CANNABIS IS KING IN THIS REMOTE MEXICAN CORNER

'It's the best hidden sweatshop industry south of the border,' a social
worker says.

LA SIERRA DE DURANGO, Mexico - The three Indian men standing by the trail
were border guards of sorts.

Ordering passing strangers to a halt, they stepped forward to ask for
identity papers - anything with a photograph would do. They poked through
baggage with their rough farmers' hands. They inquired politely about the
purpose and duration of the visit. And, apparently satisfied, they ticked
off the single customs regulation.

"If you want to buy mota, the limit is four or five kilos," said the
leader, a man with a Aztec face and an AR-15 assault rile slung over his
shoulder. He nudged his chin at the lush marijuana plantations checkering
the nearby hillsides. "All the rest is reserved for a buyer in Durango
City."

Welcome to what could be called the Independent Republic of Dope, a remote
corner of Mexico's western cordillera where cannabis is king and where its
subjects - a couple hundred impoverished Tepehuan Indians - live and toil
among the fields of the cartels, virtually autonomous from the central
government.

The time-honored job of marijuana farming is nothing new in Mexico, of
course. For years, Mexican traffickers have supplied more than two-thirds
of all the drug smuggled into the United States.

But here, some 450 miles south of the border in the oak-studded mesas of
Durango state, the drug subculture has achieved a certain grim status more
often associated with the lawless poppy fields of Afghanistan or the
coca-growing hinterlands of Bolivia. No longer a clandestine sideline,
marijuana has become the main pillar of the local economy. The weedy
shrubs - chopped, dried and pressed into bricks - even serve as currency:
A good horse costs about 30 pounds.

"You take our marijuana away, and we'll either starve or move away to the
cities," said a Tepehuan elder who, like most people in the isolated
region, asked not to be identified. "We've been growing it for 20 years.
Eighty percent of the families live off it."

On a recent visit to the drug zone, that estimate seemed an understatement.

Marijuana grew everywhere - flourishing beside horse trails and sprouting
brazenly in household gardens. Mule trains loaded with colas, the "tails"
or seedstalks of the plats, threaded past picturesque adobe farmsteads, the
mule drivers waving jovially. Boys puffed on joints during breaks from
hoeing the fields. And sandaled Tepehuan women pickled marijuana leaves in
their kitchens to use as a homemade liniment.

"It's good for arthritis," one of them said.

That the marijuana industry could be so blatant is a testament to the power
of Durango's cartels. Indian growers told how their urban bosses tipped
them off long before the occasional army patrols skirted the mostly
roadless region. When overzealous soldiers cut trenches across a local drug
airstrip last year, the Tepehuans quietly began filling in the holes for
landings and digging them out again after takeoffs.

In colonial times, such shrewd tactics made the Tepehuans a feared foe
among the Spanish invaders. Yet today, even a few hardened dope growers are
unsettled by the current course of events.

"We used to be pretty good cowboys, but nobody raises cattle anymore - too
much work," lamented Javier, a 30-year-old marijuana grower who lives on a
canyon rim not for its spectacular scenery but because it commands a
strategic view of all the mountain passes within 20 miles. "We're spoiled.
It's just too hard for us to turn down a little plot of weeds that can
bring 300 pesos a kilo," about $17 a pound.

After helping pump millions into the pockets of urban traffickers, most of
the area's Indians still live in barren mud huts with dirt floors. Javier's
family, for example, subsists mainly on a diet of watery bowls of beans.

Two of his three children remain shoeless. His most expensive possession is
his gun, a new .45-caliber automatic.

"It's the best-hidden sweat-shop industry south of the border," said Edwin
Bustillos, a social worker whose organization, the Sierra Madre Advisory
Council, is struggling to keep the druglords out of Tepehuan territory in,
neighboring Chihuahua state. "They spend almost all their earnings on
buying the food they once grew themselves. What's left over goes for
tequila."

Bustillos complained that the toll that drugs have exacted on the
impoverished people who do the grunt work for traffickers has been a blind
spot for policy-makers on both sides of the border.

Yet for the denizens of Durango's lawless mountains, that ignorance - and
contempt - is mutual. Told that the U.S. Congress would be voting soon on
whether to recertify Mexico as a reliable drug-fighting ally, Javier hooted
derisively.

"It's a good thing we're not part of Mexico," he said, sweeping an arm over
a vista where the drug fields seemed to go on forever.