ECONOMICS ENTICE MEXICAN NATIONALS TO TOIL IN POT PLOTS

It's the green that draws people to spend months toiling in the north
state's back corners during its blistering summers.

Not the green of the marijuana they're growing, but the green of the
cash they stand to reap when they bring in the harvest.

The payoff can be as much as $30,000 for four months of work, said
Alan Foster, a special agent with the National Park Service who is
tackling the pot garden problem in Whiskeytown National Recreation Area.

"That's really big money," he said.

Those farming pot gardens are often Mexican nationals working in the
United States illegally. This year, 80 percent of those arrested for
marijuana cultivation in Tehama County were Mexicans, although the
rate is usually 50 percent, according to the Tehama County Sheriff's
Department.

The money Mexicans can make growing marijuana far exceeds what they
can make working in the fields or at other jobs, said officials
raiding north state gardens. Migrant farmworkers usually earn about
$12,500 a year, according to a survey of farmworkers by the U.S.
Department of Labor, conducted in fiscal 2001 and 2002.

It was economics that persuaded Eloisis Rosas Jarquin, 21, to change
his vocation from landscaping in Santa Rosa to tending a marijuana
garden in Tehama County.

"It was much lower money," Jarquin said in Spanish of the landscaping work.

But Jarquin, who spoke with the Record Searchlight at the Tehama
County Jail on Oct. 26 and 31, said he didn't know exactly how much
he was to be paid for his time in the marijuana garden. He was only
told it would be more.

Jarquin was one of four men found by Tehama County sheriff's deputies
Oct. 3 in a 1,200-plant pot garden nestled in the pines of the Coast
Range foothills. All the men ran into the forest that surrounded the
garden and Jarquin was the only one caught and arrested.

He was transferred earlier this month to Sacramento County's main
jail in Sacramento, where he is being held without bail on federal
marijuana cultivation charges that could send him to prison for 15
years or more.

A Mexican national, Jarquin said he first got to the U.S. in 2003 by
walking across "la frontera," or the border, near Mexicali, Mexico.
The walk through the desert took eight hours. He has returned to
Mexico to visit his family once since then and had plans to go back next year.

The man who recruited Jarquin for work in the marijuana garden was a
Latino who spoke Spanish. He picked up Jarquin and two other workers
at a place in Santa Rosa where migrant workers wait for job offers.
The man didn't say exactly what the work was when he picked up
Jarquin; he said it would be good pay and a half-hour away from Santa Rosa.

The drive turned out to be more than four hours, which worried
Jarquin, but he said he had no choice but to go to work.

The money he had hoped to earn was for his "papas," or parents, who
live "en un rancho muy pobre," on a very poor ranch, in the Mexican
state of Oaxaca, Jarquin said. Since he has been in jail, he hasn't
been in contact with his family, including an aunt in Santa Rosa with
whom he had lived.

He had been at the garden eight days and he didn't know the other
three men, Jarquin said. It was the first time, he said, he had been
in a marijuana garden. He said he didn't try any of the product
because he doesn't like it.

"No est bien para salud," he said, which means, "It's not good for
(your) health."

The nights in the garden were cold and the food not as good as his
aunt's cooking, Jarquin said. He saw wild animals, including a number of bears.

Tucked into a drainage about one-third of a mile from a forest road,
the garden was protected from rodents -- which like to nibble at pot
plants -- by a small fence on one side and mouse traps hidden in the
dirt throughout.

A hunter spotted the garden in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in
late September and called the sheriff's department. A week later a
half-dozen deputies and a U.S. Forest Service special agent raided
the garden, hauling in Jarquin along with the 1,200 plants.

Now Jarquin, who said he wants to get back to Mexico, is left
wondering what will happen to him next.

He'll find out after his trial in federal court. He'll likely be
deported to Mexico, but only after serving time in prison if he is convicted.