The New York Times
September 26, 1998
 

          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.