Huicholes Archive

Mexico City to Huicholes: “You are not alone”

By
Tracy Barnett
Published: October 28, 2011Posted in: Featured, WhyTags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Mexico City to Huicholes: “You are not alone”

By Tracy L. Barnett
for The Esperanza Project

MEXICO CITY – Led by a vanguard of more than 250 Wixarika elders, women, men and children in their colorful traditional dress, a colorful river of marchers filled the grand Reforma Avenue of Mexico City for four hours yesterday, ending at the residence of President Felipe Calderón.

“You are not alone! You are not alone!” chanted the marchers, some of whom had formed a protective human chain encircling the indigenous representatives as they prepared to deliver their petition to the nation’s highest authority: Save Wirikuta, the Sacred Heart of Mexico.

It was the culmination of two days of events designed to draw attention to mining and agroindustrial projects that threaten the cultural survival of one of the world’s best-preserved living pre-Hispanic cultures: the Wixarika people, better known by the Spanish name of Huicholes. Two massive mining projects have been proposed for the Wixarika’s most sacred site, and a plague of industrial tomato growers have razed thousands of hectares of fragile desert habitat in the UNESCO-recognized, state-protected Wirikuta Ecological and Cultural Reserve.

Traditional authorities from each of the eight communities represented by the march were allowed to enter the presidential complex, heavily guarded by federal police in riot gear, in order to present a letter to authorities. It was the third such letter asking Calderon to rescind the 22 concessions granted to the Canadian transnational First Majestic Silver Corp. Until now, there has been no response. The hope was that with so many eyes upon the delegation’s demands, this time would be different. Presidential representatives promised an answer within a week.

“Felipe! entiende! Wirikuta no se vende – (Felipe [Calderon], Understand! Wirikuta is not for sale),” chanted the crowd as they approached the Mexican counterpart to the White House. Plumes of smoke rose into the air from the copal burning in ceremonial censors along with chants of “Wirikuta no se vende! Se ama y se defiende! (Wirikuta is not to sell; it is to love and defend).”



Participants made their way to the front of the crowd to affix their colorful Huichol Eyes of God to the gates of the presidential complex, as feather-headdressed Aztec dancers beat a rhythm to the chants with their drums and ayoyotes, and members of the Triqui tribes, Red Road and other indigenous groups and dozens of environmental and human rights groups joined the throng with banners. The marchers made it clear that the site is sacred not only to the Wixarika but to other indigenous groups and to thousands of non-indigenous Mexicans and internationals who believe the Mountains of Catorce and the desert at their feet is one of the most important spiritual centers in the world.

Events began on Wednesday with a press conference in which intellectuals, artists and other leaders in the civil society expressed their support for the mobilization and the Wixarika delegation. Actor Daniel Giménez Cacho thanked the delgates, saying “they are teaching us to defend our house and what is ours.” In previous days, Giménez Cacho was one of dozens of Mexican actors and film personalities who signed a letter in support of the mobilization, including Gael Garcia Bernal. Top musical stars like Manu Chao and Aterciopelados have promised support, and last week, Ruben Albarran of Café Tacuba, Roco and Moyenei from Sonidero Meztizo and other artists held a press conference for Wirikuta. Roco and Moyenei accompanied the entire processon on a double-decker bus-turned-sound system, alternately broadcasting music and calls of encouragement to the crowd; at one point a pair of traditional Wixarika fiddlers played their haunting music to cheers from the crowd. The entire event culminated in a high-energy concert at the Museum of Anthropology, led by Roco and Moyenei.

The delegation was received at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the National School of Anthropology and History with open arms, food and one of two concerts sponsored by Sonidero Meztizo.

After the press conference, the multihued band loaded onto buses for a pilgrimage to the Basilica and to the Hill of Tepeyac, where the indigenous Juan Diego is believed to have seen the Virgin of Guadalupe. Perhaps more importantly to the Wixarika, it’s the ancestral temple site for Tonantzin, the powerful pre-Hispanic Earth goddess.

Another part of the delegation went to meet with officials at SEMARNAT, the federal environmental agency, to outline their concerns. And yet another group went off to do interviews with the national media.

But the spiritual high point of the two-day affair came on Thursday morning, when the Wixarika streamed into the park containing the Pyramid of Cuicuilco, the first important civic-religious center of the Mexican Highlands and a sacred site for the Wixarika. They made their way through the park to the foot of the pyramid, where there is a simple altar where the Huichol people leave their offerings. There at the foot of the pyramid, traditional musicians began to play their fiddles, and one by one, the marakames blessed each of the participants with their feathered muwiere. Time seemed to stand still as each person filed in to take their turn in front of the tiny house constructed to shelter their offerings.

“Today we lighted the candles of life and left our offerings for all life on Earth,” explained Wixarika traditional leader Santos de la Cruz in a reception at the neighboring School of Anthropology and History, the same site that welcomed the Zapatistas in their many sojourns from Chiapas more than a decade ago. “We pray not only for the protection of our heart, our veins, our life, which is Wirikuta, but for the other sacred sites in the world which are threatened, and this threat menaces all of life on the planet.”

For more information about the campaign to save Wirikuta, see www.frenteendefensadewirikuta.org.

Images from the October 26-27 mobilization Save Wirikuta: The Sacred Heart of Mexcio:


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Esquire Latin America: Huicholes prepare for battle

By
Tracy Barnett
Published: October 8, 2011Posted in: Featured, WhyTags: , , , , , , , ,
Esquire Latin America: Huicholes prepare for battle

Esquire Latinoamerica, August 2011
Text and Photos by Tracy L. Barnett

For the Huicholes, the region known as Wirikuta, in North-Central Mexico, is sacred; for a Canadian company it is the base of its next great mining project. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of the village of Real de Catorce, at the heart of Wirikuta, are divided among those who need jobs and those who see the mine as a threat. The debate grows with every day and has reached as far as Canada and the United Nations.

To see the entire article (in Spanish), download here: PDF Huicholes

Huicholes take the fight for Wirikuta to Canada

By
Tracy Barnett
Published: May 14, 2011Posted in: Featured, WhyTags: , , , , , , , ,
Huicholes take the fight for Wirikuta to Canada

A delegation of representatives of the Wixarika People travel to Vancouver, Canada, this week, home base of the mining company First Majestic Silver Corp., which plans to open a mine on their most sacred site, Wirikuta.

The delegates plan to make their case to the public, to members of Parliament and to the mining company and to participate in the Mining Justice Week events May 14-19, a week dedicated to demanding justice in the mining industry throughout Latin America and the world.

On Sunday, Jesús Lara Chivarra of San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlán, Jalisco, México, will be one of the speakers at a conference on “Mining, Social Justice and Self Determination for Indigenous Peoples.” The next day, Lara, together with Huichol artist Cilau Valadez, of Santiago Ixcuintla, Nayarit, will present at the Forum on the Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth and Indigenous Peoples.

Tuesday and Wednesday the delegation will attend meetings with indigenous peoples of Canada and with leaders from Vancouver, and will attend in solidarity a mobilization in front of the headquarters of Goldcorp, one of the biggest and most controversial Canadian mining companies now doing business in Latin America. We hope that by Tuesday we will be joined by delegates Rodolfo Cosio Candelario, jicarero and guardian of the ceremonial center of Las Latas, Santa Catarina, Jalisco, and Juventino Carrillo de la Cruz, a leader from the community of San Sebastián. Their Canadian visas have been postponed and we hope they will be granted on Monday.

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Rodolfo Cosio Candelario and Jesus Lara Chivarra in Cancún, December 2010, in an interview with Maricarmen Wister of TV Cable.

The events will culminate on Thursday with the annual stockholders meeting of First Majestic Silver Corp., when a pair of delegates will try to enter and ask for the preservation of Wirikuta and that First Majestic abandon its plan for the mine in the site, which is extremely sacred for the Wixarika People.

During the week, the delegation will be available for interviews with various media and will be organizing meetings with representatives of the government, of First Majestic and with local and regional indigenous leaders.

For more information, follow The Esperanza Project on Facebook and @esperanzaprojec on Twitter.

“Wirikuta is the matrix of life”: Wixarika Regional Council

By
Tracy Barnett
Published: April 14, 2011Posted in: Featured, WhyTags: , , , , , , , , ,
“Wirikuta is the matrix of life”: Wixarika Regional Council

(Photos by Gerardo Ruiz Smith)
Editor’s note: The declaration of the Wixarika Regional Council in the Defense of Wirikuta is a powerful commentary on the increasing frequency of natural disasters and the lack of understanding in our contemporary cultures. May we heed their call before it’s too late.

Declaration of the Wixárika Regional Council for the Defense of Wirikuta

To the Wirikuta Defense Front of Tamatsima Waha’a
To the Civil Society in General
To the Three Powers of the Mexican State

Will they understand in time? Will the governments and corporations that control the material order of the world be capable of understanding in time that the disasters like earthquakes or tsunamis, which they only manage to define as natural phenomenon, are the furious words of those our people know as kaka+yarixi, deities or fundamental forces of nature that feel, think and have the word that permits us to live?

For us, these disasters have an urgent message, calling on humanity to try another way of relating with nature. We don’t know if government officials will be capable of listening and attending to the call in time, because they don’t show any signs of being good at dialog.

After our sacred site of Wirikuta was ordered by governmental decree and a management plan that protects it, the government granted concessions to a Canadian mining company that threatens the Sierra of Catorce and the desert lowlands that comprise this sacred zone, in the municipalities of Charcas, Villa de la Paz, Villa de Ramos, Zacatón, Catorce, Matehuala and Villa de Guadalupe.

We have been for more than seven months demanding that the government of our country cancel the concessions of the mining company First Majestic or Real Bonanza in the Sierra of Catorce and we have heard no response from any of the municipal, state or federal institutions. So what good, then, are the agreements, the decrees, the management plans and the word of Felipe Calderón dressed as a Wixárika promising the protection of our sacred places at the hour of signing the pact of Hauxamanaka just two years ago?

We have been demanding for more than seven months and once again, we make our demand:

That the federal government cancel the 22 mining concessions to the Canadian company First Majestic Silver Corp. and its Mexican “prestanombres” (one who loans his name in order to conduct business), Real Bonanza S.A. de C.V. Mining, in this sacred place not only destroys a fundamental pillar of the Wixárika culture, it is an attack that brings as a consequence many natural disasters and death.

The mining company asks us to let them extract minerals from the sierra in exchange for giving us the Cerro Quemado. We explained to them that the Sierra of Catorce is a sacred whole and therefore it is impossible to mine the area and to respect the Quemado. From the South to the North, the sierra is a collection of kaka+yarixi or fundamental ancestors and the springs that are essential for the rain and the fertility of our country. Wirikuta free of mining and of projects that destroy her natural fragility is what we are demanding that the government enforce.

We are not alone in this struggle. Every day more support is growing for the defense of Wirikuta. The Tamatsima Waha’a front, of which we are the point of the arrow, is constituted of numerous Mexican civil organizations and from other places in the world who are working intensely to offer solutions and build alliances with other peoples and other movements that also defend the roots of life.

We appreciate the support of the indigenous people of the United States and Canada, organized in the Native American Church and of course our brothers of the National Indigenous Congress.

We have organized conferences, debates, festivals to spread the word of our right to be respected and we plan still more musical festivals and gatherings and creative activities so that this threat of extermination be detained.

This is the path of our struggle. In what other way does the government want us to remind it of its historic and moral constitutional obligation to respect our fundamental patrimony, the patrimony of all Mexicans and all of humanity?

Listen, ladies and gentlemen of the government and who dominate the corporations: Wirikuta is the matrix of life. Matrix of the rain and of fertility. A place to remember our origin and the natural future of humanity. There is no room there for either mines nor industrial tomato growers. There is room for other projects so that the ejidal campesino families who live in Wirikuta, and those of us in the Wirikuta Defense Front have proposals for that.

We salute with respect all of those who have put forward their dignity in the face of so many years of dispossession and discrimination that today Wirikuta has one of the zones with the highest emigration rates in the country. We salute with the same respect the campesinos of Wirikuta who await this criminal exploitation with hopes of an improvement in their living conditions and who await too with the pain of seeing their children go to the United States, Monterrey and other places to never return, and who await the beginning of the mining exploitation with the pain of seeing that the uncontrolled ambition for money wants to do away with the sacred rain that keeps us alive, to throw them off their lands or make them accept with humility the mining alternative, who await First Majestic with the pain of living with the contamination of heavy metals left behind by the mining activities of the past.

To you, our brothers, our proposal is to change from below, from the local organization of so much injustice that you are now living, reconstructing your social fabric. We have made your situation our own and we are working so that between us we may demonstrate that we are capable of constructing dignified alternatives.

We appreciate the initiatives that are being worked on in an organized manner for the realization of cultural festivals, especially the group of artists and intellectuals who have joined this struggle. We exhort them to continue with this historic force and to trust in our organizational structure headed by our assemblies and traditional authorities, projected in the path of the Wirikuta Defense Front of Tamatsima Waha’a.

We send our recognition and congratulations to the companions with whom, together, we are the Wirikuta Defense Front of Tamatsima Waha’a for the nomination of an international award in the category of Human Rights, which is our demonstration that civil society can organize using the tools of communication that we count on, for which we call on the civil society to support this nomination by voting for our website and the other campaigns that have been launched by our movement.

We wish to reiterate the need to maintain an interlocution and coordination of confidence through the Jalisco Association in Support of Indigenous Groups (AJAGI), and to avoid delays in communication in our communities, which is indeed complicated.

This is what we wish to communicate to the people of Mexico and the Mexican State. It is what we reiterate from the Colonia Rivera Aceves, locality of Waut+a, in this tenth reunion of the Regional Wixarika Council for the Defense of Wirikuta conformed by our traditional and agrarian governments, kawiterutsixi and mara’akate and this is what we communicate to all of our friends of the Front, the journalists, intellectuals, groups of artists, politicians and to the society and general.

Attentively

Wirikuta is not for sale. Never again a Mexico without us.

Regional Wixarika Council for the Defense of Wirikuta
Tiway+la – Colonia Rivera Aceves, C.I. San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlán on April 9 of 2011
For Waut+a San Sebastian Teponahuaxtlan and Kuruxi Manuká

Gracias a Gerardo Ruiz Smith por su colaboración fotográfica. Vea su hermosa colección entera aquí.

The fight for Wirikuta crosses the border

By
Tracy Barnett
Published: February 19, 2011Posted in: AJAGI, Borderlands, Featured, Indigenous peoples, Mexico, WhyTags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
The fight for Wirikuta crosses the border

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By Tracy L. Barnett
Translation by Yvonne Negrin

MIRANDO CITY, TEXAS – It was an unforgettable meeting of cultures: Lakota and Navajo, Chippewa and Cree, Coahuiltecan and Chichimecan and more, joining hearts and minds wth their Wixaritari brothers in a hogan in South Texas.

“Never in my life did I imagine that this moment would come,” said Efren Bautista Parra, a diminutive yet powerful marakame, or shaman, and the traditional governor of San Andrés Cohamiata, with tears in his eyes. “Just like the joy of this moment, our suffering brings us together in a bond of brotherhood.” Around the fire, cradled in the curve of a crescent moon, the language of spirit transcended words to merge all souls into one.

Efren was one of eight Wixarika leaders chosen by their communities in the highlands of Jalisco, Durango and Nayarit to travel from their communities to this town in Mirando City, Texas. They were there to attend the International Convention of the Native American Church, a union of Native American peoples of North America dedicated to preserving the right to traditional use of the sacred peyote plant, or medicine as it is known.

“Never did we imagine that there were others who, like us, use the sacred hikuri as we do in their ceremonies and prayers,” he said.

The Native American Church is comprised of various tribal peoples from the United States and Canada, who consider peyote a sacrament and use it in their prayers and ceremonies. Upon learning that a Canadian mining company, First Majestic Silver Corp., has acquired 22 concessions, granted by the Mexican government, to exploit minerals in the sacred land of Wirikuta, the birthplace of the Wixarika’s Father Sun and the ecosystem where the sacred plant grows, the Native American Church invited representatives of the Wixarika communities (also known as Huichol) to attend its convention on 11, 12 and 13 of February in Mirando City, Texas.

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Some of them had been traveling for days to arrive in Guadalajara, where a race to acquire visas and passports culminated in a 15-hour overnight bus ride from Guadalajara. An hour of lines and paperwork at the border was followed by an hour of travel from Laredo to Mirando City in a rented van through the desert considered a sacred place for members of the Native American Church.

Unfazed by the lack of rest, the delegation arrived energized and eager to meet their northern counterparts. In the Mirando Community Center, festooned with hearts and balloons for the upcoming Valentine’s Day celebration, the delegation was welcomed with open arms by the Indian nations of the north, a greeting which was followed by an extensive and sincere dialogue.

“We are the keepers of the sacred land of Wirikuta,” said Felipe Serio Chino, secretary of the Wixárika Ceremonial Centers of Jalisco, Durango and Nayarit. “We conduct our pilgrimages there every year, as our ancestors entrusted us to do, so that life can continue to be reborn. It is inconceivable to us that from one moment to the next, a site this sacred can be destroyed. This Canadian company is very powerful, but we hope that perhaps with partnerships like this one we can win in the defense of Wirikuta.”

Santos De La Cruz Carrillo, an attorney and an appointed official from Bancos de San Hipólito, Durango, explained the process of the formation of the Wirikuta Defense Front of Tamatsima Wahaa.

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“We know they are in violation of our rights. What they have planned is an attack on our culture. We want this to be known not only nationally but internationally,” he said.

“We are here to build bridges and join forces with the indigenous peoples of the North. We invite you to work with us and to integrate into the Front in any way you can to help defend what is sacred in life. Our prayers and ceremonies are to renew the candles of life, not just for the Wixárika people, but for the whole world.”

Sandor Iron Rope, a Lakota leader from South Dakota and Vice-President of the Native American Church of North America, was the first to answer.

“We understand the process of colonization on both sides of the border,”he said. “We can unite in the defense of our medicine. We are the legitimate guardians of this continent and we must create a struggle to continue spreading awareness among those who do not understand.”

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Sandor shared a song he had written for Wirikuta in his native Lakota:

Several members of the Native American Church told of how the peyote had changed and even saved their lives, such as Lance Long, a member of the Ho-Chunk people of Wisconsin. Long told of how as a baby he was on the verge of death, and medical doctors could do nothing to help. Finally, his parents gave him his first peyote tea. “I am alive today thanks to medicine,” he said.

Members of the Coahuiltecan delegation of Texas reiterated their support as an indigenous sister nation bound by the long history of medicinal use of peyote by both indigenous groups. They expressed that the desecration of sacred sites must stop and that the defense of Wirikuta is the same as defending Our Mother Earth.

The two-day dialogue included a ceremony in which several saw visions of the Condor and the Eagle, symbols of North and South. Sandor Iron Rope expressed it as a vision from the beginning of time, in which the Eagle and the Condor flew together as in the beginning of the world.

Agreements were manifested in the Native American Church of North America signing of a letter by the Wixárika delegation, proposing a collaboration with the Church and a pledge of brotherhood and solidarity. The assembly of the Native American Church of North America unanimously voted to join the Wirikuta Defense Front.

José García, spiritual leader of the Coahuiltecan nation, sang during the ceremony in his native language and in a voice that resonated from another dimension. Later he explained that he had actually visited Wirikuta during the ceremony, and he shared the story behind the song.

“Several years ago I was commissioned to talk to the Wixaritari (Huichol) to tell them that our elders dreamed that something bad was happening in Wirikuta,” he recalled. “At that time I didn’t understand. Tonight I realized what it meant, as I visited this sacred place and spoke with Wirikuta during my song. ”

Armando Loizaga and Cristian Chávez contributed to this story.


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Huicholes shot, wounded by municipal police

By
Tracy Barnett
Published: March 23, 2010Posted in: AJAGI, Featured, Huichol lands, Indigenous peoples, Indigenous rights, Mexico, WhyTags: , , , , , , , , ,
Huicholes shot, wounded by municipal police

(Above: Encampment of Santa Catarina Huichol community at site of Bolaños-Huejuquilla highway construction, 2008)

HUEJUQUILLA, Jalisco, Mexico – Tensions between the Huichol community and local government are high after police officers fired at a vehicle full of Huichol community members, injuring two, members of the Jalisco Association in Support of Indigenous Groups (AJAGI) reported today.

The vehicle was headed down the Mezquitic toward Huejuquilla near the town of San Antonio de Padua with seven members of San Andrés Cohamiata community aboard, including a child. According to the Huicholes’ testimony, they began to be followed y a vehicle that flashed its lights at them. Fearing an assault, the driver sped up; the police responded by shooting at the vehicle and wounding Rosendo Parra López, who was in critical condition, and Matea Tizano de la Cruz, whose legs were grazed by the bullets.

The neighboring Santa Catarina community, which was in the midst of a general assembly at the time, decided together with the authorities of San Andrés and another nearby Huichol community, San Sebastián, to make an appearance at the municipal building in protest of what they see as a wave of repression against the Huichol community.

The attack occurs in the context of increased trafficking by organized crime groups in the area, who disguise themselves as police officers, making it increasingly more dangerous to stop when a vehicle signals with its lights, AJAGI reported in a press release.

Additionally complicating the matter is the upcoming meeting of the 27th National Indigenous Congress, scheduled to be held in a few days in the Huichol community of Bancos de San Hipólito, a community that is part of a territory that was taken from them in 1968 and which is gaining ground in a landmark legal battle that could set an important precedent in the indigenous land rights movement worldwide.

Tensions have already been heightened since late last month, when a group of Huicholes from Santa Catarina on their traditional pilgrimage to Real de Catorce were accosted by another group of police during their annual peyote ceremony, a situation that provoked an immediate outcry from concerned citizens, and state police responded by providing the Huicholes with an armed escort to the next province on their pilgrimage trail.

Santa Catarina community members say they have been the victims of frequent harassment since they began their protest and legal battle of the Bolaños-Huejuquilla highway, part of an important trade route facilitating the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Community members say the highway construction has proceeded without their consent in their territory and through their sacred sites, and has resulted in environmental and cultural degradation. They point to a pattern of human rights violations throughout the country, including assassinations, forced disappearances, persecution and imprisonment against indigenous people involved in land rights issues.

AJAGI cites recent acts against the Nahua communities of coastal Michoacan and from the mountains of Manantlán, and the group requests that concerned citizens write to the authorities to urge an immediate stop to the police repression of Huichol and other indigenous communities throughout the country.

Letters can be sent to:

Lic. Fredy Medina Sánchez, Municipal President of Huejuquilla, fredymedina@huejuquilla.gob.mx
And to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico, oacnudh@ohchr.org,
And to the Jalisco State Commission on Human Rights at cedhj@infosel.net.mx.

Police harass Huicholes during annual pilgrimage

By
Tracy Barnett
Published: February 25, 2010Posted in: AJAGI, Featured, Forest protection, Huichol lands, Indigenous peoples, Indigenous rights, Mexico, WhyTags: , , , , , ,
Police harass Huicholes during annual pilgrimage

Monday evening, a group of Huicholes gathered around a fire in the desert near Real de Catorce, San Luis Potosí, the sacred place they call Wirikuta, and conducted the millennial ritual that for them, ensures the well being of not only their community, but the entire planet.

Suddenly, they were interrupted by a squadron of four state police cars, who pulled up and began harassing them, according to a bulletin released by AJAGI, the Asociación Jaliscense en Apoyo de Grupos Indígenas. Police began taunting the maraakame, the spiritual leader, breaking up the sacred circle, handling sacred objects and destroying “Grandfather fire.” They accused the Huicholes, or Wixarika as they call themselves, of breaking the law concerning the gathering of peyote, which they have done for thousands of years as a part of their annual pilgrimage to Wirikuta.

The harassment went on for three hours, when they finally left the pilgrimage participants in peace. But they returned to the encampment at 2 a.m. to continue the harassment, this time recording the proceedings with videocameras and interrupting the song of the marakaame and the words of the ancestors, according to AJAGI.

The news hit me like a rock in the stomach. Only a week ago I was in Santa Catarina, making the two-hour hike down a mountain to the ceremonial site of Las Lajas to interview the maraakame, Don Dionisio. He evoked the ancestors and the importance of the Huichol tradition in an eloquent plea for understanding of their predicament that brought tears to my eyes. On that very day, the community was in the midst of its ritual surrounding the departure of the peregrinos, who had been chosen by the entire community to represent them in this fundamental spiritual practice.

Marakaame Uxayuka+ye/Dionisio de la Rosa Cosio

I was there to learn about the community of Santa Catarina’s resistance to a major highway project that the federal government had begun to build through their land, without the community’s consent. After seeing the size of the project, the mass destruction of forest and the location of the highway, which passed through several sacred sites and cut through the millennial pilgrimage route, the community rebelled.

In February 2008, a group of 800 residents picked up their belongings and hiked – in some cases, for several days – to the peak of the highway construction project and set up an encampment, where they remained for six months. Since then, they have filed suit against the government, saying the highway project violates environmental laws as well as their land and spiritual rights.

Scene from Wixarika highway encampment, February 2008 (Xaureme Cosio photo)

The highway department responded with copies of a petition signed by 400 residents at a meeting the community says never occurred; they claim the petition was falsified, and just last week, demanded that the agency produce the originals.

AJAGI representatives say the timing of the harassment was no coincidence, and that in fact, this type of harassment has been occurring during the pilgrimage since the group began protesting the highway construction.

“It seems ironic that despite the fact that PROFEPA (the Federal Agency for Environmental Protection) harassed the people of Tuapurie (Santa Catarina Cuexcomatitlan) with environmental pretexts and norms whose enforcement is not in the jurisdiction of the state police. This is taking place at the same time that the plunder of peyote in the hands of narcotraffickers is on a sharp rise, and important zones of biodiversity are being destroyed by the multinational agricultural industy.”

Currently, transnational agribusiness companies are buying up and denuding hundreds of hectares of important peyote habitat and destroying it. One transnational tomato company recently purchased 400 hectares of biodiverse desert habitat, including an important peyote site, and set about stripping it of vegetation and constructing deep wells that depleted local water supplies for miles around, the group said.

Other planned developments that have been approved by the government cut across the ancient pilgrimage route in dozens of places with high-power lines, highways and subdivisions.

Additionally, the federal government has drawn up a “Management Plan” for the peyote that regulates the indigenous group’s ritual gathering of the plant, a plan that did not involve the community’s participation and that the group believes violates their rights under Convention 169 of the United Nations International Labor Organization, a key ruling in favor of indigenous land rights.

“Is this the environmental protection that PROFEPA and the state police require?” AJAGI asks. “The situation is delicate and the Wixarika people need for civil society in general and for human rights organizations to be aware of what’s happening with the traditional pilgrimage, as well as the government harassment that has been happening systematically since February 2008,” the group wrote.

I am currently finishing a documentary about Santa Catarina’s fight against the highway project and its efforts to preserve its land and way of life. Details will be forthcoming. Meanwhile, here is a slide show from last week’s visit to Santa Catarina Cuexcomatitlan, the Wixarika community of Tuapurie.


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