Food and Aid Arrives to the Sierra Tarahumara
Days after a false report claiming distraught Rarámuri mothers unable to feed their children were taking their own lives in the mountains of Chihuahua, food and aid donated by thousands of Mexicans this past weekend finally arrived.
Chihuahua is experiencing one of the worst droughts in over 70 years. Groups in the United States are raising money in support of affected communities.
Stay tuned for more information.
Marisol Valles: Paying a Bitter Price for Bravery
From a windswept ridge high above El Paso, looking out across the Rio Grande to the vast plains of northern Mexico, Marisol Valles García can almost see her home town. But she can’t go back.
Ms Valles, 21, fled Mexico in fear of her life, hustling her parents, sisters, husband and one-year-old son into a 4 x 4 vehicle and hurtling across the border to seek asylum in the United States. They left just in time. That night a squad of hit men arrived at their small bungalow and ransacked the rooms.
“I would like to go back home,” she said. “But if I hadn’t left my country I wouldn’t be alive now.”
In spite of her diminutive size and sweet, girlish manner, Ms Valles had some powerful and vicious enemies. The criminology graduate was appointed chief of police in the small town of Praxedis G Guerrero, 50 miles east of Ciudad Juarez and a few miles from the US border.
It is this proximity to the border – and the insatiable drugs market, which sees $300 billion of drugs a year cross it – that placed Praxedis in the centre of the cross-border trafficking battles, with rival cartels engaged in ferocious turf wars that turned the small agricultural municipality into one of the most dangerous towns in a violent region.
Read more at The Telegraph
For more information, visit Marisol-Valles.com
A new program enacted in the Mexican state of Chihuahua hopes to lure marijuana farmers into the avocado business.
The small aircraft touches down in a tiny dirt track airstrip, hidden in the folds of the surrounding mountains. A crowd of men wait for us in pickup trucks. They are heavy set, clad in jeans and trucker hats. Strong hands grasp ours in greeting before we all clamber onto the pickups, and the strange convoy sets off. Our destination is a three hour ride away over a dirt road, weaving around the edges of giant canyons and plunging through clear mountain streams.
We are in the Sierra Madre, the ‘Mother Mountains’ of Northern Mexico. In a country currently struggling against a wave of drug led violence, these rugged lands have long been the apex of all that is wild, violent and illegal.
Here, blood feuds regularly erupt that can wipe out entire families. It’s not an uncommon sight to see farmers work with rifles swung on to their shoulders. Many of them are employed in producing the only crops that really pay here: marijuana and heroin poppies.
Read more at Al Jazeera English
Semana Santa Rarámuri en Norógachi Chihuahua
See photo collection documenting the life & culture of the Raramuri of Chihuahua. Photos by Ruben E. Reyes
Raramuris: Subiendo y Bajando La Sierra Tarahumara
Ventana a mi Comunidad
Serie de videos Ventana a mi Comunidad. Una producción de Videoservicios Profesionales SA de CV para la Coordinación General de Educación Intercultural y Bilingüe de la SEP, México. http://ventana.ilce.edu.mx
Ventana a Mi Comunidad: Raramuris (Tarahumaras) - Cazando Chichimocos
Serie de videos Ventana a mi Comunidad. Una producción de Videoservicios Profesionales S. A. de C. V. para la Coordinación General de Educación Intercultural y Bilingüe de la SEP México.http://ventana.ilce.edu.mx
- via lachusita
