The teenager on the bus to Basihuare has a gun-stock peeping from the front pocket of his hoodie. He’s seventeen, pale mestizo, and has the edgy vibe of an entry-level halcón – lookout – for the local narcos. Our bus rumbles over frozen mud ridges through a blood-colour Wile E. Coyote landscape, all improbable red stone arches, sheer drops, split-off rock columns. Graffiti smears on the rock-face read ‘100% Chapo’ and ‘7A7’: a reminder that this is the frontline of a war for the lucrative opium poppy and marijuana fields of the Golden Triangle behind Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango.
It’s a bright December morning in the heart of the Sierra Madre mountains in Chihuahua, northern Mexico, home to the ethnic group known as the Rarámuri, or ‘Tarahumara’ to Spanish-speakers. Renowned for their exceptional long-distance running abilities, the estimated 85,000 Rarámuri live in abject poverty and hunger according to a UN Development Index which ranks the region behind Niger in Western Africa.
In September 2015, 21 homicides were registered in the Tarahumara region, as Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán’s Sinaloa Cartel battles their resurgent rival, the Juárez Cartel. These deaths are the tip of the iceberg. Police investigations lack transparency, while local papers are too stifled by fear of reprisal to report accurately. One shoot-out in the tourist town of Creel, in March, reportedly left three dead. Locals put the figure closer to 15.
A little before we arrive, the kid with the gun gets off the bus and takes up a position by the roadside. He’ll stand there all day, stamping his feet to stay warm, his breath unfurling in crisp layers of steam, a WhatsApp sentry earning the equivalent of €175 per month.
Two more lookouts aged about 13 stand on a vast boulder outside Basihuare. They’re Rarámuri: shorter, slighter of frame and darker-skinned than the kid on the bus. From their pebble-eyed stare and expensive smartphones it’s clear they’re also halcónes.
Young people like them are Mark Brady’s target market. Every year, the 75 year old former Gaelic footballer and his charity – the Irish Tarahumara Society – raise between €30,000 and €50,000 to provide basic essentials to the Rarámuri, as well as providing a ladder up out of poverty and into education. Most Rarámuri live off the grid, distrusting a system which they call chabochi – a word from Rarámuri cosmology that means ‘created by the Devil’. Official figures are hard to come by, but local health centre figures suggest that over a quarter of Rarámuri have not completed primary school, with almost 16% illiterate.
Thanks to Mark’s scholarships, however, hundreds of Rarámuri have gone on to secondary school and state universities. There are 14 recipients due to graduate from the country’s prestigious National Polytechnic Institute – a trampoline into the Mexican middle-classes – later this year.
Mark spends half his year living in a low, unplastered concrete shed similar to the 30 or so buildings that make up Basihuare. A mother and daughter, Nelly and Norma Pérez Echevarría, own the land he lives on. In return, he’s renovated their entire house, building an insulated wood loft. Mark’s away when we arrive, helping to rebuild a bridge two hours away, in Recigoche, where the flooded river has drowned a child.
“I call him the bull, because he’s always charging around,” laughs Norma, 52, a single mother of three grown-up children who works at the local health centre. “He’s well-suited to the Tarahumara. He’s wild and kind, like they are. He does too much for them, but they love him. When they fail, or his help doesn’t work, he’s cut to the heart. I’ve seen him cry over this. I worry about him.”
We wait for him in Basihuare main square, near a cartel safe-house guarded by six light-skinned men wearing baseball caps. By the dirt road leading to the health centre sit three familes of brightly-dressed Tarahumara women and children, speaking a language whose fluttering cadences are lighter than those of Spanish. They’ve come for a 100 peso (€6.50) child allowance due that day, but the delivery has been postponed. The women have walked five hours from Batopilas in vain. Even as they rest before the long walk back, they’re anxious to get home before dark, when narcos rule the road.
One mother – who won’t give her name – reports that Mark’s agreed to pick them up and bring them to Basihuare once the money comes in.
“He does a lot for us,” she says. “He’s a good man.”
Mark’s battered blue-green pickup arrives around 2pm, carrying the bridge-repair team. He could pass for a whole quarter-century younger: ruddy-faced, well over six foot – including his slight stoop – and still with the physique of a midfield bruiser. He addresses the building team in loud, Midlands-accented Spanish. His ebullient handshakes and back-slaps are at odds with the Tarahumara caginess, and yet it goes over well. The kids playing on the square approach, looking as free from shyness as they ever do.
“I’m speaking English! Wow!” he says in the jeep back to his place, breaking off to give the rest of his crisps to a kid standing by the window. He swigs Coke and snaffles biscuits, eating fast, as if his food is nothing more than fuel. “That’s Agustín. He’s ten. He and his brother, Martinique, they stay with me on the weekends. That takes the strain off that family for half the week. Their father drinks all their money. I hate drunks. One night he turned up at my house – two o’clock in the morning – saying he’d had a new baby. He was carrying a toddler. I don’t know where he’d gotten the toddler from, but anyway. So I gave him a big sack of stuff – Marúchan soups, beans, tortillas, all that – and he started crying. It was money he was after, so I gave money to his sons and their mother to keep it away from him.”
Written down, this looks like boasting. But Mark’s anecdotes feel ego-free, rattled off like a soldier at a debrief.
“I came here, in 1984, after visiting my sister in Texas. My eyes were hanging out: ‘How can they live here! How do they do it!’ And I still don’t know!” You can hear the italics, the exclamation marks in his diction.
“I still don’t know why I care so much, but I do. Years ago, I said to myself if I continue down this road, I don’t come back. Too much to do. I had a run-in with some Yank evangelicals using the Rarámuri as farm labourers in their greenhouse. There’s a huge infantilisation happens between the Rarámuri and the mestizo Mexicans – and it’s worse with foreigners. They treat them like they’re kids.
A jeep blaring brass-led narcocorrido music – ballads about drug dealers – speeds towards us outside his house, honking its horn to get us to reverse. The men in the back are carrying rifles.
“Oh, they’re all out today!” he shouts, reversing. “I get on like a house on fire with these lads,” he says drily. “They scare me, but I’ll go mad if I think about death. If a bullet comes my way, it comes my way. I won’t even know about it. They’re good at what they do. I know where the red line is, and I skirt it from time to time, but I won’t cross it.”
Parked outside his house is a second pickup, laden with blankets, tinned food, clothes, and toys: Christmas presents for the village. “I’m like Santy, but with food,” Mark explains.
His home is more spartan inside than outside, with a tarpaulin draped on top of cardboard pallets in lieu of a table. The floor is concrete, and Mark’s bed is a mattress propped on thick chunks of wood. The spare bed for visitors is better-appointed. He cooks off a two-ring stove, with an old car-seat serving as his sofa.
“This is wealth to them [the Rarámuri],” he says. “In Ireland, I have a proper house, but I feel knackered there. I can’t charge myself up. This is just a place to sleep, and it’s not comfortable: but I have such energy. I run off the Tarahumaras. And this lad.” He’s pointing to a dark wood crucifix hanging opposite his bed. “He’s the first thing I see every morning. Him, and my sister’s photo behind him, because they both brought me here. My work here is my vocation. I don’t really care about religion, anyway, except as an energy source. That’s why I dropped out of the seminary early,” he explains. “I liked the outside world too much: football, pubs, acting. I remember one night going to the superior and saying I had a problem. My marks were fine, so he was surprised. I told him I didn’t think I could live without a wife. ‘You must pray about this,’ said the superior. Next day, I was on the train.”
Mark finds a photo of himself with his ex-girlfriend among the Mass cards and press clippings Blu-Tack’d to his wall. “She’s Belgian. We split up years ago. This is from when I went to visit her. She married a man. I married this mountain.”
The next stop on his tour around the house causes worry, though: a small, dark splat on the concrete wall.
“I made the mistake of still thinking I was still the Meath number 8,” he says. “So when I saw this fat spider I made to mash him with my foot – and ended up on my back. Broke an inch off my coccyx. And I was lying there for a day and a half, in agony, because Norma and Nelly never come in here. But my father made it to 82. I’ll be OK for a while.”
That concern spikes on our drive to Creel, where Mark’s spending the night before collecting the families we met on the square. By half four, the darkness is thick and smoky, but Mark takes the bends like a racing driver, axle poised over the dividing line “because I don’t want to hit a walker or a horse or a drunk driver”. He says we’re going fast because he has a busted brake-light and doesn’t want the police to catch him.
But this is Basihuare. His words don’t ring true. Last October, Chihuahua state police released a list of municipalities which they had under control. Basihuare was not on that list. The only vehicle we encounter is a pickup speeding in the opposite direction. The driver veers towards us in a game of chicken – loser goes in the ravine – but pulls away at the last moment.
“Look at that!” Mark yells, almost gleefully. “Only a cartel boyo would do that! That’s their mentality. No value on human life, not even their own!” Regaining composure, and slowing down as we approach Creel, he tells about a shootout he stumbled on while returning home. “I didn’t stop to count the bodies, but there were a lot of them. It was right outside the gate. Ten year ago, this wasn’t a problem. But you see this roundabout? I met a bunch of kids playing with sticks, pretending to shoot me. Tarahumara kids, playing cops and narcos. The mentality is changing. They don’t grow to eat anymore: they grow cash crops, mota [marijuana] and heroin poppy. It’s changing,” he repeats, his voice puzzled.
It’s full dark and freezing when we say goodbye to Mark outside his hotel. The owner – an older man dressed like a vaquero – grabs him in a bear-hug. It catches him by surprise. For just a second, the Sierra Tarahumara’s one-man NGO looks lost, surprised, almost anxious. Then he remembers where he is, who he’s with, and he claps his friend on the back, eyes front, his loud GAA manager voice trouncing the Spanish words, his stooped shape moving quickly through the dark.
–Tepoztlán, Morelos, January 17th 2016
Words: Tim MacGabhann
Photos: Eduardo Herce
