COMMUNITIES SERVED BY SMA:
COLORADAS DE LA VIRGEN :
TIMELINE

(compiled from newspaper clippings by Consejo EcoRegional Sierra Tarahumara A.C.)

1980s
Alejandro Fontes is named Chief of Rural Police in the nearby Municipio of Morelos; he is subsequently killed when his plane goes down with a load of drugs, reputedly shot down by military forces.

1984
The ejido of Coloradas de la Virgen is formed on what had been communal indigenous land; the best lands go to the mestizo ejidatarios. The ejido is created through fraud: there are numerous electoral irregularities, including the votes of seventeen dead souls and twenty-one people who had long since left the area, and the exclusion of local Rarámuri residents. Iván Fontes is elected ejido president.

1986
Logging begins; the Rarámuri protest. Julio Baldenegro, a traditional authority, is killed after carrying protests to the government. Between 1986 and 1994, thirty-six Rarámuri are killed, including the Second Governor in 1992.

24 Dec. 1986
Bishop José A. Llaguno and the priests in the Sierra address Chihuahua Governor Fernando Baeza advising him of the dangers confronting the priests of Baborigame and Guadalupe y Calvo. They demand an investigation into the assassination of Julio Baldenegro and are threatened. The governor appoints a special task force to investigate the assassination and establishes a security force charged with protecting the priests of various communities who frequently denounce murders, robberies and harassment of the indigenous peoples.

29 Jan. 1987
The bodies of four indigenous who had been kidnapped in August, 1986 are found. Attorney General Mauro Antonio Rodríguez provides a statement, saying the identity of the assassins is known but that lack of communication has prevented their being captured; he speculates about conflicts between the Tarahumara and the Tepehuan. The Supreme Council of the Tarahumara attributes the crimes to drug trafficking.

30 Jan. 1987
The State Human Rights Commission denies that the assassinations were caused by conflicts among the indigenous and attributes the deaths to drug trafficking.

18 May 1988
Mauro Rodríguez Leggi, State Attorney General, attributes the assassination of Julio Baldenegro to an escaped criminal named Pascual Arroyo. The people of Baborigame insist that Pascual Arroyo is a scapegoat and that the indigenous leader was assassinated by three persons sent by the Fontes family, who control the forests, the pastures, and the local police.

3 Oct. 1991
In a Human Rights Forum organized by the National Human Rights Commission and the State Coordinator for the Tarahumara, eighty-two indigenous governors from Urique, Guadalupe y Calvo, Bocoyna, Guachochi, Uruachi, Ocampo, Guerrero, and Nonoava (among them, Rarámuri, Guarijios, Tepehuanes and Pimas) demand clear answers and declare themselves fed up with forums which do nothing to resolve their demands. They denounce the murders which go unsolved and delays in justice; arrogance on the part of the judiciary, the military, and the municipal authorities; the high incidence of alcoholism and the serious impacts of drug trafficking and cacicazgo; the taking of indigenous lands and the fraudulent debts invented by the ejidal commissioners; cattle theft; the growing influence of protestant sects which divide the people and destroy their culture; and the absence of basic public services. They deplore the negative influence of the mestizos and protestant sects, saying that they as indigenous governors are losing their influence among their people.

5 March 1992
The Brothers Joel and Alejandro Fuentes González are riddled with machine gun fire near Coloradas de la Virgen, in a fight among family members dedicated to drug trafficking. Apparently Rogelio Fuentes was responsible for the death of his cousins. The attorney general says he has no immediate intention of sending reinforcements to Guadalupe y Calvo, where the toll that week is three deaths and three wounded, one seriously, in two shootings. Drug trafficking and land conflicts are presumably behind the shootings. With regard to activities of the judicial police, he says that the shootings are occurring in places where access is difficult and requires several days of travel by mule or on foot. He adds that in order to avoid more bloodshed, efforts should be made to prevent clandestine sales of alcohol and firearms.

31 July 1992
“The indigenous of the state of Chihuahua suffer discrimination in the provision of justice, and are jailed and judged without the benefit of an interpreter or adequate legal defense. Accused of homicide, rape, damages and offenses against health, 120 indigenous, among them Pimas, Guarijios, Tepehuans, and Tarahumaras, have been arrested,” according to a census taken by the National Indigenous Institute of seven of the fourteen jails in the state.

5 August 1992
The inhabitants of the High and Low Tarahumara live in a climate of terror caused by drug traffickers and gangs of gunmen. Sources in the municipios of Guachochi, Batopilas, Urique, Bocoyna, Nonoava, and Balleza, who insist on unanimity, report that the areas with the largest marijuana crops are:
Cumbres de Huerachi, Ouxivo, Sinforosa, San Miguel on the Morelos River, Humaniza, Papagochi, part of Norogachi, and a large part of Guadalupe y Calvo, principally
Coloradas de los Chavez and Coloradas de la Vírgen. They denounce the buying of informants. They confirm that they have complained to the highest authorities but that nothing has been done.

1993
A majority of the Rarámuri inhabitants of Coloradas flee to the town of Baborigame for fear of the Fontes’ reign of terror.

29 Dec. 1993
Teresa Jardi, Federal Attorney General for Chihuahua, denounces organized crime in the Sierra Tarahumara and its reign of terror, and names Artemio Fontes as the principal capo for drug trafficking in the area. She indicates that certain timbering interests, who are cutting the forests illegally, are also involved in drug growing. “I am going to mention a name which exemplifies the situation: Artemio Fontes has become the absolute lord of Coloradas de la Virgen, where he owns the agricultural lands and the forest, along with a gang led by Angel Fontes (alias el Towi) and Manual Fontes, who was recently released from prison. That is a gang which persecutes the indigenous and takes away their land, so they cannot work it and suffer hunger. We are investigating this family and asking for arrest warrants. The gang has reached such dimensions that this operation will have to involve the military as well.

Teresa Jardí states that the indigenous have collaborated in the investigation and in destroying drug plantations because these actions are necessary for the recuperation of their lands and their very survival. She says that in places like Coloradas de la Virgen, the indigenous are forced to flee and then outsiders are brought in to tend the crops; in Madera and Nuevo Casas Grandes, the fields are being cared for by people from out of state. In the Sierra Tarahumara, important advances have been made against drug trafficking, especially with regard to the indigenous and their being forced into this kind of criminal activity, but there is still a lot to be done, and drug money is still the fundamental basis of the economy in certain parts of the Sierra.

31 Dec. 1993
Teresa Jardí issues an arrest warrant for Artemio Fontes, but Federal Magistrate Avelina Morelos Guzmán issues an amparo, or pardon, which nullifies the indictment.

9 Jan. 1994
Los Angeles Times publishes article describing Baborigame as a “narco-village.”

9 Feb. 1994
In her final report, Teresa Jardi, Chihuahua Attorney General from August 19, 1993 to January 5, 1994, states that the Attorney General’s office suffers from corrupt sindicalism and neither works to destroy the infrastructure of drug trafficking within the police and ministerial agencies nor does it eradicate plantations. She indicates that the problem of drug trafficking has grown worse with Javier Coello Trejo’s appointment as Under Attorney General and accuses him of having creating a police force which is corrupt, homicidal, and prone to torture. During her term of office, six public ministers are dismissed.

In her report, she thanks the Bishops Adalberto Almeida, Monseñor Corral, and the Jesuits and Dominicans, Camilo Daniel, Francisco Barrio, Francisco Molina, and Javier Benavides.

16 March 1994
Edwin Bustillos García, of the Advisary Council of the Sierra Madre, together with the State Coordinator for the Tarahumara, CNDH and the Attorney General, announce the preliminary findings of a project which is being planned, denouncing the growing of drugs. Combatting drug growing has been inherent in the project, which has always recognized that in the most remote regions of the Sierra of Chihuahua, more than half of the indigenous inhabitants are unwillingly forced into this practice.

In the barrancas where there are no jobs, and where violence does not allow the indigenous to live traditionally as they did twenty years ago, an even higher number are involved in drugs. The Sierra Madre Program, which consists of the Advisary Council of the Sierra Madre and the Arizona Rainforest Alliance, in a progress report made in August of 1993, reports a reduction of illegal cutting, the resolution of certain land tenancy conflicts, and investigations into human rights abuses along with some arrests. It points out that in Coloradas de la Virgen, where two lumbering companies and one narcotrafficker have invaded and terrorized the ejido, arrest warrants have been issued against these people, the exploitation of the forest has been lifted enough to guarantee the lives of the indigenous, and the first steps have been taken in close coordination with the indigenous.

It says that since March, 1992, in Coloradas de la Virgen, four indigenous have died from the violence, one of them the governor. An indigenous promoter received the impact of machine gun fire in his hip and in his head. The community development project, based on the management of the ecosystem in the Sierra, has a presence in twenty-two indigenous communities in the sierra of Chihuahua, in the municipios of Urique, Guachochi, Batopilas, Morelos, Guadalupe y Calvo, Balleza, and Bocoyna.

1 May 1994
Isaac R. Malpica, of Guadalupe y Calvo, denounces the perpetual state of violence in the Sierra, saying the people are just as afraid of the gunmen as they are of the army or the judicial police. Recent events, such as the harassment of the Tepehuans in Baborigame, the massacre of drug traffickers in Mesa de la Guitarra in October 1992, and the armed conflicts that have occurred recently, all of which have involved the military, are examples which have brought national attention to the remote barrancas of the Chihuahua Sierra.

This past April 22, a group of soldiers from the Mars Task Force, dedicated to finding and destroying drug plantations, were shot on as they slept in the Sierra, in the course of a tour of the zone advising people to give up their guns. The shootout continued near the Ranchería Cementerios, near the town of Pericos, in Baborigame, and one of the aggressors was wounded but managed to flee. The criminals abandoned their guns, among them an AK-47 and pistols for the exclusive use of the Army. This incident caused military authorities to send reinforcements to the municipios of Guadalupe y Calvo and Morelos. The Commander of the Fifth Military Zone, Luis Montiel López, has concentrated on Baborigame, according to what his staff told the press.

Note that the shootout in the Sierra took place on the same day that the Secretary of National Defense, Antonio Riviello Bazán, a number of Mexican generals, and some mid-range officers of the Pentagon met at the former Hacienda of Santa Gertrudis, in the municipio of Naica.

12 Dec. 1994
This Monday, the U.S. NGO Forest Guardians issued a statement denouncing the fact that the peaceful Tarahumara are being destroyed with impunity by Mexican drug traffickers, the neglect of Mexican authorities, and the strict drug war policies of Washington.

A letter is addressed to President Ernesto Zedillo and signed by close to ninety humanitarian and environmental organizations in nine countries, stating that every week three or four indigenous Tarahumaras and Tepehuans are assassinated in the Sierra Madre, and their lands are taken over by drug traffickers or by lumbering companies controlled by the drug cartels.

According to the information given, one of the most violent of the caciques is Artemio Fontes, with outstanding arrest warrant for more than sixty crimes. Nevertheless, the suspect lives openly at home in Chihuahua City, since he received a pardon (amparo) from Federal Magistrate Avelina Morelos Guzmán, according to the letter sent to the Mexican chief of state.

The letter further details various cases which have not been adequately investigated due to corruption or other priorities. According to the records of the Attorney General and reports of the INI (National Indigenous Institute), the accomplices of Fontes have killed at least thirty-seven persons from the Ejido Coloradas de la Virgen during the last few years.

22 Feb. 1995
Some twenty demonstraters led by Forest Guardians gathered at the Mexican Consulate in New York to protest human rights violations against the indigenous peoples of Chihuahua.

March 1995
Outside magazine publishes a lengthy article about Edwin Bustillos, of CASMAC, which is reprinted in the Utne Reader.

2 June 1995
Excerpts from the New York Times. Baborigame: twenty-five years ago the place barely existed. Then drug traffickers invaded the heart of the Sierra Madre Occidental and changed the lives of the most traditional indigenous pueblos in Mexico. Now Baborigame is one of the biggest towns in the mountains, and probably the most dangerous. It has suffered violence, temptation, and tragedy. On the outskirts of Baborigame, next to the sawmill, Fidel Torres, fifty-six years old, spends most of his time constructing a little wooden house. He is a Tarahumara Indian who came to Baborigame three years ago when he decided he could no longer live in the only other place he has ever considered home: a small ravine in the Sierra called Coloradas de la Virgen. He left there when his son was killed at a dance in the church of Baborigame.

It is drugs, that is what causes so much violence, says Isidro Baldenegro. He points to a spot behind the church where two men were assassinated. Nearby is the place where his father, an indigenous leader, was assassinated with a shot to the belly, and the school whose teachers fled and never returned, and the land set aside for a new clinic where no mason has dared to come and lay a single brick. The cemetary full of young Tarahumaras who died violent deaths.

The indigenous do not usually use drugs. But here, a few hectares of marijuana and poppies can mean three thousand pesos for a Tarahumara, more than he could earn in several years—if he can manage to stay alive.

April 3, 1996
The Los Angeles Times publishes an article about Baborigame, entitled “’Narco-Village’ Finding It Tough to Break the Habit” and charging that the town’s mayor, Manuel Rubio Loera, is a “known drug dealer.”

22 May 1996
Francisco Chávez, of the Commission for Solidarity and Human Rights (COSYDDHAC), denounces violations of human rights.

4 August 1996
The number of soldiers and judicial police multiply in order to bring about compliance with the firearms law, this increase having begun a little more than two months ago to coincide with the upsurge of a new subversive group in Guerrero called the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR). Leaflets are distributed along the principle highways, there are roadblocks on the major roads that enter the Sierra and military detachments in the region are increased, according to Gabriel Parga of the Parish of Guachochi and José Luis Cubukdox, Bishop of the Tarahumara. They also say that the soldiers should go into the Sierra where the plantations are and not bother tourists and people who are going about their daily affairs with their roadblocks.

Problems in the Sierra: The municipal seat of Uruachi has no school, because the teachers fled after a professor was assassinated by a group of evil-doers. In Archivo, in the same area, there are constant assaults by groups of persons who carry long guns and cover their faces in different ways. Coloradas de la Virgen has had no school for two years because the safety of the teachers cannot be guaranteed. Last June 2, José Cruz Gardea, the sectional president of Norogachi, was assassinated. Violence, drug trafficking. In Tomochi, municipio of Ocampo. For months the inhabitants of Coloradas de la Virgen have complained because the royalties from the sawmill are handed out in Pericos, where they were assaulted by the gang of the Towi, Angel Fontes.

The presence of the Fontes has lasted for three decades. Teresa Jardí denounced the gangs and groups of gunmen, brothers and cousins, behind the drug growing. At least fifteen traditional and ejidal authorities have fallen at the hands of this family.

Father Rafael Alvarez Ríos complains that in Coloradas de la Virgen, where there are at least eighty school aged children, there have been no teachers for four years, since they were violently run off by the caciques. This priest has been investigating the phenomena of cacicazgo in the region since 1991.

Adelina Fontes Piñeda states that for more than three years they have not celebrated their traditional Holy Week fiesta, or that it was only celebrated during the authorities’ change of shifts.

In 1993, Towi’s gang had three confrontations with the Mexican Army in Cementerios, near Pericos.

2 Feb. 1997
El Financiero analyzes the transformation of the drug trade.

28 Feb. 1998
Insecurity in the municipio of Guadalupe y Calvo due to the lack of police officers. The municipal president, Rigoberto Martines Melchor, stated yesterday that some of his men tended to hide in the face of danger.

The state’s attorney, Arturo Chávez Chávez, stated in a radio interview that the police of Baborigame are fearless, but the problem of drug trafficking in the Sierra is beyond them, and that the judicial police of Baborigame do not stop the big drug dealer because they would not leave town alive.

28 Feb. 1998.
Before events in Baborigame, including an attempt on the life of a priest, the Attorney General of the Southern Zone established a Center of Operations in that town, bringing in more judicial agents. They said this was the result of the confidence the community has shown in denouncing abuses and violations. Yesterday an arrest was made following a complaint about a person charged with death threats and carrying arms.

So far this year, thirteen plantations were destroyed (nine of poppies, three of marijuana, and one of both) and two kilos of seeds of the two drugs were confiscated, along with $25,000.00 and 2,300 barrels of beer.

Thirty firearms (twenty-four short and six AK-47s) were confiscated and six arrest warrants executed, some for homicide. Among the communities considered to be in conflict are Pericos, Coloradas de la Virgen, San Juan Nepomuceno (Balleza), Mesa de San Rafael, Dolores, Yerbitas, Los Tarros, Milpillas, Las Reformas, and San Javier. Some gangsters in Guazapares and Urique and areas which border on the states of Sonora and Sinaloa. In Temoris,
Guazapares, there were fifteen deaths in two years in confrontations with the state police or with gunmen.

According to the State Attorney General, Guadalupe y Calvo is where the largest number of gangs and armed men operate, among them gangs known as Los Pezcuinos, Los Vargas, Los González and El Gringo. The most marginalized municipio is Morelos, with the group commanded by El Payo, along with Los Pescuños and Las Vargas. Las Vargas in the communities of San Ignacio and El Durazno among the municipios of Guadalupe y Calvo and Morelos. In the town of Basonaivo in the municipio of Guazapares, the gangs assaulted and burned the installations of the INI.

Assassinations of teachers in Las Higueras, in Batopilas; San Juan de Iturralde, in Balleza; and Sorichique, in Batopilas. Threats in Buenavista in San Carlos, Pino Gordo, El Venadito, in the municipio of Guadalupe y Calvo; El Vergel, of the town Laguna de Juanotas, in the municipio of Balleza where the professor Antonio Bustillos Villar was assassinated seven months ago.

May 1999
The New York Times publishes an article denouncing irresponsible logging, entitled “All Across Mexico, a Chainsaw Massacre of Trees.”

23 Feb. 2001
Angel Fontes González, the dangerous chief of a gang of thugs in the Sierra, known as the “strongman” and “reckless” in the south of the state because he defended himself with his gunmen and committed armed robbery against the people transporting loads of marijuana and opium paste, lost his life last Tuesday at the hands of an individual with whom he had differences in Baborigame. No arrest warrants had been issued against Fontes González, alias El Towi, for any reason, but his notoriety as a gunman was legendary, not only in Baborigame, Guadalupe y Calvo, where he lived but in most of the region south of the town. His usual victims, who were other drug traffickers, never turned him in.

El Towi’s base of operations was in a town called Pericos, from which the indigenous population had fled, the day laborers had disappeared and the businesses had all gone broke. Given the climate of violence in this region, in 1998 the teachers fled from Coloradas de la Virgen, some five kilometers from Pericos, leaving seventy children without classes, according to the author of The Tarahumara: A Wounded Land.

13 April 2001
At least three gangs of thugs operate in the municipio of Morelos, entering the territory of Guachochi and then escaping to Sinaloa, according to inhabitants of Morelos. Opium is one of the crops grown here, in Morelos and in Guachochi, and the people exchange it for credit in the stores. You might find it hard to believe, indicated the informer, but that is what they use for cash in the stores: a quarter, a half, depending on what they owe. But the people make a living at it, but now there is another, more serious problem, with drugs: for the last six or seven years, they have begun using powder. Before it was only marijuana and alcohol, which they drank with strawberry soda. But now, what they want is cocaine.

1 August 2001
COSYDDHAC complains that the provision of justice obeys the rule that the poorer and more isolated the people are, the less possibility they have to be heard and their complaints acted on by the proper authority. They present a detailed report on the judicial attention paid to 301 cases in 2000: 171 are criminal cases, four before international courts, twenty civil, twenty-five family, two cases of lack of public security in the Baja Tarahumara, fourteen agrarian, two discrimination against the indigenous, twenty-five social, two ecological, two health related, and one administrative.

In summary, 107 cases were heard, which related to violence in the communities and the discretionary application of the law, eighty-five are considered inter-communal violence and belong to the municipios of the Baja Tarahumara. The communities have complained to the authorities of the existence of gangs located in Coloradas de la Virgen, Urique, Batopilas, Guazapares and the region around Baborigame.

24 Sep. 2002
Tarahumara and mestizo ejidatarios from the community of Coloradas de la Virgen in Guadalupe y Calvo blocked the roads and access to the offices of SEMARNAT (Department of the Environment and Natural Resources) in Chihuahua City demanding that the agency put a stop to irresponsible logging in their forests. Led by Fidel Torres Baldenegro, the indigenous governor of Coloradas, they demanded a Negotiating Team with the participation of the Agency for Agrarian Reform, the Agrarian Court, SEMARNAT, the INI, and especially Xochitl Gálvez, director of the Organization for the Development of the Indigenous Peoples.

They maintained that in 1999, a fraud was committed in the Agrarian Department with the program for certifying ejidal rights, when ninety ejidatarios were inscribed, of whom only six lived in the community, and that many of the names on the list were of people who had died. They added that since these illicit maneuvers, the cacique, Iván Fontes Carrillo, obtained a permission for cutting timber in the entire old-growth forest, which is property of the indigenous ejidatarios who have lived in the region since the days of their ancestors.

25 Sep. 2002
SEMARNAT suspended the logging permits in the Ejido Coloradas de la Virgen in Guadalupe y Calvo, in response to a request by the Agrarian Court, and the demonstrators left its offices and returned to their places of origin. The Agrarian Court requested the suspension, now that a petition of ejidatarios has been submitted to revise and revoke the original ejidal authority. SEMARNAT notified the ejido authorities to stop the logging.

2 Oct. 2002
Indigenous ejidatarios, most of them Tarahumaras from Coloradas de la Virgen, accompanied by representatives of nongovernmental and civic organizations, denounced the fact that on returning to their communities, after the SEMARNAT protest the week before over the irresponsible logging of their forests, they were threatened by the local cacique, Artemio Fontes Lugo. They therefore demanded the intervention of the judicial authorities and charged the three levels of government with ensuring their safety. Among those threatened were Lino Martines Acuña, Isidro Baldenegro López, Luciana Torres Palma, Alfonso Molina Carrillo, Martín Valdéz Ramos, Adelina Fontes Medina, Gumercindo Torres Molina, Josefa Chaparro Bojórquez, and Jesús Carrillo Ramírez, among others.

February 2, 2003
Proceso, a Mexico City news weekly, publishes an article about Coloradas, entitled “Narco-talamontes con protección oficial” (“Narco-loggers with Official Protection”), which holds police and military publicly accountable for their complicity with the Fontes cartel.

29 March 2003
About seven armed men who belong to the judical police and the Orion Group arrive in Coloradas de la Virgen in the morning, and without search warrant or arrest warrant, enter the houses and turn them upside down, search the women and arrest the men. They do not respect our civil authority in the person of our police commissioner, Hilario Quiñónez Rubio. They pull him out of his house and want to take him away. They also go into Isidro’s house, and take him away, along with Hermenegildo.

The arrests of Isidro and Hermenegildo are carried out while, in Pericos, an hour from Coloradas, another ejidal assembly takes place, in which the son of Artemio Fontes Lugo is confirmed as president of the ejidal commission and new members are included in the ejido, all of them mestizos, and the exploitation of the forests is also reauthorized.

Without covering their tracks, the judical police stop in Pericos, before continuing on to Baborigame, with the indigenous prisoners; hours later they will be transported to Parral where they will be imprisoned.

In a letter directed to the President of the Republic in January 2003, his immediate intervention with the agencies charged with obtaining justice to ensure that they act according to law is demanded, and that Trinidad Baldenegro and Gabriel Palma López be immediately released. In April another letter is sent demanding the liberty of Isidro Baldenegro López and Hermenegildo Rivas Carrillo, and his intervention to put an end to the impunity and abuse of the indigenous people of Coloradas de la Virgen.

Early April 2003
Mrs. Josefa Chaparro Bojórquez is visited in her home by the Public Ministry and the Sectional President of Baborigame, Ramón Ochoa, who told her to gather the people who had stopped the logging trucks and bring them to testify at the Public Ministry. They also asked her to appear and testify about “certain things.” Several days later, she received a document, where the names of all the activists in defense of the forests appeared. For these reasons, she is afraid they will issue or execute arrest warrants against her.

April 20, 2003
Teresa Jardí, the former federal Attorney General of Chihuahua who had attempted to bring Artemio Fontes to justice, publishes a letter of support for Isidro, ending with these words: “I voted for Fox and over and over again I declared that a vote for him meant getting the PRI out of Los Pinos. I also did it because I was convinced that he would not be a bad president. I was wrong. I don’t believe that Fox will respond to this complaint. But I hope I’m wrong.”

May 1–4, 2003
Representatives of SMA, Consejo EcoRegional Sierra Tarahumara A.C., and Coloradas were featured speakers at the Women and War Conference in Austen, Texas, organized by the American Friends Service Committee.

May 23, 2003
The Sierra Club Human Rights and the Environment Committee features Isidro on their webpage. Articles are also published in the May–June issue of Earth First!, and on the Mexican Solidarity Network webpage.

May 27, 2003
The Human Rights Center Augustín Pro, of Mexico City, addressed a letter to Mexican President Fox, the governor of the state of Chihuahua, and the state attorney general, demanding an investigation into the circumstances of Isidro’s arrest and guaranties for his safety, as well as the safety of other named activists, and demanding an investigation of logging in Coloradas de la Virgen.

May 31, 2003
The Third Congress of the Indigenous Peoples of the North is held in Creel, and passes resolutions demanding liberty for Isidro and an end to illegal logging.

June 3, 2003
Trinidad Baldenegro López and Gabriel Palma López are declared innocent of all charges and released from jail.

June [].
Isidro is transferred from Parral to Chihuahua City, and into the jurisdiction of the federal court, so that his legal defense can begin.