DRUG GANGS DEVASTATE INDIAN VILLAGES IN BAJA CALIFORNIA

SANTA CATARINA, Mexico -- After five centuries of killing and pestilence
that began with the Spanish conquest, only a few hundred of Baja
California's indigenous people are left alive. And now they are being
hunted down and killed by drug traffickers. The violence began two years
ago when the leader of an indigenous village that resisted traffickers'
efforts to take over communal lands for drug cultivation was gunned down,
along with another Indian, in an ambush along a rural road.

While some have resisted, other Indians have been seduced by the quick
fortunes that can reward those who manage desert airstrips or offer other
services to the drug cartels. And that has resulted in a string of killings
in the Indian communities that cling to the arid hills 60 miles south of
the California border.

The violence took on horrifying new dimensions last week when two entire
families of Indians from the Pai-Pai ethnic group, along with a household
of neighbors, were dragged from their homes and shot to death in a driveway
in Ensenada, a coastal city to which some Indians have migrated. It was
Mexico's worst incident of drug-related bloodshed in memory.

"We're not many Pai-Pai, and this has devastated our community," said
Armando Gonzalez, the commissioner of communal lands in Santa Catarina,
waving across the horizon of wooden huts and cactus that make up this
desert hamlet where seven of the massacre victims were buried Sunday. "For
us there's never been anything so calamitous."

Few institutions or communities in Mexico are being spared the effects of
the multibillion-dollar drug industry, and even the most remote indigenous
communities are no exception.

"The traffickers are taking advantage of the traditional conflicts that
have plagued these communities, and that is undermining the fragile sense
of cohesion that exists," said Everardo Garduno Ruiz, a graduate student at
Arizona State University who wrote a book about Baja California's
indigenous communities.

The Jesuit missionaries who explored Baja California in the 16th century
estimated the native population at 50,000. The Catholic Church persecuted
the Pai-Pai and speakers of four other indigenous languages, labeling their
traditional healers as pagans. The Indians resisted all efforts to
transform them into sedentary farmers until the 1930s, when the government
finally forced them onto communal lands. Today only about 1,000 Baja
California natives are left, Garduno said.

Until recently, tuberculosis, alcoholism and emigration were among the main
causes of decline, but the disintegration quickened a decade ago when drug
traffickers began to muscle in on the communities.

San Isidoro, a Pai-Pai village 30 miles southeast of Santa Catarina, has
nearly disappeared since 1987, when the government loosened restrictions on
the sale of communal properties and traffickers and their representatives
began to buy the Pai-Pai's lands. Many of San Isidoro's Pai-Pai have moved
into the nearby town of Valle de Trinidad.

Nonetheless, in 1996 San Isidoro still had Marcelino Murillo Alvarez, a Pai
speaker, as its community land commissioner. After the army found marijuana
plantations around the village that year, Murillo told the authorities that
he was willing to sign a document swearing that he and other Pai-Pai were
uninvolved in the drug cultivation, Murillo's brother Federico said in an
interview.

Weeks later, on May 29, 1996, gunmen blocked Marcelino's car and shot him
to death along with a passenger, Federico said. On May 18 of this year,
there was a killing near Valle de Trinidad. Ramon Valenzuela, the president
of the vigilance council of another, smaller group of indigenous people
known as the Kiliwa, was gunned down along a farm road. A Valle de Trinidad
police official, Roberto Gonzalez, said none of the murders had been solved.

"The Valle de Trinidad has turned into a valley of death," Federico Murillo
said.

The killings of the Indians near Trinidad have attracted renewed attention
since the drug-related massacre of 18 men, women and children on Sept. 17
near Ensenada. Police said after that crime that the target had been Fermin
Castro, 38, a Pai-Pai from Santa Catarina who was shot during the attack
and is in a coma. He grew wealthy in the last decade, ostensibly as the
owner of a rodeo production company. Police said Castro had headed a small
trafficking organization.

The Ensenada killings have also caused people in Santa Catarina to rethink
their views on another spectacular killing last year. To the horror of
spectators at a rodeo in May 1997 that Castro produced near Santa Catarina,
a gunman on horseback galloped up to Eufemio Sandoval, the Pai-Pai Indian
who worked for Castro as the rodeo announcer, shot Sandoval to death at
point-blank range, rode off to a waiting jeep and escaped into the desert.

People here originally viewed Sandoval's killing as part of a longtime
family vendetta. But two people said they now believed that it had been
related to Castro's narcotics activities.

Scores of Pai-Pai attended two memorial services, one last Saturday in El
Sauzal, the Ensenada suburb where the Sept. 17 massacre took place, and the
other on Sunday in Santa Catarina's cemetery. There, five of the seven dead
were children aged 6 to 13. But no one spoke.

"I guess nobody could find the words to express their feelings about this,"
said Cruz Lopez Ochurte, a villager.

Checked-by: Richard Lake