CAUGHT IN BAJA'S DARK SIDE

Indians Seduced By Mexico's Bloody Drug Cartels

Santa Catarina, Mexico

In a dusty cemetery above the desert plain, seven fresh stone mounds
symbolize the notoriety that so abruptly has been visited on this
remote village of indigenous Baja Californians.

The simple graves - including those of five children ages 4 to 13 -
are but one link between tiny Santa Catarina and the recent
execution-style slaughter of 18 people 1 1/2 hours away near the port
city of Ensenada.

The massacre, some of whose victims grew up in this settlement of 250
or so Pai Pal Indians, has cast a spotlight on the community amid
suspicions that Baja California's bustling drug trade is sweeping up
the handful of indigenous tribes who inhabit a landscape as
picturesque as it is well-located for sneaking narcotics 70 miles,
north to the U.S. border .

For the little-known Pal Pai -who lack running water and electricity
but whose language and ways are grudgingly surrendering to modernity -
the September 17 massacre has drawn bewildering visits from reporters
and prompted nettlesome questions about drugs in a boulder-strewn
expanse of melon patches and cattle ranches in the isolated interior
of northern Baja.

Mexican authorities have been tight-lipped about their investigation
into the killings, but say the motive might have been "problems"
between some of the small drug-running gangs that have carved out
clandestine airports and marijuana plantations far from the gaze of
anti-narcotics squads.

One of those drug gangs was allegedly headed by Fermin Castro, a
native Pal Pai who ran the Santa Catarina school before moving on to
become a prominent rodeo promoter around Ensenada. Castro, 38,
believed to be the primary target of the assault, died after weeks in
a coma.

The Pai Pai community's leader says outsiders have persuaded or
pressured impoverished locals into selling land or letting them grow
marijuana.

"People come here to convince the Indians to start growing other
crops," said traditional chief Juan Albaez Higuera, 76. "They start
paying for or this and giving money for that. And a lot of people who
are needy go with them to work ... doing whatever narcos do.

"It's not good for us," he said.

Other residents point to their humble living conditions as proof that
there are no lucrative drug ties.

"If there were drugs like they say on the news, the people would be
living better here," said Pascacia Ochurte, 40, who sells sacks of
corn and beans. She fingered a pile of bean plants drying outside her
house on the village's edge. "If I were doing that, I wouldn't be
struggling like this."

Mexican authorities said after the mass killing that Castro headed a
group of small-time operators, or "bajadores," that paid a top
lieutenant in the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix cartel for the right to
smuggle drugs north to the United States. Army General Jose Luis
Chavez Garcia, the top federal prosecutor in Baja, said the bands use
remote landing strips and back roads to shuttle shipments from the
Gulf of California to the Pacific Ocean.

Even residents who dispute reports of drug smuggling concede that they
know little of Castro's activities since he left town several years
ago.

Albaez; said evidence of a drug trade in the region, generally
referred to as the Valle de Trinidad, began appearing a few years ago.
The sound of small aircraft punctuates the desert stillness, and
Albaez said military patrols are everpresent.

Some say that the povertyplagued villagers are easy marks' for
outsiders dedicated to the narcotics trade. They also voice suspicions
about signs of affluence they have seen around town.

"Those people are poor, Now lately they bring in nice cars. money's
coming in, they dress well and all those things," said Pedro
Espindola, who runs a little store at the highway turnoff to Santa
Catarina and heads a public-safety committee in a nearby community.

Indeed, Santa Catarina seems a jumble of contrasts. Squat shacks amid
the boulders lack indoor plumbing, but several boast satellite dishes
and televisions, powered by car batteries.

Santa Catarina was an ancient stopover for nomadic Pai Pai, who until
this century shuttled from the mountains of the Baja interior to the
coast and back as the seasons - and food prospects - changed, said
anthropologist Mike Wilken, who directs the Ensenadabased Native
Cultures Institute and has traveled among indigenous groups in Baja
for nearly 20 years.

The Pai Pai are one of only four indigenous tribes in Baja California
to survive the Spanish conquest, disease and diaspora. Jesuit
missionaries who traversed the region in the 16th century estimated
that Baja was home to some 50,000 indigenous people. The remaining
ethnic groups - the Kaliwi, Kumiai and Cucapa - add up to no more than
800, some experts say. A fifth group calling itself Cochimi is part of
the Kumiai, Wilken said. All live in northern Baja.

Today, Pai Pal parents speak their traditional language at home but
Spanish is the "lingua franca" in the classroom. Threads of Pai Pai
religion, driven underground by Catholic missionaries, have blended
into Christian beliefs.

Social and medical problems from alcoholism to tuberculosis are
stubborn, and Pai Pai leaders and residents bemoan a lack of work and
basic services. The town's signature products are clay pots and
baskets crafted by village women and shipped to market in Ensenada or
sold to tourists who ,brave the six-mile drive up a bumpy dirt road.

Young men leave town as soon as they are old enough to work, taking
jobs as ranch hands elsewhere in the region or moving to Ensenada. The
phenomenon creates the odd sense that Santa Catarina is missing a
generation, that it is peopled only by children and the elderly.

"There's no work. There's no nothing. It's very isolated," said 66
year-old Teresa Castro, who on a recent afternoon hand-shaped clay
pots in a thatch shed next to her house.

Santa Catarina found itself in the glare of publicity after ~ unknown
gunmen assaulted Fermin Castro's ranch compound in the Ensenada suburb
of El Sauzal. Members of three families, two of them Pal Pal, who
lived in the compound were yanked from their beds, ordered to he face
down on a concrete patio and sprayed with gunfire.

Santa Catarina's residents have reacted to the mass killing with a
stoic, but stunned, sadness. Squeezed over the centuries by conquest,
revolution and nature's caprice, denizens of rural Baja find
themselves in a vise of a new sort.

Checked-by: Patrick Henry