The Tarahumara who live in the rugged canyon country of northern Mexico are under tremendous strain from drought and the pressure of exploitation by drug cartels.
By Rick Schwertfeger
Silvino “zigzagged around scrawny desert saplings, while the shadows cast by the dirt bike’s spotlight darted around him. He moved swiftly. He was conditioned to navigating switchbacks. Muy ligero, he told himself. Light-footed. Soon the sound of the dirt bike faded. He had escaped….”
Silvino then continued to run 100 miles to safety in Mexico.
The greatest long-distance trail runners in the world? Probably. The Tarahumara of northern Mexico are famous in the distance running community, especially in the United States. Based in their religion and agriculture-based culture, Tarahumara can run prodigious distances on canyon and mountain trails. Once discovered, their best runners were recruited to compete in some of the U.S.’s biggest trail races. American photographer Rick Fisher first brought them to the 1993 Leadville, Colorado, 100. The results: First, second, and fifth! More top results followed, including in races around the globe.
Some of the greatest distance runners in the world…
Ryan Goldberg writes:
“An indigenous tribe of roughly 70,000…the Tarahumara…originated on the lush plains east of the mountains. But beginning in the sixteenth century the tribe fled Spanish invaders, Jesuit missionaries, and Mexican settlers — and their fatal diseases, forced labor, and attempted conversions — retreating into the Sierra Madre’s forbidding landscape. They settled what would come to be known as the Sierra Tarahumara, an expansive network of canyons that are, at some points, deeper than the Grand Canyon, dropping 6,140 feet through three ecosystems. The most famous section, covered with lichen, is the color of oxidized copper.”
But, as with so much in contemporary Mexico, the Tarahumara story is one of drought, poverty, and armed exploitation by powerful drug cartels. In The Drug Runners, (Texas Monthly, July 2017) Goldberg follows the entwined threads of the Tarahumara story – a terrific article that artfully reveals the essence of the tragedy for so many poor people and communities in Mexico.
The drug cartels thought, hey, if the Tarahumara could run huge distances, they sure could hump marijuana over the wastelands of northern Mexico into Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Recruits signed on or were forced to be loaded down with 45-pound bales of weed and enough food and water to make the journey. Their agricultural economy wrecked by drought, their communities disintegrating into poverty, the payoff from such a journey will keep a family going for months. Survival, baby — do what you can and have to to keep your family alive. Ummm, however, just un problema: You can get caught! And, of course, some do. Pretty hard to help out your family from a clink in the U.S.
Mexico’s Copper Canyon is being infiltrated by drug cartels.
Ryan Goldberg examines the legal thread from U.S. side of the border. He follows Attorney Paul Chambers, based in the little West Texas city of Alpine. Based on my first hand experience, Alpine is a wonderful, appealing town. But it’s also just north of many of the main smuggling routes into Texas.
“By 2015, the tiny office of the federal public defenders in Alpine was tasked with the second-largest caseload in Texas, behind El Paso. Many of these were…so-called backpacker cases: groups of six or more Mexican men arrested in the mountains, each carrying about 45 pounds of marijuana.”
The caseload was too large for the public defenders to handle. Private attorneys like Chambers were assigned to defend the rest.
Chambers, 27 and just starting his career, learned of a legal procedure being used on members of groups of “backpackers”: Each member of the group is being charged as legally responsible for all of the drugs the group carried —not just the 45 pounds each individual carried. This leads to heavier charges and longer sentences.
And, Chambers researched more broadly about the lives of these Tarahumara, the economic conditions in their decaying communities, and that many times the “mules” are forced to do that job either to earn survival money or through force. And he learned that once the Sinaloa cartel took over Tarahumara towns, land was converted by force to growing poppies for production into opium.
“In the summer of 2016, drug traffickers moved on the town of Basihuare,…stealing the funds from the town’s ejido, a government-supported agriculture cooperative. After razing the corn and bean fields, they planted poppies instead.”
Chambers realized how “innocent” many of those arrested were.
“Chambers had seen many of these harsh sentences handed out, including to drug runners who were essentially forced into smuggling. Still, of the dozens and dozens of clients he’d defended, it was…the plight of the Tarahumara, that stuck with him.”
For example, re: one client named Vega:
“Vega pleaded guilty to the marijuana charge; there was no other recourse. Vega didn’t know the men who’d recruited him, which is typical in backpacker cases, so they didn’t have any information to offer prosecutors in exchange for a shorter sentence. As a result, Vega — performing the lowest, most expendable role in the drug trade — carried the burden himself.”
Vega got 46 months. “…Looking at the slight, dark-haired, shackled Vega, Chambers’ anger bubbled up.” Turns out Chambers grew up in a family damaged by drugs, drug dealing and prison sentences of his father and other family members.
“Chambers thought about how Vega wouldn’t be there for his two sons as they grew into their teens. He knew what an absence like that could do to a family.”
The tragedies of the drug frontera roll on and on.
A summary article such as this by necessity leaves out many rich details that Ryan Goldberg wrote in his fine article. Readers are urged to read it in full at: http://features.texasmonthly.com/editorial/the-drug-runners/
© Rick Schwertfeger Used by permission.
tom says
I met a tarahumara indian in the mid 1970’s who was working in a lead and silver mine in the mineral mountains midway between Florence and superior, in central Arizona. he had walked all the way from the Mexican border north to the area mentioned. walking at night, laying low during the day. he was immune to any thoughts of paperwork or legal migration! he carried a few tortillas and water and found his way over all that desert terrain to work for low wages in the mine. his xact birth date was unknown but he said he was 53 years old. running or walking, probably no culture can equal the tarahumara for distance, landscape savvy or endurance.
JimC says
Great stuff Tom. Not even the Apache could keep up with the Tarahumara.