COMMUNITIES SERVED BY SMA:
COLORADAS DE LA VIRGEN :
Mexican Indians Suffer Brunt of Drug Trafficking, Illegal Logging

5 June 2003: Diego Cevallos,
Inter Press Service

MEXICO CITY, Jun 4 (IPS) - Drug traffickers, illegal logging operations and police corruption have proved to be a lethal mix in Mexico, leading to the murders of indigenous people and destruction of their land and culture in the northern state of Chihuahua, bordering the United States.

History suggests that, in some parts of Chihuahua, an Indian who gets in the way of the 'narcotraficantes' and logging mafias ends up drugged, imprisoned or dead. Isidro Baldenegro, leader of the Rarámuri peoples, knows this from personal experience. He spoke with IPS from his prison cell, and asserted that he will continue "waging war" against the local 'caciques' (local political bosses) and the mafias.

"I hope there is some justice left to stop the destruction, the vicious logging," said Baldenegro, held since March on charges of drugs and weapons possession, just as he and other Rarámuri had won temporary injunction from the court to halt logging in a local pine forest. The case of this prisoner, leader of the Chihuahua community Coloradas de la Virgen, is on the desk of President Vicente Fox, thanks to the efforts of environmental groups demanding his release. Baldenegro has played an important role in fighting illegal logging in a country that loses 1.1 million hectares of forest each year, say environmental activists.

The Mexico Solidarity Network, a Mexican-U.S. human rights coalition, is gathering signatures via its web site for a letter demanding Baldenegro's release.

Coloradas de la Virgen, covering more than 25,000 hectares, has been the home since time immemorial for the native Rarámuris, as they call themselves. The indigenous group is known as the Tarahumara among anthropologists.

In 1953, the Mexican government ceded nearly the entire area to migrant farmers, particularly the forests and farmable lands. Through subsequent lawsuits, the Rarámuris were able to regain part of their traditional territory, but nearly all of them were left living in ravines and gorges, but that did not stop them from fighting to recover the native forests.

Chihuahua is home to seven million hectares of temperate and cold climate forests. The Coloradas de la Virgen area is home to one of the last remaining old growth pine forests in the Mexican Sierra Madre, according to the Mexico Solidarity Network.

Baldenegro says he felt "powerless when he saw how they (the mafias) accuse us and how the judges and police believed them."

Environmentalists here say this case is all too similar to that of Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera, Indians from the southern state of Guerrero. Cabrera and Montiel also were active opponents of deforestation and spent two years behind bars for the same charges that Baldenegro is facing. After an international campaign was launched on their behalf, maintaining their innocence, the two were released in 1991 and the Fox government recognized that they had been victims of grave injustice.

Consejo EcoRegional Sierra Tarahumara A.C. (Environmental Force), a non-governmental organization operating in Chihuahua, expressed hope that Baldenegro would be released as Cabrera and Montiel were.

"The situation in Coloradas de la Virgen is delicate, because there it is the community-based Indian activists who--with Baldenegro in the lead--are fighting the indiscriminate and illegal logging by local political bosses and mafias," Patricia Peña, Consejo EcoRegional Sierra Tarahumara A.C.'s projects coordinator, said in a conversation with IPS.

Baldenegro said that he was at his home in Coloradas de la Virgen when the judicial police (a specialized force) took him into custody. The officers did not show him an arrest warrant and they threatened him, he said.

"My father (who was also a Rarámuri leader) was killed for standing up to the bosses that head the logging operations and have ties to drug trafficking. So I know the story, but I will continue to fight," said the 37-year-old Indian. Julio Baldenegro, Isidro's father, was murdered in 1986, gunned down by unknown assailants. The case has yet to be resolved.

The Mexican Attorney General's Office and Chihuahua authorities acknowledge that there are land disputes between Indians and mestizos (mixed-race) inhabitants, illegal logging in the forests, illicit production of marijuana and the threatening presence of drug traffickers in Coloradas de la Virgen and surrounding villages.

A decade ago, Teresa Jardi, the Attorney General's delegate to Chihuahua
at the time, reported that in the Tarahumara sierra, which includes Coloradas de la Virgen, there were "organized crime" gangs with ties to the police, and that in those groups were loggers and drug traffickers. Jardi fingered one of the gang leaders as Artemio Fontes, but he and his family serve to this day as local officials in Coloradas de la Virgen. And it is they who, through ostensibly legal assemblies, authorize the logging in the surrounding pine forests.

The indigenous community has denounced that this logging activity is illegal and demanded that authorities take action to stop it. In late 2002 the Rarámuris won an injunction that froze logging operations. But Fontes and his associates filed appeals to prevent their logging activities from being interrupted.

The same story of lawlessness, environmental devastation and human rights
violations seems to drag on and on. "The peaceful Tarahumara peoples are being annihilated by the unpunished aggressions of Mexican drug traffickers and the negligence of the authorities," said the U.S.-based environmental group Forest Guardians in a 1994 statement.

In a letter to then-president Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000), and backed by some 90 environmental and human rights groups from nine countries, Forest Guardians said that in the Tarahumara sierra, "three or four Indians are assassinated each week." The letter goes on to say that the indigenous community had been "invaded by drug traffickers and by logging companies controlled by the drug cartels."

One of the most violent bosses is Fontes, according to the environmental group. There were arrest orders pending against him for more than 60 crimes. But he remained at large, living a normal life in Chihuahua capital. And Fontes continues the same sorts of activities today. "He is one of the people responsible for my being in prison. So I accuse him directly," said Baldenegro. "In the state of Chihuahua, in the most remote regions of the sierra, more than half of the Indians living there are dragged (into the drug trade)," either growing or trafficking the illegal substances, says a report from the Attorney General's Office. Chihuahua adjoins the United States, the world's leading consumer of illicit drugs.

Some 150,000 Indians live in Chihuahua, 4.5 percent of the state's total population. Most are Rarámuris or Tarahumaras, and more than 90 percent do not have access to social security (news - web sites) benefits. Fifty percent are illiterate, a portion far above the six percent overall rate in the state. Of the Indians older than 15, 64 percent have no formal education and 46 percent of children aged six to 14 do not attend school.