THE CURSE OF CHIMAYO

NM Town, Long Held In Deadly Grip Of Heroin, Struggles To Break Free

CHIMAYO, N.M. - Just 45 minutes from the glitz of Santa Fe sits the village
of Chimayo, a collection of 18th century adobe homes, graced with the Old
World stained glass and sculpture.

It is also a place, authorities say, afflicted with a modern-day curse: At
least one in every four people in the community of 4,000 is a black tar
heroin addict. Since 1995, more than 90 people have died of drug overdoses.

More recently, it is also a place where residents say they are fighting
back, attempting to retake the community and its glory with the help of
federal and state law enforcement - something they had sought for years.

"I suppose there's no place like it on earth," said Sue Ellen Strale, a
nationally known sculptor. "You live in this beautifully pure place, and a
low-rider passes you slowly on the road and the driver pretends to shoot
you. You look in his eyes and see pure evil.

"But Chimayo is also a story of empowerment," she added with a nod. "Oh,
yes. We're going to take it back."

More than six months ago federal agents came to town. SWAT teams from the
state, the Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI swooped through Chimayo
on Sept. 29. They hauled away 31 members from the four entrenched families
controlling the black tar heroin trade in the Espanola valley. In October,
23 more were arrested.

In February, five men entered guilty pleas to federal drug charges.

"In the federal system, we can keep people from bonding out if we
successfully argue they are an ongoing danger to the community," said
Assistant U.S. Attorney Chuck Barth. "That's what we have done in Chimayo."

Authorities also took to the roads, throwing up more than 40 roadblocks in
the area between August and October - preceding the mass arrests.

"We did it mainly just to show the flag, you know, just to show everyone we
were there," said State Police Capt. Quentin McShan, who also noticed that
the public for the first time seemed receptive.

"When we started the roadblocks we actually had people thanking us for
stopping them," he said. "Ten years ago, we might have been run out of
town."

Severe Consequences

The volume of drugs described in federal court documents would not
ordinarily have merited federal attention, said Mr. Barth, but the
consequences of the heavily concentrated drug use did.

In 1999, there were 114 burglaries - or one in four homes. There were nine
homicides, several of them gruesome, in Chimayo and neighboring Espanola,
population 11,000.

According to Justice Department statistics, the national average is 8.2
homicides per 100,000 people and 418 burglaries per 100,000.

In the last nine months, 639 people have been hospitalized for nonfatal drug
overdoses.

Tradition

The "black path" of Chimayo, as residents call it, is generational - going
back at least to the 1950s. Officials say many of Chimayo's addicts are
"functional" - they are teachers, grocery clerks or artists versed in the
old ways of weaving and woodcarving specific to the Espanola Valley.

Based on arrests, hospital admissions, deaths and informant activity, police
think that about one in every four people in their teens or older is a
heroin user.

The figures don't quantify the fear in Chimayo, where children walking to
school stubbed their toes on discarded syringes and adult residents dreaded
the threatening, warning glares from those dealing and using heroin.

Ms. Strale is a member of the residents' Chimayo Crime Prevention
Organization, a group of volunteers that began "summit meetings" three years
ago, inviting government officials to see the community's plight.

In March, U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., attended a meeting in Espanola,
where doctors, community leaders and the group's president, Bruce
Richardson, gave him an earful.

"He'd [Mr. Richardson] brought this big, industrial-type pickling jar with
him," Ms. Strale said. "I don't think he intended to use it, but at one
point he just pulled it out from under the table." He put it before the
senator and his staff.

"It was full of syringes he'd picked up from his property bordering the
river, and they were all floating in this filthy river water. The room just
went numb. . . ."

Federal Action

Mr. Domenici went to Attorney General Janet Reno. Within weeks, Chimayo came
under the jurisdiction of the Organized Crime/Drug Enforcement Task Force
and was designated a "High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area." North Texas
(including the Dallas-Fort Worth region), Houston, South Texas and West
Texas also share the "High Intensity" designation.

New federal funds soon came to the area. Additionally, the U.S. Department
of Health provided a $1 million grant for a rehabilitation program, now in
its fledgling stages.

"It's very difficult to get those designations," said Albuquerque DEA chief
William Hansen. "Almost impossible. And I'm just glad we [the DEA] were
already on top of the situation, having been briefed by the state police
before all the funding came down. It might have been embarrassing if we'd
never heard of Chimayo before."

Few people outside New Mexico have heard of Chimayo, although it is
considered one of the oldest European settlements in the United States.
Various tribes populated the valley before the Spanish arrived in the late
1500s. It was settled by Spanish colonists by 1700.

Historians believe that the Spaniards first used the spot as a garrison
prison, possibly establishing the area's criminal undercurrent in the
following centuries.

The drug took hold in the 1950s for unknown reasons - "I don't know why,
nobody knows why," Capt. McShan said. Authorities noticed it showing up in
arrest reports and hospital admissions.

"Every region has its drug of choice," Capt. McShan said. "In Taos, it's
cocaine. Black tar heroin just became part of the fiber of this community."

Response

Law enforcement reaction had been slow.

"We needed the feds," Capt. McShan said. "Our ability to influence the
system at that level was limited. Because Chimayo lies in two counties there
were jurisdictional disputes. Also, everyone knew each other - judges,
lawyers, cops and corrections people."

Moreover, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Barth, "Rural New Mexico is woefully
underfunded in the law enforcement department. These people were getting
arrested. They just bonded out before the ink was dry.

"I think the system there was just overwhelmed with the magnitude of the
problem."

Mr. Domenici's Washington spokeswoman, Sarah Echols, said the senator acted
as soon as he became aware of the problem.

"New Mexico is a border state, and drugs have always been an issue. The
senator took action as soon as the seriousness of the problem was brought to
his attention by the media and his constituents," she said.

Carnage

The Rev. Casimiro Roca came to Chimayo in 1954 as priest of El Santuario de
Chimayo. The 83-year-old, 4-foot-6-inch priest is retired now but still
troops down to the old church every day in his trademark French beret with
the natty sweater and jacket combination over his collar.

He also still performs funerals, though. He's performed dozens over the
decades. Arresting people doesn't seem to affect the carnage. There were two
deaths just after the arrests - caused when addicts who couldn't buy their
fixes turned to a lethal substitute mixture to stave off withdrawal.

"This is a mess," Father Roca said. "This makes me suffer terribly. I never
knew how powerful these drugs were - that young people give their lives to
them."

Father Roca buried best friends who died within days of each other last
June. Allen Sandoval, 36, attended the June 2 rosary of his friend, Brian
Romero, 27, who had died of a heroin overdose. On June 3, Mr. Sandoval was
found dead, also of an overdose.

"I feel so sad," Father Roca says, "to see all the beautiful children die."

Shawna Chavez and her husband, Patricio, own Chavez's Artwork and Retablo
Shop, one of dozens of small art stores dotting the old roads.

She specializes in tin work, wood carvings, pottery and chili. When she
hears the shop bell ring, she comes walking from an old adobe house nearby,
past several low-riders, parked and dusty.

She chats enthusiastically about the history of the region, the beauty of
the Sangre de Cristo mountains and the story behind each piece in her shop.

She does not miss a beat when she explains how her own father died of a
heroin overdose, one brother is serving 14 years for drug sales, another is
in his third rehab try and a sister has disappeared.

"I don't know why I never got involved with it," she said. "Perhaps because
my grandmother hated it so much."

"You could walk into any shop in town and hear a similar story," Capt.
McShan said. "There's nobody in this place who doesn't know a heroin
addict."

Optimism

Despite Father Roca's pronouncement that "he was going to die this year
because people are making me nuts," even he is now optimistic.

"Now we are getting some attention from outside and that was critical," he
said.

Ms. Strale said her neighbors, whose property borders that of suspected drug
dealers, are allowing their children to play outside unsupervised for the
first time.

"We are all over this place," the DEA's Hansen said. "And we are going to
stay all over this place."