Crossing La Linea




Rancho Norte, Sierra Taramuhara.  

 



































Sierra Taramuhara, Chihuahua, Mexico-
About five days after leaving the United States, I found myself alone on a remote ranch in the northern mountains of Chihuahua, with a loaded shotgun under my bed. 

The ranch (which I will call Rancho Norte in this blog) is high in the Sierra Taramuhara.  The Sierra Taramuhara is a vast jumble of ridges and deep gorges, crossed by a complex and twisting system of rivers.  The hills are deeply forested with pines at the higher elevations and oaks lower down.  There are only two roads that cross this mighty range that stretches from the Mexico-US border near Arizona and New Mexico to Jalisco, halfway down the country.  Remnant pockets of wolves inhabit the most remote regions of the range.  The ranch where I was headed is between 15 and 20 miles from the nearest tiny town, and is was only on the outskirts of the vast wilderness of the range.

The history of the Sierra Taramuhara is as rough as its geography.  It got its name from,  the Taramuhara Indians who fled into the canyons of the mountains to escape the bloody conquest of the Spaniards (more about the Taramuharas in a following blog).  The first rumblings of the Revolution of 1910 were in nearby Tomóchic, when in 1891 a group of unhappy Chihuahuans revolted against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.  In bloody battles in the rough terrain, the rebels continually wiped out the soldiers sent to quell the rebellion, until they were crushed by an entire army in 1892.  The cry of Poncho Villa and his men in the 1910 revolution was ¡viva Tomóchic!  What´s more, for the last century and a half this was Apache terrain, after the Apaches were driven south out of the US.  Battles with Apaches were fought very near the Rancho Norte as late as World War II. 

And now it is the terrain of the narcotraficantes running drugs northward to supply the ceaseless market demands of the U.S.  The area I was in is in the loosely defined battlefront, called La Linea, between the Cartel Juarez of Ciudad Juarez and the Sinaloa men of Chapo Guzman.  On a normal spring day a few months before I arrived, Sinaloa men crossed La Linea, drove into the town nearest Norte, executed the leaders of the rival cartel, and shot up the office of the municipal president.  When I was there, the secretary of the president was carrying out the duties of the president who had fled, as no one wanted to take his place.


The very beginning of the road to Rancho Norte.



I arrived in this town straight from crossing the border, with only a day's stop over in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora with relatives of friends of my parents.  I had arranged by email to come work on this ranch and we established a meeting time and place.  But the bus I took from Obregón was hours late, and I had missed my pickup appointment.  So I spent the night in town and set out the next day to walk the 15 to 20 miles to the ranch.  I had only a vague idea of where the ranch was from the descriptions of a cowboy I met in a little store in town. 

I soon was walking down a faint two-track path, overgrown with grass and choked with rocks.  The air was clean and dead still.  It had hailed violently the afternoon before, and the ice was mounded in the gullies and depressions.  Limpid streams slid across sandstone beds in every small arroyo and their banks were lush with a pungent orange flowers.  At high points I could see ridge upon ridge, blue in the air moist from yesterdays rain steaming up from the wet ground to collect again into violent thunderheads.

Farther down the road to Nopal.

After several hours on this track, I rounded the bend to see two men mounted on horses, wearing military uniforms, with semi-automatic rifles slung at ready across their laps.  They had already seen me.  I made sure my hands were visible and stopped in my tracks. 

¨Buenos dias,¨ I called.

They reigned in their horses.  They said something I didn´t understand.  I decided that if there was any danger, diplomacy was my best option, so I came closer to try to engage them in dialogue. I didn´t catch most of what they said as my Spanish was still quite rusty.  But I found out that they were stationed at the ranch, on ranch horses, and they knew that the people at the ranch had been looking for me.

I continued.  At least I was on the right path.  I descended into the ranch a couple hours later, and passed the band of soldiers of about 30 soldiers with their tattered camp beside the river.  I greeted them and they eagerly showed me where to wade across the river to hike up the bluff to the ranch buildings.  As I took off my shoes I asked them if they were here protecting the ranch.  They gave me a strange look.  I asked them how long they were here.  They said, ¨Until we receive orders to move on.¨  A group of them were in the shade of a nearby pine, oiling their weapons.

When I entered the ranch I was greeted by a young man my age from Colorado, Michael, and the Mexican hand Luis and his wife Sandra and three young daughters. Michael began to fill me in on what was happening on the ranch as he showed me around the ranch buildings.  The owners would not be around for another two weeks, he told me.  We went onto the roof, where we could see the soldiers.  Michael nodded toward them.

¨They are camped out here to move the local narcos´weed.¨

¨How do you know?¨

¨Luis and I were in town the other day and the commander was drunk and told us. They´ve been coming up here a lot, using our computer, our horses, borrowing my truck.  What can I say?¨

We were silent for a while.

¨Here come with me,¨he said.

He took me into the back room and showed me a large animal cracker bag bulging like an overstuffed pillow.  "Mota,"he said.  ¨They gave it to us as 'a small gift' after I lent them my truck." He set down the basketball-sized bundle.

All night trucks came and went on the far bank of the river.  We slept little.  We held conference in the stone kitchen.

"We´ve got to get out of here," said Michael.  'I´m loading up first thing tomorrow."

Luis looked amused at our gringo worry.  His youngest baby was in its little cradle on the table and he was rocking it with a kitchen knife.  The bag of marijuana was on the table next to the crib.  "If they come for us, first I will shoot my family and then myself so they don´t torture us.

Michael was on edge. "Not funny Luis."

"He´s not joking," said Sandra.

Me cramped in the back off the truck,
loopy from the fumes of the gas can.

We got up the next morning and left as swiftly as possible, all seven of us in Michael's truck.  The far bank was deserted. The soldiers had moved on. But Michael still drove with a lead foot out the incredibly rough road. When we reached Luis' hometown, Michael dropped us off and then headed straight on to the border, only stopping for gas. I stayed the night with Luis. 

But in the wee hours of the morning the ranch owner arrived, anxious to sort out the situation, and 15 minutes later he and I were back on the road to Rancho Norte.  When we got to the ranch there was no trace of the soldiers. We reasoned that the marijuana harvest was now over, and there were no more goods to move through.  The owner had other business to take care of, so he left almost as soon as he had come.  First, though, he loaded a shotgun with four cartridges, cocked it, turned on the safety, and put it under my bed.

And then I was alone on the ranch.