In Mexico’s Wild, Rough Tarahumara Mountains, Indians Who Advocate Land Rights Are Jailed

BABORIGAME, Mexico (AP). In the rough Tarahumara mountains of northern Mexico, dozens of Indians have been gunned down over the last 15 years in a bitter land conflict with ranchers, loggers and drug growers.

Now, members of a new generation of Indian activists has been tossed into jail on what they claim are politically motivated charges after a group of mainly female Indian activists blocked logging trucks on mountain roads earlier this year.

The clash pits Indians against a cowboy culture of guns, drugs and pickup trucks in a land of mile-deep gorges and fog-shrouded mountaintops where some Indians still live in caves and opium poppies sprout along roadsides and fences.

A decade after activists here won international press attention with the Goldman Environmental Prize, the mountain roads still rumble with the weight of logging trucks loaded with huge old pine trees, while anti-logging activists like Isidro Baldenegro sit in jail.

“Even though I’m locked up, the people are still going to keep on fighting,” said the mild-mannered, round-faced Baldenegro during an interview at a jail in Parral, about 200 miles south of the U.S. border.

Baldenegro claims influential local loggers and ranchers persuaded the police to trump up charges against him, an accusation prosecutors deny. What is clear is that there is a history of violence against Indian activists.

“If one of us dies for some reason, other people will carry on the struggle,” said Baldenegro, who identifies himself as “100 percent Rarámuri,” the name the Indians prefer to Tarahumara. “This has gone too far too stop.”

Baldenegro, 39, was arrested in March. He said state police showed up at his house asking him about his activism; he has led about 400 Indians in his village of Coloradas de la Virgen to protect their land and stop logging.

State police say they found Baldenegro and another activist carrying two assault rifles, two pistols and a half-pound of marijuana seeds; they arrested both on weapon and drug charges.

Three months earlier, two of Baldenegro’s brothers were arrested on similar charges; they were later released because the police who arrested them contradicted themselves in testimony.

All three are sons of Julio Baldenegro, an Indian leader who opposed logging. His still-unsolved murder in 1987 marked the beginning of a wave of killings.

“They used to kill the Indians, now they’re tossing them in jail,” said Patricia Peña, an activist with the conservation group Fuerza Ambiential. “I don’t know if you can call that progress.”

Baldenegro and his brothers deny the charges, saying their arrests were aimed at quelling their movement to assert Indian communal property rights over about 125,000 acres of mountain land.

That movement has angered white and mestizo
“mixed race” landholders who were given group title to much of the land under a 1950s decree that largely excluded the Rarámuri, who seldom concentrate in groups and prefer to live in scattered settlements.

Contradictions abound in Baldenegro’s case. Federal police say he was arrested on a mountainside after someone swore out a complaint against him. State police, however, said they were on a routine patrol when they spotted a suspicious-looking man attempting to run into the woods; it turned out to be Baldenegro.

Several witnesses—Baldenegro’s friends and relatives—say he was arrested at his home. That would have required police to produce a search or arrest warrant, neither of which they had.

In a police mug shot, Baldenegro was forced to pose with the rifle he was supposedly carrying at the time, a common Mexican police practice. But the picture appears to show a weapon different from the Kalashnikov rifle he is accused of having.

At the very least, the arrests seem to be a strangely zealous bout of law enforcement against one family, in an area where ranchers wearing marijuana-leaf chains swig beer at midday in town squares.

The battle against logging came to a head in late 2002, when a timber permit was granted to the mainly non-Indian members of the local common-property settlement known as an ejido.

“We went up to the road, and stopped the trucks. There were a lot of us women, and we told the drivers, “This is it, you’re not moving any more trees through here,” recalled 50-year-old Josefa Chaparro.
The drivers complied, and the government later canceled the logging permit; angered ejido members have filed court challenges against the logging ban.
Chaparro, a mother of four, is one of the many Raramuri women already widowed by the conflict; her husband, Adolfo Chaparro, was shot in his bed in 1998. His murder, like most in those years, remains unsolved.

Chaparro said she and her husband had worked to put out dozens of forest fires, in a bid to save the land. While most Rarámuri don’t oppose a sustainable level of logging, they refuse to allow clear-cutting from which non-Indians get all the money.

At stake are not only the high-mountain forests of pine and scrub-oak—the last old growth in northern Mexico—but also endangered species such as the Military Macaw and Thick-billed Parrot, and the threatened Mexican Golden Trout, which is found nowhere else.

“If they take everything, then we won’t have any grass or water left for the animals. What will our children and grandchildren inherit?” asked Chaparro.
Baldenegro—who received a monthly stipend from Fuerza Ambiental—had avoided violence, said his sister-in-law, Maximina Carillo Torres.

“Many people wanted to take the law into their own hands, but he always said, ‘Wait, let’s do things the right way,’” said Carrillo Torres, whose husband was also arrested. “It just seems like the chabochis (white people) are trying to take away what little we Rarámuri have left.”

Local police and activists readily acknowledge the violent nature of life in the mountains, which rise up to 9,000 feet about 50 miles west of Parral. Soldiers search every passenger on the small planes that ply the mountains, but the anti-drug effort barely makes a dent.

“You can see it in the economy of the region,” said a local newspaper editor, who spoke only on condition of anonymity. “When there is a good (poppy) harvest, everybody sells more. When there isn’t, business drops off steeply.”

Baldenegro denied growing any drug crops, “I’m fine with a little corn and beans” but acknowledged there is a vicious cycle of drugs and violence, that make guns almost a necessity.

“Most people who grow those crops,” he said, “do it in order to trade them for weapons.”


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