ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Another drug, heroin, is the focus of our next story. In the high desert of northern New Mexico, the Espanola Valley has a problem with heroin that goes back years. Despite a crackdown by law enforcement, the region has the highest rate of death from overdose per capita in the country. NPR's John Burnett reports on the community's struggle and its efforts to heal itself.
JOHN BURNETT reporting:
Chimayo, New Mexico, is a historic town of cottonwoods and adobe houses a half-hour north of Santa Fe, famous for red chili, the miraculous shrine known as El Santurario and, until a few years ago, an epidemic of Mexican black-tar heroin. Stoned young people were dying in highway accidents. Junkies were murdering for drug money. People were afraid to leave their homes, fearing break-ins.
On a rainy, spring morning in 1999, the people of Chimayo marched in a statement of defiance and solidarity. They walked eight miles along a winding state highway past drug dens and roadside crosses of their victims. They were led by a Catholic brotherhood, the Penitentes Hermanos, who chanted sacred hymns that sounded like this.
(Soundbite of chanting)
Ms. LINDA PEDRO (March Organizer): I was right in the center of their singing. It was like a limpia, you know, a cleansing like the curanderas will do on a person. It was like a communit limpia.
BURNETT: Linda Pedro helped organize the march. She's a wheelchair-bound artist who lived next to an open-air drug market. Five months later came a seeming answer to their prayers. At dawn on September 29th, 1999, a massive assault force of federal, state and local police swooped down on Chimayo.
Ms. PEDRO: I woke up the morning of the raid, and I was scared because there were big guns going off and helicopters. And then I heard the dogs killed because when they shot that team of pit bulls next door, you heard them die. It was horrible.
BURNETT: When the smoke cleared, the feds had hauled off members of the Barela, Martinez and Gallegos families suspected of selling heroin for years. In Albuquerque, then US Attorney John Kelly, quoted on KRQE-TV, was triumphant.
Mr. JOHN KELLY (US Attorney): It has taken a very significant bite out of the major, long-tenured, well-established narcotics distribution families in the valley.
BURNETT: Six years later Linda Pedro sits in front of her home in the shade of a Chinese elm in her now quiet neighborhood.
Ms. PEDRO: I'm not saying that the heroin usage is gone or the drug trafficking is gone, but there was an evil that prevailed here that most, I think, everyone can say is gone.
BURNETT: Locals say there are far fewer shootings, overdoses and burglaries today. This community of 6,000 that once cowered from the dealers took a stand. They started the Chimayo Boys & Girls Club and the Chimayo Crime Prevention Organization. They created the Chimayo Youth Conservation Corps, which pays young people to do community service work and gives them a positive peer group.
(Soundbite of water splashing)
BURNETT: On a recent morning Youth Corps members met at the house of their director to help shovel mud out of her home, the result of a freak flood the previous night.
Ms. RAMONSITA MARTINEZ(ph) (Youth Conservation Corps Member): I'm going to dig another little trench. That way the water can just go straight through.
BURNETT: Ramonsita Martinez, a 24-year-old with gang tattoos and a cross around her neck, stands in rubber boots with a shovel, reflecting on the culture she says she's left.
Ms. MARTINEZ: The older ones are teaching the younger ones to do bad things, you know, break into houses and go do drugs. And the younger ones think that that's, you know, the way to go. And I think that I'd probably be doing the same thing if I didn't have this support system.
BURNETT: Today as Chimayo approaches the sixth anniversary of the big raid, the community is undeniably a better place. They're trying to save a generation of young people from the needle, which, despite their efforts, is still never far away.
(Soundbite of crowd noise)
Unidentified Man #1: It's good to see you.
Unidentified Woman #1: Take it easy.
BURNETT: On Tuesdays addicts converge on a white RV parked on the outskirts of Chimayo to pick up free syringes under a state-funded program to help prevent needle-born diseases.
Unidentified Woman #2: Hi.
Unidentified Man #2: Hi. How are you?
Unidentified Woman #2: Good. And you?
Unidentified Man #2: OK.
BURNETT: A middle-aged man with tattooed arms, smelling of alcohol, says he's just been released from prison, and he wants to find a methadone program. But for now cheap, plentiful heroin will do.
Unidentified Man #2: Heroin. We're infested with heroin, not in this town, particularly but, you know, in the surrounding communities. There's heroin everywhere, all around. You'll find it. And there's some good heroin there.
BURNETT: As is common with drug enforcement nationwide, the federal raid simply pushed the overdoses, murders and property crimes elsewhere in the Espanola Valley. So six months ago, in March, the feds staged a second major raid in the valley. This time they arrested scores of Mexican nationals who had picked up all the business left when the Chimayo pushers went to jail. The headline in the Albuquerque Journal trumpeted `Feds Cut Drug Pipeline to Espanola.' Wishful thinking, says Espanola police Chief Richard Guillen, whose city lies 10 miles west of Chimayo.
Chief RICHARD GUILLEN (Espanola Police Department): We eliminated the local families as the pushers, but then we got the Mexican nationals to take over. And, yes, when crime did go down in Chimayo, we transferred those problems to other communities surrounding Espanola. Now with the second one that we just did now in March, we're transferring the problem back to the locals. They're starting to push the dope again.
BURNETT: The Espanola Valley, with its painteresque sunsets and soaring mesas, is steeped in tradition. Spaniards first settled here along the Rio Grande more than 400 years ago. Heroin has been here for more than half a century. Public health officials say, for the most part, drug addiction in Espanola is no different than it is anyplace else, with roots in broken families, poverty, low self-esteem, unemployment. But there's one strikingly unusual feature, says Dr. Fernando Bayardo, chief of the Espanola Hospital emergency room and a local anti-drug activist.
Dr. FERNANDO BAYARDO (Chief, Espanola Hospital): You truly and unfortunately have an environment where certain families or certain communities have this dependence. And, yes, in fact, you have a grandmother shooting up with a grandchild; you have family members shooting up together. It's not something that the teen-age son hides from other family members. And how are you going to change those unhealthy lifestyles or habits and develop new norms?
BURNETT: The long history of opiates in the valley coupled with the tight-knit society create special challenges for police, say Evelyn Kilgus(ph) and Ron Esinberg(ph), special agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration who work the valley.
Ms. EVELYN KILGUS (Special Agent, Drug Enforcement Agency): Anyone new coming into that community is immediately suspect, whether or not they're law enforcement. So for us to mount a massive, effective law enforcement effort in that area is incredibly difficult.
Mr. RON ESINBERG (Special Agent, Drug Enforcement Agency): When you do the enforcement and you do arrest the trafficker, family members and people in the community get really upset. And they say, `Why don't you just leave us alone? This is what we do. Why are you bothering us? We're not bothering you.'
BURNETT: But what may look from the outside like family acceptance is from the inside despair, says Alfredo Montoya. He's former chairman of the county commission that encompasses the Espanola Valley and a former heroin addict himself.
Mr. ALFREDO MONTOYA (Former County Commission Chairman, Former Addict): Addicts don't want to be addicts after about their 10th fix. The first few times that you do heroin, it's for pleasure; thereafter, you do it just so that you won't be sick. And you don't want to be an addict. You'd do anything not to be an addict.
BURNETT: There's some encouraging news from the Espanola Valley. With all the police raids, more addicts are coming forward to seek treatment, though the waiting list is long. The county is about to open a new detox and drug rehab facility. What's more, Chimayo has proven that communities can, with great effort, reclaim themselves, though the change is rarely permanent. The Espanola police report the Chimayo drug dealers who were busted in the '99 raid are all out of prison and are reportedly dealing again. John Burnett, NPR News.
SIEGEL: Some heroin addicts have been able to kick the habit, and you can hear how one man went from addict to county administrator and drug addiction researcher at our Web site, npr.org.
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