BEAUTIFUL LAND, UGLY ADDICTIONS

Heroin overdoses pervade rural New Mexico region that is often seen by
outsiders as synonymous with spiritual purity.

CHIMAYO, N.M.--For two centuries, the sick have come to an adobe church in
this village in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The fine, talcum-like dust
in the sanctuary's tiny chapel is said to possess miraculous powers.

Each year a few pilgrims leave their crutches propped up against the walls.

Now the town of Chimayo itself is suffering from an ailment that not even
"the Lourdes of America" has been able to cure. It is a sickness that has
shattered the lives of dozens of families here and many more in towns
peppered across the stark but beautiful valleys and mesas of northern New
Mexico.

Chimayo is the "heroin capital" of Rio Arriba County, a rural region of
34,000 people with one of the highest rates of drug overdoses in the United
States. In all, nearly 100 Rio Arriba County residents have overdosed in the
last half-decade, according to state officials, a death rate more than
triple the national average.

The spread of heroin and cocaine in northern New Mexico has reverberated
through the community like a series of biblical plagues, touching the lives
of many people beyond the small minority who use the drugs.

A series of drug-related crimes--ranging from the mundane and pathetic to
the horrific--has triggered both a crackdown by federal agents and a small
but growing protest movement against the state's Republican governor, Gary
Johnson, who has called for the legalization of drugs.

No one has been able, however, to stop the overdose deaths in Rio Arriba
County. At least 19 county residents died last year, all but one of them
male, most of them 30 or older.

'Mom, Mom, I'm Afraid'

Allen Sandoval, 36, succumbed to heroin last June, about five miles up the
road from the santuario at Chimayo. He left the world with several religious
medals and cards in his pockets, along with 13 cents in change.

Death surprised him outside his home, on the dusty ground of a town whose
bleak, narrow streets resemble those of an impoverished Latin American
village. A few hours before he died he used a pocketknife to carve his
initials in the tree that looms over his mother's front porch.

"He would say, 'Mom, mom, I'm afraid.

I don't want to die,' " said Olivama Sandoval, his mother. "But we couldn't
help him. He was so afraid of death, and look where he's at now."

Sandoval was laid to rest in June in the town cemetery, next to a friend who
died two months earlier, also of an overdose, his body discovered in his bed
by his mother.

Others have been found in their bathtubs, sitting in ice water, a fellow
addict's last-ditch attempt to shock a heart into beating again.

Many more have been dumped off at an emergency room in nearby Espanola.

Heroin use has been on the rise across the United States since the early
1990s. Emergency room admissions for heroin overdoses have doubled since
1991, with the most dramatic increases in overdoses in urban centers such as
Baltimore and Newark.

No one can say with certainty why drug addiction is so rampant in this
corner of the Southwest, a place of dramatic ochre and rust-colored vistas
that is often seen by outsiders as synonymous with spiritual purity.

Some speculate that the proximity to Mexico has brought the area an
especially potent mixture of the "black tar" heroin produced there.

The drug is easy to find in places such as Espanola and Cordova. A recent
study by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that the availability of heroin
in rural areas now matches that of big cities.

Nearly everyone agrees that the region's unrelenting poverty is a factor. In
overwhelmingly Mexican American Rio Arriba County, the poverty rate is about
30%, reflecting the century-long decline of northern New Mexico's
subsistence farmers.

Lauren Reichelt, director of health services for Rio Arriba County, said the
drug problems are spurred in part by "cultural dislocation and cultural
oppression. People are in pain."

An Epidemic in Pastoral America

The epidemic has reached its most intense proportions in the isolated
settlements in the region, in places such as Cordova (population 700), where
at least six residents have died of overdoses in the last few years.

The town's plaza, the site of a small church, is surrounded by dirt streets
barely wide enough for a car to squeeze through.

Rain has carved deep ruts into the roads, and a pair of gutted adobe
buildings loom nearby.

Several inebriated men, their reddened faces already numb by late morning,
greet a visitor. (County health officials say alcoholism is a significantly
more widespread problem than heroin use.)

William Trujillo, a slight man of 49 standing in a sour cloud of alcohol,
said he too had used heroin for a few years. "Don't ever mess around with
that kind of thing.

It kills."

Heroin, a sedative, soothes its users with a brief but powerful sense of
euphoria. It erases all discomfort of body and mind. It makes the weak feel
strong and the lonely feel loved.

Then its magic wears off--after minutes, or hours--leaving its users even
less able to face pain than before.

"For a long time heroin wasn't big around here," said Anthony Trujillo, a
church deacon in nearby Santa Fe. "All of a sudden, in the last few years,
it's the drug of choice. . . . I don't think there is anyone in Rio Arriba
County who has not lost a friend or a relative."

Men and women in their 50s with a lifetime of alcohol abuse behind them are
now hooked, as are teenagers bored with the predictable pace of a small
town.

Jonas Trujillo (no relation to the deacon) is a teenager from Chimayo who
recently spent three months using heroin. "People just see it as regular,"
said Trujillo, a young man with short-cropped hair and a severe, humorless
expression. A fervent evangelical pastor has helped him escape the drug, he
said. "The Lord made himself known to me. He showed me how the devil is
taking down the land."

A Rash of Crime Afflicts Region

Drug abuse has fed a wide variety of crimes across the state, police
officials say, with the crime rate increasing in New Mexico each year since
1993, bucking a nationwide trend.

A substitute teacher at Espanola Middle School was arrested in 1998 for
selling heroin outside the school grounds.

At least 1 in 4 homes in Chimayo is burglarized each year, according to the
New Mexico State Police.

Perhaps the most notorious drug-related crime in recent years was the 1998
carjacking and murder of 18-year-old Erik Sanchez, a standout student from
Espanola. Sanchez's captors took him to a bridge over the 600-foot-deep Rio
Grande gorge and threw him over the railing--it remains unclear whether he
was still alive.

The assailants, two men from Taos, allegedly wanted to sell his car for drug
money.

One pleaded guilty to the murder and is serving a life sentence; the other
is scheduled to go to trial this year.

Sanchez's mother, Donna Garcia, has since become a fixture at rallies staged
by the anti-drug movement here, which is also seeking expanded treatment
facilities for addicts.

At one gathering in January at the state capitol in Santa Fe, Garcia wore a
sweatshirt emblazoned with her son's photograph and the words, "My lost
treasure."

For law enforcement officials, the most violent crimes bear the hallmarks of
heroin and cocaine addiction as desperate addicts resort to ever more brazen
crimes to feed their habits.

"You think of heroin as an urban problem, but it's part of the fabric of
this community," said Capt. Quintin D. McShan of the state police. "We've
got art, landscape, scenery and good, honest, hard-working people.

We've got a lot of good things going on. And we also have heroin."

In September, federal DEA agents, assisting overmatched state police and
county sheriffs, descended on eight homes in Chimayo and nearby Santa Cruz
in an early-morning raid in which 31 people were arrested on suspicion of
distributing heroin and cocaine.

Capt. McShan said an increased police presence has helped lower the crime
rate slightly in Chimayo, where, for a time, dealers had set up open-air
drug bazaars on the highways.

The open drug sales are a thing of the past, but the burglaries continue.

"It's gone from being ridiculous to being just very bad," McShan said.
Robberies remain so common that "a lot of people don't even bother to report
them anymore."

Overdoses reported at local emergency rooms are also on the rise. Some
addicts switched to new drugs--taking a cocktail of Valium, alcohol and
antidepressants--or found new suppliers who sold them heroin of dubious
quality.

"When a person is addicted and they need a fix, they're not going to ask
what's in it," said Ben Tafoya, director of the Hoy Recovery Program in
Espanola. "And if they can't get ahold of heroin, they're going to use any
other drug."

The rate of death from overdoses in the county has remained steady since
1995, about 20 each year.

Six autopsy reports of men who died last year show a pattern consistent with
recent studies on heroin overdoses: All were longtime users who had also
ingested large amounts of alcohol and other depressants.

In the mostly dispassionate reports, filed by state medical examiners in
Albuquerque, there are also details that hint at lives marked by more than a
few tumultuous, violent twists.

The victims' bodies themselves carry the signs of the years of hard living
and self-abuse.

Autopsies Paint Tragic Picture

Peter Cordova, 34, was last seen alive several days before his body was
discovered in his Espanola home. The coroner noted a fresh puncture mark in
his left forearm and evidence that his heart and kidneys had been damaged by
alcoholism. Heroin is metabolized by the body into morphine, and traces of
that drug were found in Cordova's blood, along with Valium and other
prescription drugs, including amitriptyline, a powerful antidepressant.

Hours before his death, Genaro Trujillo, 54, had traveled to an Espanola
clinic for a dose of methadone.

He was last seen alive by his parents, snoring loudly on his bed. The
coroner found old rib fractures, not related to his death, and a prosthetic
eye.

Brian Romero, 27, left the world with a gallery of tattoos covering his
body, each described in detail by an especially assiduous medical examiner:
"a 12x4-inch tattoo of a woman and a dragon . . . a 2 1/2x1 1/2-inch tattoo
of a cross and a flower . . . a 5x4-inch tattoo of a dog with a baseball bat
. . . a 2 1/2x2 1/2-inch tattoo of a cross and the name 'Tracey' . . . "

Trujillo and Romero are both buried in Cordova's cemetery, a small plot of
land overlooking the town, with views of snow-capped mountains and a forest
thick with pinon and juniper trees.

In the circle of mourners at both funerals was their neighbor, Allen
Sandoval, who later died of his own heroin habit.

Olivama Sandoval, a retired state employee, traces her son's downward spiral
to the night when he was 19 years old and his girlfriend's father shot him.
A bullet passed through her son's forehead. "That shot messed him up. It
affected his brain.

He stayed like a little boy."

He collected Social Security payments and lived with his mother.

He started drinking and became something of a town punching bag, coming home
from the plaza with black eyes and cut lips. His mother would run out to
defend him.

Although she does not know exactly when he started using heroin, she does
remember vividly the night he confessed that he was addicted.

He fell to his knees at the foot of her bed and pleaded for help, a
29-year-old man sobbing like a baby.

"When things like this happen, you don't know who to blame.

One day I told him, 'Why are you doing this to me? Since I found out you're
doing drugs you don't know how my heart broke and it's never, ever mended.'
Not a day went by when I didn't think, 'Is he going to be alive in the
morning?' "

After at least seven years on heroin, in and out of rehab five times,
Sandoval was once again on the waiting list for a clinic in Albuquerque when
he overdosed and died.

His graveside service was in the old, rural style of funerals here, ending
with a dozen neighbors and relatives taking shovels to cover his coffin with
dry earth, building a mound they covered with votive candles and silk
flowers. In the small, 100-year-old brick house where Olivama Sandoval still
lives, there are nights when she feels her son's presence. "I hear him
knocking, I hear his voice calling, 'Mom!'