Winding up hairpin tums, we kept passing canvas-backed army trucks, some of which, Bustillos suspected, may have contained confiscated marijuana plants. He estimated that half of the cannabis that the army is supposed to burn on the spot ends up being sold in the United States. A high official in the capital, who had spoken to me on condition of anonymity, had explained that the generals have strUck a deal with the ruling PRI party: The army can do whatever it wants with the drugs it seizes, so long as it stays out of politics. "The general in this state hates me," Bustillos said casually, as another army trUck chuffed past us.

       We coasted into Guachochi late in the afternoon. Suddenly the road was lined with elaborate stone walls enclosing the estates of narcotrafica12tes, their mansions set too far back to be seen. Guachochi was a hot, dusty, ugly town of 22,000 people, plus a large population of mangy pariah dogs. The whole place was suffused with a carnival atmosphere. Tarahumara from ranchos all over the Sierra had trickled in for the Yumari harvest fiesta, a three-day thanksgiving celebration that is their big blowout of the year.

       One of the revelers who had just rolled into town was Petronillo Bustillos Gonzales, the govemor of Aboreachic, a loose community of 400 Tarahumara families located an hour and a half's drive from here. Gonzales, a proud man who was a celebrated local marathoner in his youth, was wearing his best cowboy hat, with a gold band, like all the other Indian men crammed into his flatbed truck. The drug problem was very much in evidence in Aboreachic. Twelveand IS-year-old Tarahumara kids, whose role models had now sadly become the traficantes, were snorting cocaine, smoking marijuana, even shooting heroin. "I talk to the people on Sundays," Gonzales said, "tell them to behave well and not plant mota [marijuana] or chutama [opium] because these things make you crazy."

       Right now, however, all Gonzales could think about was the Yumari fiesta. "Muchos compaiieros," he said excitedly, tipping his hat before disappearing into the crowd.

       Bustillos is well known among the people of Guachochi. From here, it is only a 45minute drive to the east to Agua Azul, the little town where Bustillos grew up as the son of a local saddle-maker and where he now keeps a small farm. There are a lot of Bustilloses in these parts. Last September, one of his relatives, a policeman by the name of Alonso Bustillos, had fired some shots over his house in Agua Azul during the night-evidently to express his displeasure at CAS MAC's attempts to gather incriminating evidence against the Fontes cartel. "Some of the Bustillos are my worst enemies," he told me with a wry smile.

       The Yumari celebration was taking place in an open field across the street from a school. Throngs of Tarahumara were gathered around huge, crackling bonfires. Some were brewing tesgiiina, a flat, mild corn beer, in metal vats. At each bonfire, tWo files of men wearing helmets decked with colored streamers were shuffling to simple, two-chord jigs played by a pair of men on homemade fiddles and a third on guitar. This was the Matachines, a dance that reenacts Spain's defeat of the Moors and was taught by the Spanish missionaries to many Indian groups as a way ofindoctrinating them; the Indians played the Moors, but gradually they infused the pageant with meanings of their own. The dancing, which was performed exclusively by the men, seemed oddly inhibited to me, even repressed. The women sat motionless in their shawls, staring off into space.

       I sat on a log and took in the insistent rhythms that a dancer in shell-decorated leggings was stamping out in the dust with his tire-tread sandals. After a few hours, as I settled into the scene, I began to slip into Tarahumara time, into a cosmos in which maps and clocks are of little use, where people have multiple souls, where the physical plane is not what is really happening. "For the Tarahumara, nature is paramount," Bustillos told me as we stared into the flames. "Even rocks can be alive. It is a different concept of everything."

       Standing in the field, Bustillos introduced me to half a dozen refugees from Coloradas de la Virgen. It was difficult to draw them out-such was their customary shyness, not to mention their ingrained suspicion of outsiders-but as they spoke of their home, the picture that emerged was of a place truly gripped by terror. Only a handful of Tarahumara remained in Coloradas, the majority having relocated to larger Indian communities like Baborigame and Guachochi.

       One of the refugees, a young man in jeans and a cowboy hat, was Jesus Martinez Chaparro, the former president of the Coloradas ejido. (The ejido, or "common land," is a form of local self-government that was introduced after the Mexican Revolution, when large estates were awarded as communal property to campesinos.) Among other outrages, Chaparro alleged that the Fontes thugs had kidnapped his son, shot up his house, and taken his livestock and crops. Lately Chaparro had been hiding out in the forest, eating whenever his wife could bring him food. He did not want to share the fate of the previous ejido president, MartIn Torres, who Chaparro said had been murdered on March 28 by Fontes cowboys after he stood up to them for breaking into his house and threatening to rape his wife and molest his two-year-old niece. "If someone wants to be a leader of the indigenous people," Chaparro told me matter-of-factly, "they will kill him."

       The muted revelry of the thanksgiving dances lasted through the night, and when dawn broke, the bonfires had burned down to a few charred, smoldering logs. But the men were still shuffling in their lines, the tesgiiina brewers still tending their vats, the women still zoning in their shawls. A column of swirling dust-a soul in transit, according to Tarahumara belief-skipped across the brightening field.

       IF THE TARAHUMARA ARE AN UNUSUally reticent people, it is in large part the result of their traumatic contact with the outside world. First, in 1607, came the missionaries, bringing smallpox. The Tarahumara thought the deadly epidemic was spread by the ringing of church bells; one of the actual vectors may have been baptismal water. Typical of the civilizing endeavor was Father Joseph Neumann, who arrived in 1681 and spent 50 years among the Tarahumara without coming close to understanding them. "These Indians are by nature and disposition a sly and crafty folk," Neumann wrote in a memoir. "They are accomplished hypocrites, and as a rule, the ones who seem most virtuous should be considered the most wicked."

       While the padres wanted their souls, the miners, who struck silver south of the Sierra in 1631, wanted their bodies. At first the Tarahumara put up a desperate fight, but after a failed revolt in 1696, when the Spaniards posted the severed heads of 30 tribal leaders along the road to the village of Comcomorachic, their resistance became passive. They withdrew into themselves, tuning out the world of the chabochi, as they call Europeans, a term variously translated as "spider faces" or "whiskered ones."

       Then, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the loggers arrived, and they've never left. With gangs of conscripted Tarahumara providing the labor, by now all but 300,000 acres, or about 2 percent, of the oldgrowth forest has been felled, most of it without official permits or approval from the Tarahumara tribal councils.

       Before founding CASMAC in 1992, Bustillos had worked fora year with a communal timber company in the Sierra town of Caborachi. His time in the forests opened his eyes to the environmental degradation and human rights abuses that had been taking place for decades. Hastily built logging roads along the steep hillsides were washing away, silting up rivers and streams. At the same time, overcutting had reduced complex habitats to a virtual monoculture of uniformly aged pine, causing a number of species to go extinct-including the imperial woodpecker, the largest woodpecker on earth. Other animals in the Sierra had become critically endangered, such as the Mexican gray wolf, the jaguar, and the thick-billed parrot.
 

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