In Remote Mexican Village, Residents Have Worst of 2 Worlds

In a dusty cemetery above the desert plain, seven fresh stone mounds symbolize the notoriety that so abruptly has been visited on this remote village of indigenous Baja Californians.

The simple graves--including those of five children ages 4 to 13--are but one link between tiny Santa Catarina and the recent execution-style slaughter of 18 people an hour and a half away near the port city of Ensenada.

The massacre, some of whose victims grew up in this settlement of 250 or so Pai Pai Indians, has cast a spotlight on the community amid suspicions that Baja California’s bustling drug trade is sweeping up the handful of indigenous tribes who inhabit a landscape as picturesque as it is well-located for sneaking narcotics 70 miles north to the U.S. border.

For the little-known Pai Pai--who lack running water and electricity but whose language and ways are grudgingly surrendering to modernity--the Sept. 17 massacre has drawn bewildering visits from reporters and prompted nettlesome questions about drugs in a boulder-strewn expanse of melon patches and cattle ranches in the isolated interior of northern Baja.

Though Mexican authorities have been tight-lipped about their investigation into the killings, they said the motive might have been “problems” between some of the small drug-running gangs that have carved out clandestine airports and marijuana plantations far from the gaze of anti-narcotics squads.

One of those drug gangs was allegedly headed by Fermin Castro, a native Pai Pai who ran the Santa Catarina school before moving on to become a prominent rodeo promoter around Ensenada. Castro, 38, believed to be the primary target of the assault, remains in a coma in an Ensenada hospital.

The Pai Pai’s leader says outsiders have persuaded or pressured impoverished locals into selling land or letting them grow marijuana.

“People come here to convince the Indians to start growing other crops, you understand?” said traditional chief Juan Albanez Higuera, 76. “They start paying for this and giving money for that. And a lot of people who are needy go with them to work . . . doing whatever narcos do.”

“It’s not good for us,” he said.

Smuggling Ties Denied

Other residents point to their humble living conditions as proof there are no lucrative drug ties.

“If there were drugs like they say on the news, the people would be living better here,” contended Pascacia Ochurte, 40, who sells sacks of corn and beans. She fingered a pile of bean plants drying outside her house on the village’s edge. “If I were doing that, I wouldn’t be struggling like this.”

Mexican authorities said after the mass killing that Castro headed a group of small-time operators, or bajadores, that paid a top lieutenant in the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix cartel for the right to smuggle drugs north to the United States. Gen. Jose Luis Chavez Garcia, the top federal prosecutor in Baja, said the bands use remote landing strips and back roads to shuttle shipments from the Gulf of California to the Pacific Ocean.

“This is an effective corridor. Sometimes shipments come in from the Gulf of [California] and pass over to the Pacific through the many back roads that we have in this state,” Chavez said. “Sometimes they arrive by small airplane.”

Even residents who dispute reports of drug smuggling concede they know little of Castro’s activities since he left town several years ago. Castro, who remains well regarded in a burg where nearly everyone is related in some way, visited rarely, residents said.

Pai Pai leader Albanez said evidence of a drug trade in the region, generally referred to as the Valle de Trinidad, began appearing a few years ago. The sound of small aircraft punctuates the desert stillness, and Albanez said military patrols are ever-present.

Some say poverty-plagued villagers are easy marks for outsiders dedicated to the narcotics trade. They also voice suspicions about signs of affluence they’ve seen around town.

“Those people are poor. Now lately they bring in nice cars, money’s coming in, they dress well and all those things,” said Pedro Espindola, who runs a little store at the highway turnoff to Santa Catarina and heads a public-safety committee in a nearby non-Indian community.

Indeed, Santa Catarina seems a jumble of contrasts. Squat shacks amid the boulders lack indoor plumbing, but several boast satellite dishes and televisions, powered by car batteries. Older Pai Pai women recall in rudimentary Spanish an era when poverty forced them to craft skirts from grass; some members of today’s younger generation sport smartly styled dye jobs. The lazy rhythms of a back-country lifestyle survive not far off a busy highway ferrying tourists between beach resorts in San Felipe and cruise ships in Ensenada.

Santa Catarina was an ancient stopover for nomadic Pai Pai, who until this century shuttled from the mountains of the Baja interior to the coast and back as the seasons--and food prospects-- changed, said anthropologist Mike Wilken, who directs the Ensenada-based Native Cultures Institute and has traveled among indigenous groups in Baja for nearly 20 years.

The Pai Pai are one of only four indigenous tribes in Baja California to survive the Spanish conquest, disease and diaspora. Jesuit missionaries who traversed the region in the 16th century estimated that Baja was home to some 50,000 indigenous people. The remaining ethnic groups--the Kaliwi, Kumiai and Cucapa--add up to no more than 800, some experts say. A fifth group calling itself Cochimi is part of the Kumiai, Wilken said. All live in the northern region of Baja.

Today, Pai Pai parents speak their traditional language at home but Spanish is the lingua franca in the classroom. Threads of Pai Pai religion, driven underground by Catholic missionaries, have blended into Christian beliefs. A traditional annual festival was canceled in August for lack of money.

Social and medical problems from alcoholism to tuberculosis are stubborn, and Pai Pai leaders and residents bemoan a lack of work and basic services. The town’s signature products are clay pots and baskets crafted by village women and shipped to market in Ensenada or sold to tourists who brave the six-mile drive up a bumpy dirt road. Young men leave town as soon as they are old enough to work, taking jobs as ranch hands elsewhere in the region or moving to Ensenada. The phenomenon creates the odd sense that Santa Catarina is missing a generation, that it is peopled only by children and the elderly.

“There’s no work. There’s no nothing. It’s very isolated,” said 66-year-old Teresa Castro, who on a recent afternoon hand-shaped clay pots in a thatch shed next to her house. A great-aunt of Fermin Castro, she said making pots is the only vocation she has ever known. Until recently, those pots were probably the only thing outsiders knew of Santa Catarina.

But the hamlet found itself in the glare of publicity after unknown gunmen assaulted Fermin Castro’s ranch compound in the Ensenada suburb of El Sauzal. Members of three families, two of them Pai Pai, who lived in the compound were yanked from their beds, ordered to lie face down on a concrete patio and sprayed with gunfire.

Among the dead were Castro’s sister, Sandra, her husband, Francisco Flores Altamirano, and their five children. The bodies were transported to the twin-spired Indigenous Catholic Church--one of two churches in Santa Catarina--and later buried in the compact village cemetery.

Other Ominous Signs

Some see the ominous imprint of the drug underworld in several killings linked to the Santa Catarina region during the past two years.

A Pai Pai rodeo announcer for Fermin Castro was gunned down at a rodeo near Ensenada last year in a crime that remains unsolved. And the murders of at least two other Indians in the region have evoked suspicions of drug hits.

Santa Catarina’s residents have reacted to the mass killing with a stoic, but stunned, sadness. Squeezed over the centuries by conquest, revolution and nature’s caprice, denizens of rural Baja find themselves in a vise of a new sort.

“There are very few viable economic alternatives available. They get to this point where they’re offered a lot of money to participate in these illegal activities,” Wilken said. “So they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.”