some of the oldest trees in Mexico. Each time, though, he got the same frustrating answer:

“Onuruame can’t destroy plants that are also part of his creation,” he said. “We will have to save ourselves from narcotrafico .”

WHEN, FOR WHATEVER DIVINE MOTIVE, onuruame created opium poppies, enabling humans subsequently to manufacture heroin, he did so not here but in Asia. Chinese traders who settled in the town of Culiacan--today northwestern Mexico’s leading cocaine distribution center--brought the first seeds during the 1930s. The vast mountain range that paralleled the Pacific coastal plains seemed a logical, virtually unpatrollable place to cultivate both the colorful flowers and another Far East import, Cannabis sativa --marijuana. Few human beings then realized the troubling implications, not only for Tarahumara Indians but for the Sierra itself, because no one yet understood that Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental was the richest biosystem in North America.

Some 50 million years earlier, this region had simply exploded, spewing enormous quantities of volcanic dust into the atmosphere, which settled and metamorphosed into powdery layers of gray tuff and pink rhyolite. Then, as the shifting Pacific plate ripped Baja California away from mainland Mexico, runoff draining toward the widening trench that became the Gulf of California rapidly eroded the soft cap rock into a network of deep canyons. At the same time, huge blocks of crust were collapsing along innumerable faults as western Mexico continued to thrust upward. Eventually, all this tumult left a jumble of colossal barriers interspersed with immense chasms.

Within the myriad niches of this elaborate landscape evolved a woodland like none other. Here grow more different pines than anywhere else on earth and more than 200 oak species. Recently, biologists have realized that for sheer diversity, the western Sierra Madre surpasses even Mexico’s cloud and rain forests. In pockets of human habitation, ethnobotanists have discovered an unprecedented genetic repository here: scores of heirloom strains of beans, squash, gourds, chiles, melons, herbs, medicinal plants and, especially, corn. Indian farmers instinctively had assured the success of nearly 20 distinct races of maize by cross-pollinating them with stands of teosinte, corn’s prehistoric ancestor, found growing alongside their fields.

This splendid cache remained relatively isolated until 1962 when, 87 years after construction commenced, the Chihuahua al Pacifico Railroad finally succeeded in spanning the tangled Sierra Madre. The route instantly became famed for thrilling vistas of the geological complex known collectively as the Barranca del Cobre, or Copper Canyon--a system of four gorges bigger and deeper than Arizona’s Grand Canyon. Bird watchers and backpackers thronged to view collared trogons and magpie jays with two-foot tails; oaks whose leaves ranged from slivers to giant, velvety lobes, and pines with drooping needles so long that Indians wove them into baskets. The fabulously picturesque Tarahumara themselves--bronzed, beautifully muscled--formed an idyllic portrait of indigenous people thriving in pristine innocence as they trotted easily up steep canyon trails, entire haystacks of corn fodder strapped to their backs.

But by 1988, when I first saw the Barranca del Cobre, the purity was becoming sullied. For two weeks, five companions and I had hiked over snow-covered rim country and descended into barrancas more than a mile deep, where green parakeets flitted through tamarind and citrus trees. When we finally reached the town of Batopilas, site of a Jesuit mission to the Tarahumara, we promptly located a restaurant. But inside we found a white-faced cook sitting with a pile of metallic blue automatic rifles heaped on his trembling knees. At one table, four men wearing reptile-skin boots and clumps of gold jewelry regarded us with silent stares, and nobody moved for the next 45 minutes while they finished eating.

The next morning, a priest whispered that the two Tarahumara families huddled in the mission chapel were hiding from these men: five Indians, he said, had just been massacred for refusing to tend illicit crops. Downriver, the captain of a Mexican army patrol, his olive-drabs brightened by the addition of lizard footwear and half a pound of gold chain, reassured us that all was serene. We trudged on; a day later, four men on horseback, leading a string of well-laden mules, nodded politely but kept their weapons trained on us while we passed.

Just last Christmas, a group of Tucson naturalists I knew unwittingly strayed where they were not welcome; two of the men were pistol-whipped and one woman raped. Now I was in the Sierra Madre again, this time in the back of a four-wheel-drive Ford pickup, flanked by three Mexican federal police officers carrying Chinese-manufactured AK-47s equipped with 35-cartridge banana clips. Wedged into nylon holsters on their belts were 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistols. Our mission: to find where marijuana and opium growers were burning this precious forest to sow illegal crops, terrorizing Indians in the process.

Since Mexico’s federales are famed more for collusion than combat with drug thugs, my escorts did not instill great confidence, but I had no choice. They were sent by Teresa Jardi, the new federal attorney general for the state of Chihuahua, who assured me that I was in trusted hands.

“These are fresh from the police academy. It takes a few months before the narcotraficantes contaminate them.”

“And then?”

“I get rid of them and bring in another batch.”

In Mexico, any attempt to accurately gauge progress in stemming the unmeasurable tonnage of drugs that flows across the border each day is effectively undermined by such systemic graft. According to recent U.S. State Department reports, drug trafficking has declined here since 1990, but locals in Chihuahua scoff at such pronouncements, pointing out that they’re based on figures supplied by the Mexican government.

Just last February, Jardi, then a veteran human-rights advocate, was leading a campaign to throw the federal attorney general’s office out of Chihuahua, so thoroughly polluted had it become by drug money. Then, in the wake of the drug-related slaying of the Catholic cardinal of Guadalajara, her old law school classmate and founder of Mexico’s Human Rights Commission, Jorge Carpizo, took over the country’s legal system. As national attorney general, Carpizo assigned Chihuahua to Jardi: Mexico’s biggest state, with 480 miles of largely unguarded border with the United States and regarded by U.S. drug-enforcement officials as a lawless void. By August, Jardi had purged more than 50 corrupt federal comandantes and district attorneys, and, she now boasted, was actually “fielding police without entire jewelry stores hanging from their necks.”

A petite, graying woman in her early 50s, Jardi was especially proud that Chihuahua’s jails were no longer filled with peasants and Indians coerced at gunpoint to plant contraband, then nabbed during bogus raids while the true mafiosi roamed untouched. But this past fall, the week before I arrived, her success began to wear thin. Jardi had requisitioned three helicopters from Mexico City and invited Tarahumara leaders, whose pastures lately had been filling with poppies, on a search-and-destroy mission. The pilots dutifully sprayed several small patches with defoliant. But when the Indians directed them to a field that stretched for several acres, two of the choppers fled. When Jardi ordered her pilot to continue, he landed next to the plantation’s isolated headquarters and told her to discuss it with the people inside. She refused to leave the helicopter, a decision that possibly saved her life, and the poppy farm remained intact.

Back in Chihuahua City, Jardi soon discovered that she had a rat among her new police officials. She had assembled her comandantes to meet with Edwin Bustillos, director of the Consejo Asesor Sierra Madre, a nonprofit group promoting environmentally sound farming and timber practices. Bustillos, a 29-year-old mestizo agricultural engineer, grew up among the Tarahumara and credited their healers for his recovery from a near-fatal accident. Now he was trying to help them preserve their shrinking resources, but lately he found himself spending more time saving humans than trees.

It was Bustillos who took Gumersindo Torres to Pino Gordo and then collected enough testimonies from witnesses that bloody night in Coloradas de la Virgen to actually jail two gunmen, Tacho Molina and Agustin Fontes. Now, in secret meetings, he was requesting Madame Attorney General to pursue Fontes’ uncle Artemio, whom he alleged to be the real strongman behind illegal logging, cattle rustling and dope growing on Indian lands around Coloradas de la Virgen, as well as the ruthless author of many murders.

The accusation surprised no one. Artemio Fontes was a well-known and well-connected cacique of the Sierra, whose powerful but reckless family had yanked themselves violently from rural poverty. During the early ‘80s, Artemio Fontes’ brother Alejandro was named head of the Chihuahua state police, a position he enjoyed until the army shot him down in a plane stuffed with marijuana. Fontes’ men often engaged in blood feuds with outsiders and frequently with each other. Each week, wealthy Fontes widows could be seen driving fine four-wheel-drive vehicles into town from the rancho to shop.

Atty. Gen. Jardi called another meeting to examine information that Bustillos claimed linked Artemio Fontes to several Tarahumara deaths in Coloradas de la Virgen. Caciques elsewhere in the Sierra, he warned, were increasingly emboldened by Fontes’ impunity. Artemio Fontes could be seen frequently in restaurants in Chihuahua City, where he now resided in an elegant neighborhood: a man with silver-flecked hair and gold-tipped boots, in the company of friends like former Chihuahua Gov. Fernando Baeza. Meanwhile, three to four Tarahumara and neighboring Tepehuan Indians were being killed each week. Bustillos again had a stack of testimonies with signatures or thumbprints. Jardi was sufficiently persuaded to order a formal investigation. Someone else at this confidential gathering apparently was also impressed: a day later, gunmen shot up Bustillos’ house in the Sierra.

The next day, in Chihuahua City, Bustillos met with his U.S.-based funding partner, Randall Gingrich, director of the tiny Arizona Rainforest Alliance. Gingrich, who wrote his master’s thesis on deforestation in the Sierra Madre, had garnered a small chunk of USAID money administered through a coalition of the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy and the World Resources Institute, earmarked for easing biological impacts of Third World development. But the threats to the environment listed in their proposal had not included the armed men they now could see parked outside their office.

They managed to slip away and headed for the border. Gingrich tried to convince Bustillos to lie low in Tucson awhile, but within a week he was restless and returned to Mexico. Now, seated on an ammunition box between me and the federales , he was heading off to find some flowers.

VIDAL VALENCIA HAD drunk a lot of tesguino , the corn beer that accompanies all Tarahumara gatherings, before he finally raised his hand. The occasion was an assembly of Redondeados, his community deep in southern Chihuahua, where human-rights workers were asking whose lands had been invaded lately. Valencia wasn’t sure which was more frightening: the new poppy fields he found every time one of his cows strayed, or what might happen if he reported them. But Edwin Bustillos had promised that the police now intended to help Indians, not to beat and jail them as in previous dope raids. And they knew of the risk Bustillos, a marked man, was taking to come here.

We were driving in a light rain through the wedge between the states of Durango and Sinaloa known as Chihuahua’s Golden Triangle. “Pick your gold: our richest forests or richest drug crops,” Bustillos said. Severed from the rest of the state by the great canyons to the north, the region was tied closely to Culiacan, source of the weapons and South American cocaine that were luring more young local mestizos into choosing narcotrafico.

A World Bank loan recently proposed for this area, intended to make Chihuahua’s timber industry more competitive, had been delayed by international protests when road building began before required environmental assessments were made. Bustillos, originally hired by the Mexican government as regional manager of a World Bank-funded forestry-development program, was one of the critics, because new roads would enter virgin Indian lands. Now, after two slapdash impact studies were successfully challenged, the World Bank was ready to resume disbursements, as soon as Mexico came up with its matching portion, $48 million. Besides the predicted habitat damage and erosion from increased logging, Bustillos feared that better roads would be a gift to narcotraficantes , currently bulldozing their way into places once never imagined.

Mexico, however, was in enough debt already and not inclined just yet to turn these primitive Sierra lumber trails into passable highways. The fractured bedrock and slick rhyolite clays we were bouncing over had already eaten one of the police vehicles, a Chevy Suburban van, that was supposed to take us up to Vidal Valencia’s mountain pastures. A backup four-wheel-drive pickup had arrived from headquarters in Parral, Chihuahua, 10 hours away, without a spare tire. His budget was so thin, Comandante Serafin Cocones of the narcotics squad told us, that it wasn’t just tires: He and four men had to buy their own ammunition.

Now we were following a borrowed Datsun with a cracked chassis, crammed with Tarahumaras, as well as a contingent of five municipal police armed with hunting rifles and ornate pistols, whom Cocones had mustered that morning simply for more firepower. Since most local police are assumed to augment their $200 monthly salaries with narcotrafico themselves, there was some question as to which way they might aim in the event of a shootout. “What choice is there?” Cocones lamented. “If someone really wants to defend these plants, we’ll need 50 men against their weapons.”

The road dissolved into a giant gully. We continued into the forest on foot, which made the Tarahumaras much happier. I half-walked, half-ran to keep up with Vidal, a thin, taciturn man in a red plaid shirt, and his 80-year-old cousin, Tirso Tellez, who leaped over outcroppings and scrambled up mountain arroyos where we stopped to drink from streams and catch our breath. These men had grown up playing rarajipari , Tarahumara kick-ball, over courses that sometimes stretched 50 miles. Their great-uncle Tibursio, Tellez told me, once ran the 110-mile round trip to Culiacan to deliver a message the day before an important match and returned in time to pace his team to victory.

Above us, thick-billed parrots frisked through the Chihuahua pines, showering us with droplets that hung from the elongated needles. We heard the triple hoot of a Mexican spotted owl but saw no mammals except for the flash of a white-tailed deer’s rump. The last grizzlies were killed here some years ago, but, Tellez was telling me, jaguar and Mexican gray wolves still stalk this pine-oak-juniper maze. Suddenly, Vidal stopped and pointed. At his feet was a steaming pile of fresh dung, surrounded by mule-shoe prints. Instantly, Comandante Cocones motioned for the police to fan out.

They spread across the hills, running silently along the ridges. The rest of us crept behind Cocones, scanning the perimeter and treetops for snipers. We inched forward and listened. Nothing. Finally we crested a small rise and looked down. Even the Indians gasped.

Below us, a swath of miraculous color burst from the dark green forest: pinks segueing to purples, pale lavenders, bright crimsons--big, papery flowers that intermixed nearly the entire blue-red spectrum, fluttering on waist-high stalks. To see a field of poppies such as these is to begin to grasp the irresistible, addictive nature of opium. These plants did not belong here, and their presence signified great danger. But for a few moments everyone simply gazed at their beauty, so soft and seductive, like lotus blossoms floating atop the blood and violence.

We had found roughly an acre of blooms, surrounded by three strands of new barbed wire, in a clearing of downed trees that had been burned. A ragged shirt and a pair of old jeans tied to a stick served as a scarecrow. There was a moment of confusion: The federales had forgotten wire cutters, but I had a pair on my utility knife. As the fence tumbled, the police and the Tarahumaras picked up sticks and began whacking the olive-green stems.

Whoever tended this field evidently had just departed, because the round bulbs left on plants that had already dropped their petals had been freshly scored. One of the local police, looking a little bereaved, showed me how to cut and squeeze the bulb until milky white syrup bubbled out, every drop of which harvesters collected in vials made from battery casings, where it coagulates into brown gum. In Parral, he said, the goma brings 10,000 pesos per gram: slightly more than $3.

Resting that afternoon on a log in the 10th field Vidal showed us, while the police built a bonfire of 200 pounds of marijuana they’d also discovered growing there, Bustillos and I did some calculating. About 10 poppy bulbs yield a gram of opium gum, and a bulb can be milked from three to 10 times. Bustillos, who had paced the boundaries of each plantio , reckoned that we’d destroyed about 12 acres. Figuring 10 bulbs per square yard, that represented at least 150,000 grams of opium gum, worth $450,000 at its crudest stage.

About 10 grams of opium gum produce a single gram of heroin, which brings anywhere from $80 to $500 in the United States, depending on the city. In a few hours, I realized, we had removed millions of dollars’ worth of untaxed goods from the market, plus at least another hundred grand for the pot now going up in flames. No matter at what point in the processing and shipping Artemio Fontes took his cut, I guessed that he would be upset, because we had just relieved him of a small fortune.

“These plants don’t belong to Fontes. He’s from over there,” Bustillos replied, pointing northwest toward Coloradas de la Virgen.

“Whose, then?”

He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Who knows? There are so many growers now.”

Behind us, the Sierra Madre dropped into Arroyo Hondo, a minor canyon compared to the barrancas to the north, but sufficiently vast to convey the impression that no one could ever eradicate dope cultivation here.

“Frankly,” Bustillos said, “I don’t care if they do. I just want growers to stay out of the last hidden sanctuaries and stop bothering the Indians who know how to care for them.”

“But they choose those places because growing dope is illegal. How can you keep them out?”

“Simple. Legalize it.”

BEFORE WE LEFT, I ASKED Vidal Valencia, who now looked a little worried, what the Tarahumaras thought of legalization. After rephrasing the question twice, I let it drop: The concept of plants being unlawful was alien to him. All he knew was that, despite the Mexican constitution that recognizes Indians’ rights to defend their land, someone was going to be mad about this. “When the police go, they could grab us,” he observed.

For the next two days, we struggled up 40 miles of atrocious roads toward Pino Gordo, where Teresa Jardi and another helicopter were meeting us for more raids. At times we passed through deforested stretches where loggers had taken the best pines; left without sufficient cover, the smaller trees left for seed stock had dried up. At lumber mills, we saw Tarahumaras working the worst jobs, hauling sawdust and dragging huge trunks to the blade. Supposedly, Bustillos’ funding was designated to help Indians gain control of and properly manage wood resources that were legally theirs, but the fallout of drugs had become a constant distraction. In every village, we heard of shootings.

The road rose through spruce and aspen, then traversed hairpin ledges where waterfalls gushed between enormous boulders. We were nearing Pino Gordo, which has the largest stand of old-growth forest left in the Sierra Madre. Comandante Cocones grew edgy because of a rumored 5-million-peso ($1,600) bounty on policemen in the area. In the valley below was Coloradas de los Chavez: Some members of the extended Chavez family were reputed to be as charming as the Fontes. Last year, the Tarahumaras of Pino Gordo had found their first marijuana plantation. By this spring there were nine, and by autumn, 17. Armed men from Coloradas de los Chavez were appearing in Pino Gordo, offering money and corn in exchange for labor in the plantios. They arrived over the same new road we were traveling, illegally opened by loggers, and made it plain that they were coming in with or without the Tarahumaras’ cooperation.

In the past, it wasn’t unknown for a Tarahumara to agree to plant a little pot in exchange for food or a few pesos, but with people dying and large chunks of their forest disappearing, the situation was now getting out of control. That afternoon, the men and women of Pino Gordo gathered at the log cabin schoolhouse. They hoped to see Bustillos and the federal attorney and police who promised to help rid them of narco-terror, but by then we were long gone. Teresa Jardi and the helicopter had never appeared. Later I learned that, despite her livid denunciation of the pilots she had recently flown with, she had been sent the same crew again. Without air support, Cocones refused to destroy any plantios here.

“There’s only one road,” he said. “Without air cover to get us out of here, they can roll a tree trunk or boulder across one of those ledges, then pick us off like pigeons.”

To raid Pino Gordo properly, Cocones added, would require 100 men on the ground and 20 giving air support. It would take a week here, with tents and sleeping bags--things he didn’t have. There was no budget. Cocones, with a plastic right shoulder joint as a memento of his last drug shootout, was getting no argument from his green troops. “I’ll try to return with reinforcements,” he told the Tarahumaras.

Yet if he did, I realized, these Indians would then be sitting ducks, and Pino Gordo would become another Coloradas de la Virgen. Cocones couldn’t refute this. “Then how can you ever stop the killing?” I asked.

“Easy,” he said. “Legalize drugs. They’ll lose so much value that they won’t be worth killing for.” He snapped open the folding stock of his Galil. “It’s the only way. Instead of public safety, we have shootings. We shoot one narcotraficante and another steps into his place. Instead of prevention and rehabilitation, our budget goes into uprooting plants. And they just keep planting more.”

I had heard this proposal a few years earlier, in Colombia, where so many people were dying that the government in Bogota openly contemplated decriminalizing drugs simply to halt the carnage. The United States warned that such a move would put diplomatic relations at risk. Since then, however, Americans such as former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, columnist William F. Buckley Jr., economist Milton Friedman, several federal judges, the mayor of Baltimore and, most recently, U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders have argued that too much time, money, and blood are being wasted in a futile war on drugs. Legalization advocates cite the example of Holland to show that decriminalization doesn’t cause a surge in addiction, any more than ending Prohibition here increased alcoholism, and that drug-related crime actually drops. The potential tax revenues from legal drugs could help pay for a massive national drug education program, to say nothing of reallocation of the United States’ current $8.3-billion drug-enforcement budget.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials counter that legalization would fill our highways and workplaces with stoned drivers and employees and needlessly jeopardize the mental and physical health of future generations of productive citizens. The DEA also denies that the war on drugs is hopeless, citing Department of Health and Human Services figures showing that usage in fact is declining. When I inquired about the source of these figures, however, I learned that they are derived from door-to-door samplings of households, a seemingly dubious measure of illegal activity. An HHS statistician defended the method, which uses an anonymous questionnaire, but admitted that the polls were probably worthless in monitoring heroin abuse, which even the DEA admits is rising.

For or against, none of these arguments mention the human sorrow and ecological loss being wreaked upon neighbors beyond our borders. I decided to ask Artemio Fontes, whose number I found in the Chihuahua City directory, what he thought. After several tries, one of his bodyguards told me that, “Senor Fontes says anything you want to know about him, ask the attorney general. She seems to have all the facts.” This apparently didn’t trouble Fontes; weeks later, a 64-page file Jardi submitted to a panel of judges, charging Fontes with both homicide and drug trafficking, failed to produce a warrant for his arrest.

“They tell me they are very behind,” Jardi explained. How long? “Months. Maybe a year. Who knows?”

I took a taxi to Fontes’ house. The watchman said he was out. Standing there, I realized that Artemio Fontes certainly wouldn’t want drugs legalized if in fact their value, bloated by virtue of being forbidden, had afforded him this agglomeration of carved wooden doors and shiny white brick, surrounded by rosebushes and iron bars.

ON MY LAST DAY IN THE Sierra, I accompanied Edwin Bustillos to his home village, Guachochi, where he broadcasts a weekly radio show in four dialects to educate Indians about their rights and their priceless environment, encouraging them to unite against unscrupulous lumber caciques and narcotraficantes. He was pleased, he told me, because he had obtained from witnesses the license number of the truck whose occupants had fired at his house, which he was passing along to Teresa Jardi.

We walked outside. The truck with the offending license plate, from the state of Sinaloa, was parked next to his car.

“We’d better get out of here,” Bustillos sighed.