‘Narco-Village’ Finding It Tough to Break the Habit

The streets of this tough, tin-roofed town--which U.S. and Mexican federal agents say helps supply hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of heroin to America each year--are not paved in gold. They’re dirt.

Carved into a plateau high in the Sierra Madre, this remote hamlet is accessible only by 100 miles of bad road or a gravel landing strip. It has one telephone, two sawmills, five restaurants and a small generating station that provides power just five hours a day.

There’s also a small army camp that was set up here several years ago to crack down on opium, which drug enforcement agents say remains the chief cash crop in the treacherous canyons just outside town. And there’s a new mayor, who plastered the latest official propaganda on the walls of the village hall when he took power in November.

“Don’t bury your life,” warns one poster, which shows a photograph of an opium poppy field. “Planting drugs is a crime.”

But take a closer look at Baborigame, a spot that Mexican and U.S. federal investigators have identified as a “narco-village,” one of dozens of remote enclaves at the forefront of the Sierra drug trade. Here, investigators said in interviews, is a prime example of how Mexico’s multibillion-dollar narcotics industry defies the Mexican government’s best efforts to contain it.

Despite the army’s presence, many of the 5,000 residents here are well armed. The town’s dusty, rutted streets are filled with scores of late-model pickup trucks--the second-level status symbol after the pistol in the Sierra’s drug culture. The local cemetery has dozens of victims of the drug mafias, which, investigators and environmentalists say, have used murder, bribery and politics to take control of this region.

Even Baborigame’s new mayor, Manuel Rubio Loera, has been formally charged with drug trafficking. A spokesman at the federal prosecutor’s office in the state capital of Chihuahua said Rubio was indicted in 1988 on charges of buying, selling and trafficking in heroin; cultivating poppies and preparing opium paste; and possession of illegal arms and stolen cars. He was arrested with a pound of heroin and three pounds of cocaine, the spokesman said.

The town’s Indian leaders have labeled their new mayor “a known drug dealer” in a sworn statement they filed with state prosecutors soon after Rubio’s election. Unofficially, federal prosecutors say Rubio was linked with one of the region’s most powerful drug lords.

“We made the arrest, we prepared the case and we had all of the elements of proof so that a judge could sentence him,” said Hugo Valles, spokesman for the federal attorney general’s office in Chihuahua. “But sometimes Mexican laws benefit the accused.”

Rubio, who insists he is innocent of the charges, spent three days in jail after his arrest. But under Mexico’s complex, sometimes corrupt judicial system, prosecutors say they have been unable to find a local judge who will order Rubio’s rearrest and trial. Meanwhile, they say, the drug charges technically are still pending against him.

Maria Teresa Jardi, the former federal prosecutor for the state of Chihuahua and now a prominent anti-drug crusader, explained that such cases are not uncommon in a region where, she and other present and former Mexican federal officials say, the drug mafias have bribed judges and prosecutors to block arrests and trials.

In 1994 testimony before a U.S. House subcommittee, Samuel Hitt, who heads Forest Guardians, the Sierra’s most active environmental group, added: “Despite eyewitness accounts, arrests have been extremely rare in the Sierra. Federal, state and local police are all extremely corrupt.”

For Rubio, though, the absence of prosecution has meant he is innocent. “I was absolved,” he told The Times. “The charges were false.”

Now state prosecutors in Chihuahua say Rubio is under investigation for land theft, embezzlement and irregularities in the November local election he won by a single vote. That investigation is based on a complaint that local Indian leaders filed with the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office. They assert that the mayor manipulated the political process to consolidate the drug mafias’ hold on their region.

Rubio, 54, flatly denied the Indians’ assertions of theft and electoral abuse, which he blamed on outside agitators. Many of the town’s non-Indian residents defend Rubio as “a good man.”

Pending the outcome of the latest investigations, Rubio remains the chief executive and top law enforcement official for more than 1 million acres of gorges and ravines just 250 miles south of the American border--an area that U.S. and Mexican drug agents say includes poppy fields, marijuana plantations and dozens of clandestine airstrips, where twin-engine jets carrying cocaine, heroin and marijuana destined for the United States take off and land with impunity.

Even before Rubio’s election, Mexican federal prosecutors, U.S. and Mexican environmentalists and Indian leaders in the Sierra say, Baborigame epitomized the huge hurdles confronting President Ernesto Zedillo’s government as it attempts to reform this nation. Two fundamental aspects of that reform, Zedillo has said, will be for authorities to break the links between narcotics traffickers and the law and for officials to bring democracy to even Mexico’s most remote villages.

In Baborigame, Rubio’s critics say, those two missions have clashed.

On the surface, Rubio’s election appeared to reflect democratic reform. He is not a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has governed Mexico for 67 years. He was in the PRI but switched six years ago to the reformist National Action Party, PAN, because, he said, its policies were more open and democratic. The PAN has become the nation’s largest opposition force by defeating the PRI in key state and local elections nationwide in the past year, largely on the issue of ruling-party corruption.

But, citing the drug charges that were filed against Rubio during her term in office, former Chihuahua federal prosecutor Jardi said: “It just shows that, with the PAN, it’s more of the same. The problem of drug trafficking [in the Sierra] is the same or worse than ever, and there is more crime, more violence.”

Edwin Bustillos, an activist in the Sierra for six years, agrees. He notes that the lack of political reform will ensure that drug lords continue to use violence to get the Indians to cultivate opium rather than corn. Ultimately, he says, that will mean more illegal drugs will be grown here--and will eventually be sent to the market in the United States.

Bustillos’ Advisory Council for the Sierra Madre, which is sponsored by the Arizona-based Sierra Madre Program and Hitt’s Forest Guardians, has taken a lead role here in opposing the drug trade because Sierra forests often are cleared illegally to make way for poppy fields; the environmentalists also have targeted corrupt officials who allow this.

In a Feb. 28 letter to Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s national security advisor, Randall Gingrich, the Sierra Madre Program’s international director, asserted that Rubio is “a known drug trafficker with a long history of violence and a criminal record.” Gingrich said Rubio’s mayoral victory was proof that “the drug cartels have now so deeply penetrated Mexico’s political and justice systems that all hope may soon be lost.” He cited what is happening in Baborigame to argue that Clinton should “decertify” Mexico’s drug fighting efforts--a decision that would have cut all U.S.-supported aid to Mexico.

But on March 1, the Clinton administration decided differently, endorsing Zedillo’s counter-narcotics efforts. An accompanying, nine-page State Department intelligence report on Mexico noted that drug cartels have infiltrated most levels of government here, asserting that “drug traffickers [have] used their vast wealth to corrupt police and judicial officials, as well as project their influence into the political sector.”

It estimated that 33,358 acres of the Mexican countryside are now used to cultivate opium, producing 20% to 30% of the heroin consumed in the United States; 46,084 more acres are planted with marijuana. The report cited the state of Chihuahua as a major source of both.

At the same time, the report noted that in Chihuahua, “Mexican authorities made some progress in fighting drug-related official corruption in 1995. Due to corruption in the ranks, [Atty. Gen. Antonio] Lozano [Gracia] ordered a clean sweep of the 60 federal judicial police in the state of Chihuahua in November and their replacement by a contingent of Mexican army officers on detail to the [attorney general].”

But the report added: “Lozano stressed that addressing the deep-rooted problems of corruption would take all six years of the Zedillo term.”

Baborigame shows why it will take at least that long.

The Mexican army has a permanent presence here now--a small camp in the heart of town. Squads trained in counter-narcotics use its two helipads and barracks as a staging ground to patrol dozens of far-off settlements in this area. The locations are otherwise accessible only by foot. In such spots, activists say, the Tepehuan Indians have been enticed by the drug mafias through profit or threat into growing poppies instead of food.

Just spotting their drug fields, though, is a daunting task. Most are smaller than half an acre. They are moved from one season to the next, hidden in thousands of crags and crevices, dwarfed under sheer rock faces, jutting cliffs and towering pines. The poppy farmers also are well armed. Many own AK-47 assault rifles, some have machine guns and nearly everyone owns a pistol.

Bustillos and others say the arms are just one part of the “narco-culture” that has become deeply embedded here.

It began more than 20 years ago, they say, when Mexico’s drug mafias first brought seeds of the opium-producing poppies and the promise of profit--and threat of death--to the region’s Tepehuan and Tarahumara Indians.

“Murder, slavery, starvation, drug trafficking, land theft and corruption are among the problems” that environmentalists working in the area have seen among the Indians, Hitt of the Forest Guardians told the U.S. House subcommittee two years ago. Dozens had been killed in Baborigame alone, he stated.

The total U.S. street value of the opium and heroin produced in the Sierra is $10 billion a year, he said.

But little of that sum appears to have reached the town or the rural Tepehuans of Baborigame. Most of the Indians live in scattered, remote encampments in the canyons--some more than a day’s walk outside town, where 90% of the residents identify themselves as mestizos, or people of mixed European and Indian descent. The geographic gap, along with a lingering cultural divide, has threatened to ignite more violence in Baborigame in the months since Rubio’s election.

Faustino Chaparro Herrera, the Tepehuan chief who sponsored the complaint against the mayor, says Rubio tricked his people. For almost a century, Baborigame, like most Sierra villages, chose its mayors not through the ballot box but through consensus in a ceremony at the local convent. With no prior notice, Rubio and the three other mestizo candidates announced Nov. 5 that the vote would be held not at the convent but by secret ballot at the local school.

A few weeks later, more than 1,000 Indians joined their chief in thumbprinting their complaint, saying the eleventh-hour move violated their constitutional rights.

“The situation here is very dangerous now,” said activist Bustillos, who has been organizing Baborigame’s Tepehuans since 1989. “I’m very afraid that if the government doesn’t respect the feelings of the indigenous [people], something horrible is going to happen here.”

Rubio and his family say the situation in Baborigame already has caused them problems. As she sat with her six children in the gritty, three-table Rome Diner that the family has owned for almost two decades, the mayor’s wife scoffed at suggestions that her husband is a drug dealer.

“If this were true, we wouldn’t be living like this,” Romelia Ustusuastige de Rubio said. “I’ve been working 18 years in this little restaurant just to get ahead. Now, the reputation of the family is at stake.”

Rubio conceded in a separate interview that he has maintained homes and business interests outside Baborigame. But he insisted that the drug charges and latest assertions of land theft and electoral irregularities are “totally untrue.”