Death toll in Tarahumara famine begins with 4 dead
2012-01-16
Posted by: badanov
For a map, click here For a map of Chihuahua state, click here.
By Chris Covert
The latest news from the western side of Chihuahua, especially around San Juanito, was grim last Thursday when news came four indigent Tarahumara Indians were found dead from starvation.
Even more grim was the news published by La Polaka news daily on Sunday that as many as 50 Tarahumara may have committed suicide last December 10th because they were unable to find food for their families.
The claim came in an interview on Channel 28 in Cuauhtemoc city from Ramon Gardea, a local indigenous peasant organization leader.
The suicide claim was vehemently denied by a Chihuahua state government official. The unidentified official was quoted in Milenio news daily as saying, "Only he who does not know the idiosyncrasies of the Tarahumara race could believe such a version ..."
| "Them peasants is all liars, ya know." |
The news has revved up social networks which has in turn aided the gathering of food aid for the region with collection points in Mexico City and other cities across Mexico. A Mexican Catholic Church organization has been formed and bank accounts set up to deal with the influx of monetary aid.
Last week, Proceso, the Mexican leftist weekly characterized the food situation as a famine, and so now as numbers are beginning to come in, and with spring several months away, the characterization is becoming realized.
To use an overwrought phrase -- albeit accurate in this case -- indigent Indian tribes such as the Tarahumara are going to be the hardest hit in this apparent coming calamity.
According to Mexican national sources, the drought at the crux of the problem started back in the summer of 2010, and it started as a problem hardly anyone in the press and in government noticed. Record numbers of Mexican citizens were being killed overwhelmingly by drug cartels that summer and into the following spring.
Who pays attention to crop reports, which do not sell advertising for newspapers and electronic media anyway?
So it wasn't until the summer of 2011 with the drought tightening its hold over northern Mexico that institutions began to notice. The record cold in the mountains only compounded the problems. The numbers from the last harvests tell the story.
- Affected by the record cold, 250 million serrano peppers have been destroyed.
- In 2010, 180,000 metric tons of maize were harvested. In 2011 less than 500 metric tons were harvested.
- In 2010, 123,000 tons of beans were harvested. In 2011, less than 20,000 tons went to market.
- The drought in the summer of 2011 has killed 200,000 head of various livestock in western Chihuahua, and the cost to feed and water them has skyrocketed to four times normal.
Crop and livestock insurance exists for those who have it, but according to Martin Solis of El Barzon, only MP $115 million is available for losses amounting to a little more than MP $600 million.
The leader of Mexico's Confederacion Nacional Campesina, a leading peasant farmer organization, Gerardo Sanchez Garcia, has told Milenio that the scope of the problem requires a much larger relief effort, totalling MP $10 billion.
The drought, characterized as the worst in almost 90 years, has already affected 989 000 hectares of agricultural land and 1.75 million head of cattle, according to Sanchez Garcia.
Only three days ago, the Mexican secretary of agriculture, Francisco Mayorga, announced that MP $11 billion would be made available in relief efforts.
The future human cost, save for the dead already known, could also add to the catastrophe. At the moment in western Chihuahua reported thefts are on the rise and concentrated around food supplies. In normal times thefts are for items to be sold, but now food is the number one target.
A flip side of the calamity is that heads of households leave their land to find work to buy food. At this point in the growing season and in a few months those individuals will not be on the land ready for the next crop.
According to an article in El Heraldo de Chihuahua news daily, quoting Chihuahua state Tarahumara state coordinator, Jesus Velazquez, some farmers in the area are resorting to renting out their lands to drug cartels which are known to operate in the area, including the Sinaloa and Los Zetas. The ratio quoted by Jesus Velazquez is one in five farmers whose lands are dedicated to growing drugs such as marijuana and poppies.
In the same article the Chihuahua state Rural Development Secretary, Octavio Legarreta, said that problems on some farms have developed because pot plants tend to act as weeds choking the agave and avocado trees. The marijuana plants keep the trees from growing more than two meters high, effectively killing production.
But the impact on indigent farmers is the worst. Tarahumara Indians are subsistence farmers. Heads of household cannot file insurance claims to ride out the drought and famine because they have no insurance. Everything they grow is for their own consumption.