COMMUNITIES SERVED BY SMA:
COLORADAS DE LA VIRGEN :
PROCESSO: Narco-Timber Barons with Official Protection

By Juan Velédíaz
2 February 2003, Mexico City

COLORADAS DE LA VIRGEN, CHIHUAHUA: The communities dispersed in the mountains agree: the people who grow drugs on the steep slopes and inaccessible canyons count on the protection of the cacique, Artemio Fontes Lugo. Some of his men, like Ramiro Argüelles, are in charge of the armed groups which have assassinated dozens of indigenous people and terrorized the population. Many men have abandoned their homes, leaving Coloradas de la Virgen a ghost town.

The stronghold of the Fontes clan lies in the municipio of Guadalupe y Calvo. There, more than thirty years ago, the corpses of Tarahumara leaders who opposed the cultivation of marijuana and poppies began to appear on the roads. And then the gang began to log the forests of the Tarahumara. Teresa Jardí, former Federal Attorney General in Chihuahua, fingered the Fontes as the principal drug traffickers of the region in the early 1990s.

Three times a year, in March, May, and June, when the poppies are harvested and the marijuana is high, a green Air Force helicopter appears and forty soldiers descend to enter the mountains in groups of ten, and spend two weeks to a month destroying the plantations. But not all of them.

In March, 2001, Artemio Fontes conducted the largest cutting of timber ever seen in the region to open new fields for drug.

In March, 2001, a so-called ejidal assembly, orchestrated by Artemio Fontes, gave permission to log 4,552 hectares to three of his associates, Iván Fontes Carrillo, Jesús Carrillo Ramírez, and Francisco Molina Acosta. The attendance list includes seventeen dead souls, and others who left the community twenty years ago and never returned. It includes signatures of people who do not know how to write. In July, 2001, the Secretary of the Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) ratified the fraudulent assembly, with permission to cut 1,700 hectares between 2003 and 2005. SEMARNAT did not verify that the community had given permission, nor did they investigate the presence of endangered species, as required by law.

The Tarahumara filed a protest in the Agrarian Court in Chihuahua in September, 2002. The Fontes retaliated with harassment, threats, and assassinations. At least ten indigenous peoples have died since 2000, and the chief of police of Coloradas was recently ambushed and wounded; he has since gone into exile.

The Tarahumara are now collecting funds to send their traditional authorities to Mexico City, to present their complaints to President Vicente Fox, documenting their health conditions, the crimes of armed groups lead by Fontes, and the unrestrained logging which has changed their ecosystem and diminished the rainfall.

On January 15, a meeting of the community, among them various shamans, announced they would no longer tolerate injustice, their children dying of hunger, and the narco timber barons laying down the law while their crimes go unpunished.

“We are going to ask the government of Vicente Fox that they return our lands and stop cutting our pines, we want to be paid for the trees they already cut because these forests are ours and we never gave them permission. They are taking everything and giving us nothing,” said the traditional governor, José Moreno Chavarría.

A low intensity war is being fought against the Rarámuri. “For thirty years, since they killed Zenón Torres, blood has flowed here. Artemio Fontes has taken over and killed a lot of people. We live in a warzone, our brothers have died, and we are fed up and desperate.”