Drug
Gangs Devastate Indian Villages in Baja
California
By SAM DILLON
SANTA CATARINA, Mexico -- After five centuries of killing and
pestilence that began with the Spanish conquest, only a few
hundred of Baja
California's indigenous people are left alive. And now
they are being
hunted down and killed by drug traffickers.
The violence
began two years ago when the leader of an indigenous
village that
resisted traffickers' efforts to take over communal lands for
drug cultivation
was gunned down, along with another Indian, in an
ambush along
a rural road.
While some have
resisted, other Indians have been seduced by the quick
fortunes that
can reward those who manage desert airstrips or offer other
services to
the drug cartels. And that has resulted in a string of killings in
the Indian communities
that cling to the arid hills 60 miles south of the
California border.
The violence
took on horrifying new dimensions last week when two
entire families
of Indians from the Pai-Pai ethnic group, along with a
household of
neighbors, were dragged from their homes and shot to death
in a driveway
in Ensenada, a coastal city to which some Indians have
migrated. It
was Mexico's worst incident of drug-related bloodshed in
memory.
"We're not many
Pai-Pai, and this has devastated our community," said
Armando Gonzalez,
the commissioner of communal lands in Santa
Catarina, waving
across the horizon of wooden huts and cactus that make
up this desert
hamlet where seven of the massacre victims were buried
Sunday. "For
us there's never been anything so calamitous."
Few institutions
or communities in Mexico are being spared the effects of
the multibillion-dollar
drug industry, and even the most remote indigenous
communities
are no exception.
"The traffickers
are taking advantage of the traditional conflicts that have
plagued these
communities, and that is undermining the fragile sense of
cohesion that
exists," said Everardo Garduno Ruiz, a graduate student at
Arizona State
University who wrote a book about Baja California's
indigenous communities.
The Jesuit missionaries
who explored Baja California in the 16th century
estimated the
native population at 50,000. The Catholic Church
persecuted the
Pai-Pai and speakers of four other indigenous languages,
labeling their
traditional healers as pagans. The Indians resisted all efforts
to transform
them into sedentary farmers until the 1930s, when the
government finally
forced them onto communal lands. Today only about
1,000 Baja California
natives are left, Garduno said.
Until recently,
tuberculosis, alcoholism and emigration were among the
main causes
of decline, but the disintegration quickened a decade ago
when drug traffickers
began to muscle in on the communities.
San Isidoro,
a Pai-Pai village 30 miles southeast of Santa Catarina, has
nearly disappeared
since 1987, when the government loosened
restrictions
on the sale of communal properties and traffickers and their
representatives
began to buy the Pai-Pai's lands. Many of San Isidoro's
Pai-Pai have
moved into the nearby town of Valle de Trinidad.
Nonetheless,
in 1996 San Isidoro still had Marcelino Murillo Alvarez, a
Pai speaker,
as its community land commissioner. After the army found
marijuana plantations
around the village that year, Murillo told the
authorities
that he was willing to sign a document swearing that he and
other Pai-Pai
were uninvolved in the drug cultivation, Murillo's brother
Federico said
in an interview.
Weeks later,
on May 29, 1996, gunmen blocked Marcelino's car and
shot him to
death along with a passenger, Federico said.
On May 18 of
this year, there was a killing near Valle de Trinidad.
Ramon Valenzuela,
the president of the vigilance council of another,
smaller group
of indigenous people known as the Kiliwa, was gunned
down along a
farm road. A Valle de Trinidad police official, Roberto
Gonzalez, said
none of the murders had been solved.
"The Valle de
Trinidad has turned into a valley of death," Federico Murillo
said.
The killings
of the Indians near Trinidad have attracted renewed attention
since the drug-related
massacre of 18 men, women and children on Sept.
17 near Ensenada.
Police said after that crime that the target had been
Fermin Castro,
38, a Pai-Pai from Santa Catarina who was shot during
the attack and
is in a coma. He grew wealthy in the last decade,
ostensibly as
the owner of a rodeo production company. Police said
Castro had headed
a small trafficking organization.
The Ensenada
killings have also caused people in Santa Catarina to
rethink their
views on another spectacular killing last year. To the horror
of spectators
at a rodeo in May 1997 that Castro produced near Santa
Catarina, a
gunman on horseback galloped up to Eufemio Sandoval, the
Pai-Pai Indian
who worked for Castro as the rodeo announcer, shot
Sandoval to
death at point-blank range, rode off to a waiting jeep and
escaped into
the desert.
People here originally
viewed Sandoval's killing as part of a longtime
family vendetta.
But two people said they now believed that it had been
related to Castro's
narcotics activities.
Scores of Pai-Pai
attended two memorial services, one last Saturday in El
Sauzal, the
Ensenada suburb where the Sept. 17 massacre took place,
and the other
on Sunday in Santa Catarina's cemetery. There, five of the
seven dead were
children aged 6 to 13. But no one spoke.
"I guess nobody
could find the words to express their feelings about this,"
said Cruz Lopez
Ochurte, a villager.