See if you can do something to help promote the town?, A friend who works in communication tasks related to the Sierra de Chihuahua told me. For many of you, that name that carries a geographical location tells you absolutely nothing.; For those who live in Mexico it means, generally, two words: forbidden and fear.
The Chihuahua mountains, along with those of Durango and Sinaloa, make up the so-called Golden Triangle, a kind of sanctuary for drug traffickers where a thick pine forest cries and prays for their corpses. Nobody goes there to do tourism because nobody does tourism where they hear or read that in the selfies the dead can be seen in the background..
And what do you want me to say about Guachochi??, I said. «Well, there are some waterfalls and a park», he answered. We go to see them. The waterfall is a tall water, normal, nice, not especially big nor especially small; the park, surrounded by an artificial lake, a quiet meeting place. Nothing. «Do you see those children playing there? That is the great triumph of this city, a miracle. "People are back on the streets and the shops are open.", he explains to me. It was, the miracle was, and it is just from that special fact that there is nothing special, that of seeing people live free, from where you begin to understand everything here and the clouds of. storm.
People are back on the streets and shops are open
Guachochi, the city through which we walked calmly, He lived through two weeks of curfew in November. It seems that it was some WhatsApp sent anonymously who unleashed a panic wave among the population. «Do not leave from the 17 Hours », warned the text message. When the night fell, everything went out, shops closed and the streets were a cemetery. Days before they had killed four family members at the entrance of the population. Some bodies rather than adding to the long list of the dead of that battle between the Sinaloa cartel and the line to control drug trafficking in the mountains.
In November I was in another place in the same mountain range, Guadalupe and Calvo. More violent, more recognized violent, Because it is one of the municipalities that accumulate more murders throughout Mexico. The problem is that the municipalities here are huge., vast terrain of mountains and ravines with communities that are more than eight hours away from the capital by car. Paths of earth and stone where hitmen hide, drug plantations, spirits, Indians and scorpions.
On that occasion I went up to the Sierra in a mayor's plane. The little that I could see serene, that my fucking bad hearing and the strong wind had me in the final stretch with my head stuck in a bag, I distinguished beautiful ravines, rivers that split the rocks and a deep pine forest. Around, drive, It was through a deep slide of trees that fell downwards in the middle of some small communities. Memory, even, We went up to a place from which we could see the town of Guadalupe y Calvo nestled in a closed valley, between green peaks. The night was cold and quiet.
The pine forests followed one another with the threat of some water trail
In Guachochi the terrain is high plateau. We went out to see a community of Tarahumara Indians and the pine forests followed one another with the threat of some water path that could divide the cruel from the human. In the community we find a hard life, poor and full of cultural nuances of the raramuri, one of those peoples that understands the world from the other side of the mirror. I remembered my years in Africa, its nature and tribal tourism, and income, less than they owed but income, that generated local communities. Here was beautiful high mountain nature, a peculiar gastronomy of meat and trout, tasty, and some indigenous peoples who organized, without abuses or theaters, They could teach the world their traditions. Could that bring tourists? I guess so, I would certainly go with an offer like that, but first the foreshortening of their lives must end, the corpses forgotten in the forest and scattered for possible newspaper headlines and fears. They are in it, fighting for it.
It was the second time I went there. I never went sightseeing. The first occasion, in Guadalupe and Calvo, I did it to talk about drugs, threats and police who fight drug trafficking. The second, now, to enter an indigenous prison and learn the reasons for the strong violence experienced in some of their communities. And in between they, their cultures, its mountains and rivers and its tasty meats. and the mirror, always the mirror that deforms everything from angular views.
