Magic and Realism in a Homemade Chihuahua Museum

Chihuahua Chronicles #3

Tom Barry

Elizabeth Dávila with collection of mammoth fossils / Tom Barry

I wasn’t expecting to spend more than a half-hour at Laguna
de Bustillos.

Ready to get back on the road to Cuauhtémoc, I had
accomplished what I had intended -- having taken a series of photos of the
nearly completely dry lakebed strewn with thousands of dead trout. To see this
graphic evidence of Chihuahua’s severe drought, I had taken the longer, free
road heading southwest from Chihuahua City.

After two years without much rain, the lake was retreating
as much as 200 meters a day, according to newspaper reports. A combination of
factors – two years of intense drought, increased deep well drilling, and the
disappearing watershed – were endangering the future existence of the lagoon.

Just when I was getting back on the libre toward Cuauhtémoc, I spotted a sign for the Favela Museum.

A dying community next to a badly contaminated and
increasingly dry lake is an odd place for a museum. Curious, I turned into the
lakefront community of Favela – one of more than a dozen dying or dead ejido communities that ring the
disappearing lake.

Unlike most urban areas and more prosperous villages in
Mexico, where home and business owners delight in painting their building in
bright and joyous colors, Favela is the color of dirt and gravel – a couple of
blocks of impoverished adobe and concrete-block homes that have probably never
had a paint makeover.

The Favela Museum doesn’t need a sign to attract attention.
The upbeat brash colors of the trippy murals that cover the walls of this
house/museum demand your attention like a blooming cactus flower.

Just what is this place?

Standing at the door, the two owners/curators Eliseo
Villegas and Elizabeth Dávila welcomed me to the Don Isidro Fabela Alfaro
Museo.

If you feel the need for wonder and a healthy injection of
inspiration, then take the libre from
Chihuahua and pay the 25 pesos (roughly $1.85) entry fee to the museo – where North American prehistory,
Mexican rural history, and a vision of homegrown environmental sustainability mesh
in magical ways.

If you are longing for a bit of magical realism, then get
off the libre and step inside the
world of Eliseo and Elizabeth.

This isn’t Macondo; it’s Favela.

Flea Markets,
Casinos, and Home in the Museum

It may have been my New Mexico plates that explain why
Eliseo and Elizabeth were immediately so friendly and welcoming. 

There was, of course, a crossborder connection here in
Favela, like most anywhere you travel in Chihuahua.

Eliseo knows better than I the road from New Mexico to
central Chihuahua. For many years, he traveled the long road to the other side
-- up to Nuevo Casas Grandes, turning northeast toward Palomas, and then on to
Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Before his truck died and his visa expired, Eliseo
used to load the back of his old truck with the arts and crafts of Elizabeth –
his painter wife and New Age explorer (Her email prefix is “oriente del cosmos.”).

The old milk jugs abandoned by the ejidatarios and Mennonite farmers around Cuauhtémoc have become
aesthetic objects in the artful hands of Elizabeth. The metal jugs were the
most popular items on sale by Eliseo at the flea markets in Albuquerque and
Santa Fe. Some of these cheerfully painted jugs – usually with flowers -- are
currently on display in the museum’s patio.

After he sold all of Elizabeth’s art creations, Eliseo would
go back on the road, heading south with a load of used appliances and other
discarded items he acquired in the north. This crossborder entrepreneur made
money coming and going – and saved money while in the north sleeping in his
truck, spending the nights in the parking lots of the Native American casinos
near Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

Entering their museum/home, I could only laugh – in
appreciation and wonder – not knowing exactly how to absorb and understand all
that was before me.

So what is this museum? Well, obviously, it’s hard to
describe – a difficulty that Eliseo and Elizabeth have also confronted.

When they founded the museum five years ago, soon after they
moved to Favela from Cuauhtémoc, Elizabeth chose upbeat, indigenous name: the
Rayénari Museo (Ray of Light Museum). But it now bears a less New Age-tinged,
more education-focused name: Museo Paleontológico Don Isidro Fabela Alfaro – a
title that links its paleontological core with its trappings of local history,
apparently designed to attract visits by school groups from Chihuahua City and
Cuauhtémoc.

Elizabeth and Eliseo have turned their four-room home into a
combination history and natural history museum – all crammed together in an
art-gallery ambience. Colorful murals cover the walls along with beautiful
paintings by Elizabeth, including a beguiling portrait of Frida Kahlo.

Huge mammoth fossils are piled on a long table that runs
down the center of the main room, and everywhere you look something else that is
equally surprising and delightful. Over five hundred fossils have been numbered
and catalogued -- and registered with the University of Chihuahua.



Mammoths were members of the elephant (Proboscidean) family, and their remains have been found in numerous North American locations, including in many Mexican sites like the one at Laguna de Bustillos. It is not clear how old the tusks, molars, rib bones, and other mammoth fossils collected at the Favela museum are. Some of these huge elephants lived a million years ago. Columbian Mammoths found elsewhere in Mexico inhabited the region from the middle the last Ice Age (Pleistocene) -- about 700,000 years ago -- to the close of the Pleistocene 10-13,000 years ago. Before visiting the mammoth museum, you may want to check out our mammoth past at:  http://www.mammothsite.com/mammoth_info.html

Don Isidro Fabela Alfaro, whose image is displayed outside
the museum, was one of early ejidatarios
and found of the ejido that now
prefers the “v” to the “b” spelling of Favela. 
There would, of course, be no Favela Museum without Favela -- not only
because where Elizabeth and Eliseo decided to live but also because of what the
ejido has done with his land since it
founding in the early 1930s.

Ejido and Environment

How did all these massive mammoth bones come to occupy the
central room of the modest home of Elizabeth and Eliseo? As I came understand,
the answer involves the land use patterns of the Favela ejido.

For many decades, the area’s ejidatorios eked out a living on the shores of this ancient basin,
which collects groundwater that seeps and flows from the Sierra Madre
Occidental. Growing corn and beans and grazing cattle in the surrounding
grasslands and forests, they led a hard life. They didn’t prosper, but they
survived, at least until the last couple decades when he diaspora to the cities
and to the United States began.

The well-organized collection of washbasins, antique
furniture, farm implements, and photos – brought to the museum by the remaining
ejidatarios and carefully displayed
in the yard  – tell this campesino story.

The lagoon and the land tell a parallel story – one of the
exploitation, abuse, and death of the grasslands, the juniper forests, and the
Chihuahuan Desert hills. Today, the land lies bare – primarily due to
clear-cutting, overgrazing and unsustainable farming.

Adrian Estrada, 57, is one of the few ejidatarios who is still trying to make a living off the land, and
he manages, he tells me, because he has many hectares of good land back in the
hills and because he has cared for his land. 
Like most close observers of the rural economy in Chihuahua, Estrada
attributes the current water crisis to global climate change and unsustainable
land management practices locally.

Estrada points to the denuded hills past the lake, saying:
“I remember when those cerros were
higher. But over the years, the wind has blown the tops of our hills and
mountains away, covering us with dust and not attracting the rains as they used
to.”

Since the land no longer gives – “No se da la tierra,”
Adrian explained -- the ejidatarios
of Favela began to sell their land about a dozen years ago. Not selling the
ownership to their properties (since nobody would want this now-sterile land)
but actually selling the earth.

Sands of Time

Playas are scattered throughout the Chihuahuan Desert. These
are hard-packed often-salty shallow basins that catch the seepage and drainage
of the monsoons. Like desert playa, Laguna de Bustillos expands after the
summer rains. But unlike the ephemeral water catchments of the playas, the
lagoon traditionally has been more like a lake, with the quantity of water and
its expanse varying according to the rain and snowfall of recent years. In some
years, after the torrential rains during the summer, the lagoon even edged up
to backyards of the surrounding communities.

It was such a year when Elizabeth and Eliseo, a married
couple, moved to Favela from Cuauhtémoc to be near the lake, which, when full
as it was then, is a thing of unusual beauty – vistas of seemingly endless
expanses of desert and water.

Although highly contaminated, the immense lagoon seemed a
miracle of nature – a large lake in the middle of the desert. But signs of
environmental sustainability and rural development gone awry could not be
missed. The wastes of the town of Anáhuac and Cuauhtémoc had long flowed into
the lagoon, including the discharges of a cellulose plant on the edge of the
lagoon. The surge of intensive agricultural enterprises by Mennonite farmers –
who have drilled for water at unprecedented depths and whose crops depend on
chemical fertilizers – have also contaminated the lagoon waters, leaving a
layer of agrochemical dust that blows off the lakebed when the waters recede.

Behind their new home, materials companies from Cuauhtémoc
were mining the land for the sand that had accumulated over the millennia in
the region’s largest natural lake.

The sand and gravel quarry that borders Favela, extending to
the backyard fences of some homes and bordering the road into the community,
represents the last gasp of the ejido.
The death of these campesino communities – created during the apex of the
Mexican Revolution’s agrarian reforms – underscores the end of an era. Yet like
the sheen of post-monsoon water in the desert playas, the era of ejidos in Mexico seems an ephemeral part
in the course of the history of the land, especially when digging deeper into
the region’s prehistoric past.

Along with the mountains of sand, the machinery uncovered a
graveyard of prehistoric life. When Elizabeth and Eliseo came to Favela, they
were horrified that the bones of mammoths and other still-unidentified
vertebrates were not being collected and preserved.

Elizabeth is the official curator of the paleontology
museum, which has the blessing of the National Institute of Art and History
(INAH) and of the lead paleontologist at the University of Chihuahua.

According to researchers from U.S. and Mexican universities,
the paleontological findings harbored in this homemade museum are largely
vertebrates of mammals that emerged in the Pleistocene, although the Favela
museum also displays fossils of numerous mid-Cretaceous invertebrates,
including oysters, gastropods, ammonites, and bivalves.

Why were so many mammoth remains found next to Favela? Some
have speculated that this area was a type of cemetery for mammoths, which
weighed as much as 12 tons.

As Elizabeth guides me through the main showroom, she tells
me: “People often say, ‘Aren’t you afraid to live in a mammoth graveyard?’ But
no, I feel safe and rooted, as if the mammoths that lived here are now protecting
us.”

But it is not just the remnants of almost incomprehensible
past that amaze the museumgoer in Favela. It’s the conjunction with what seems,
by comparison, to be almost the present. A collection of Apache daggers and arrowheads
– dating back a couple of hundred of years -- are displayed on the wall. There
are also rows of metates and morteros left behind by other indigenous
people, including the Rarámuri, who found sustenance around the ancient water
basin Also part of the unusual mix of natural and human history are sepia and
faded black-and-white photos of the early ejidatarios..

Prehistory mixes with colonial, frontier, indigenous, and
Mexican history with an ease and seamlessness that leaves you dizzy –
especially knowing that this couple as captured all this past in only five
years without any government or outside help.

A Sustainable Future

Elizabeth and Eliseo are, however, not stuck in the past.
They are also living the future of survival and sustainability in Favela.

Taking to heart the lessons of unsustainable land-use
practices and of the new challenges of climate change, Eliseo has in the last
year created yet another dimension of the museum – establishing what apparently
is the only garden in this rural area, building a greenhouse, and installing a
solar water-heating system on the museum/house’s roof, all on the cheap.

Producing their own food supply and reducing their energy
costs is, of course, one goal of this new museum display.

But Eliseo also aims to create a living museum for visiting
schoolchildren –showing how seeds flourish in the greenhouse even in winter,
how the sun not only bakes the earth but can also heat our water, and how
appropriate technology functions in the form of a simple drip-irrigation
system.

 Elizabeth and Eliseo in front of new greenhouse / Tom Barry

 Compost produced by Eliseo / Tom Barry

 Eliseo's compost pile / Tom Barry

Another World

“I don’t understand why the government and the universities
don’t help us maintain the fossils and the museum,” lamented Dávila. She and
her husband would appreciate governmental financial support, but the
government, she said, “complains that they don’t have enough resources to
help.”

“Well, neither do we. We don’t have the room nor the money to
preserve all this,” she said.

Yet, the couple doesn’t relish the thought of seeing all the
remnants of natural and human history they have so carefully accumulated carted
off to some storeroom in the capital.

“What we have here is part of the heritage of the nation,”
observed Dávila,” but it is also the heritage of all humanity. And we want this
museum to be accessible to everyone, not just a collection but a place of
learning.”

While the community of Favela has supported the
establishment of the museum, there are some who regard it as simply another way
that a poor family has found to scratch out a living in these tough times.

Eliseo and Elizabeth hope that all their work and dreams for
the museum will eventually result in a steady income stream, making possible,
among other things, for them to separate home from museum.  But they also dream of saving the pesos
needed to buy a new truck. Eliseo is eager to get back on the road again and
revive the flea market-based crossborder mercantilism that once proved so
rewarding.

As we exchanged our goodbyes, Eliseo and Elizabeth stressed
their hope in attracting more visitors from the across the border to visit
their museum/house. I promised to spread the word and to pass their way again
in the not-too-distant future.

As I was taking my leave, Eliseo handed me a strangely
heavy, odd-looking black rock, explaining that it was a meteorite found in the
desert nearby -- a “recuerdo” from
another world.

On the Libre to Cuauhtémoc

Chihuahua
Chronicles #2

Tom Barry

Most everyone heading
to Cuauhtémoc takes the toll road. It’s faster, more direct.

The cuota highway,
however, has nothing special to offer in the way of new manifestations of
northwest Mexico’s water disaster – just more dead cows on barren rangeland,
the usual new agribusiness projects that are making the desert bloom pumping
the aquifer dry, and the dusty haze that so often clouds the blue desert sky of
the Chihuahua desert.

It was the first day of July – election day in Mexico – and
I had just spent a couple of days in Chihuahua City interviewing government
officials, ranchers, and activists. Martín Solís, leader of El Barzón (a
smaller farmers’ organization founded in the mid-1990s), suggested that on my
way to Cuauhtémoc I take the libre,
which, unlike the cuota highway,
skirts Laguna de Bustillos.

The libre had all
the vistas of drought, overgrazing, and new agricultural development that the
more direct road offered, but I would miss what must surely be the most
dramatic picture of Chihuahua’s water crisis – the rapid shrinking of the
Bustillos lagoon and the associated ecological problems.

Over the past few months I have been researching the water
crisis in what William deBuys, author of A
Great Aridness, calls the “American Southwest” – the transborder region
that includes the continent’s four deserts.

In Chihuahua no one can remember drier years than the last
two.

Remains of Laguna de Bustillos /Tom Barry

View of Anáhuac across Laguna de Bustillos /Tom Barry

A shimmer of water in the distance as the two-land road
turned south toward Cuauhtémoc. Surrounding what remained of Laguna de
Bustillos were several kilometers of parched and cracked dirt – not more
overgrazed land, as I had first assumed, but the desiccated bed of the usually
immense lagoon (which was historically r 25-30 kilometers long and 4 kilometers wide).

Ringing the circumference of the largely dry lagoon lay a
collar of dirt-poor communities – what remains of a string of thirteen ejidos (land grants or commons) that
since the mid-1930s have struggled to make a living from the lake and the arid
rangelands around it.

The lagoon had been drying up so rapidly that many thousands
of trout had been caught in shrinking pools and flapped to death in puddles
that had long since evaporated. Local government officials estimated that 20-30
tons of trout lay dead in the bed of the lagoon. The massive fish kill brought
swarms of mosquitoes, precipitating a public health crisis.

For many decades, Laguna de Bustillos has been an ecological
disaster.

Whether full of water draining down from the sierras in the
west, or dry from drought and from dropping groundwater levels due to an
explosion of new wells, the Bustillos lagoon has long been an environmental
threat.

The wastes of all the surrounding villages and nearby towns,
including Anáhuac and Cuauhtémoc, have long flowed into the lagoon, badly
polluting the water. Academic researchers have repeatedly found that the water
is “highly contaminated” and reported toxic levels of various minerals and
coliform bacteria, especially fecal coliform resulting from wastewater flows
from the surrounding villages and Cuauhtémoc.

Laguna de Bustillos at La Selva / Tom Barry

While the towns have taken some measures to prevent effluent
flowing into the lagoon, researchers from universities in the United States and
Mexico say that their studies show that agrochemicals, coming mainly from
nearby Mennonite farms, now also poison the lagoon.

The immediate danger issues from the chemical-laden dust
from the lake bottom that spreads over the area on windy days. When the water
recedes, as it does every year, these contaminants blow off the lakebed,
resulting in a high incidence of allergies and respiratory problems, according
to news reports.

Yet it is outside the perimeter to the lagoon where the
tragedy of rural development in Mexico may be most evident.

Settled in the mid-1930s as part of the post-revolutionary
government’s agrarian reform, the land that rose edged up from the lagoon was
once verdant and forested. Today, however, the land is almost as bare as the
lagoon bottom, having been cleared of the Chihuahua pine and grazed to death.

La Selva, the ejido
community that lies forlornly at the end of the road that skirts the lake, is
anything but its namesake. No trees remain, but hefty tascate (juniper) timbers still stand exposed in the mud-caked
structures built by the community’s founders. 

Tascate posts all that's left of juniper forest in La Selva / Tom Barry

More than half the inhabitants of
these lakeside communities have left La Selva and its neighboring communities –
many having abandoned the land for jobs in the United States and many younger
members of the community land grant having left for Chihuahua and other cities,
never to return.

For the last dozen years the community nearest to the libre has found some economic salvation
in selling off their land. Favela, the community that abuts the libre, has over the past dozen years
been contracting with construction companies to haul off the sand deposits that
underlie the long-abused rangeland next to the town.

The several dozen homes of Favela stand between the dry lake
on one side, and on the other a sand quarry that has left the adobe and
cinder-block homes perched precariously on the edge of the excavation. 

Selling ejido land for construction materials at Favela / Tom Barry

Adrian Estrada, 57 years, who has farmed and grazed the
ejido since a young boy, says told me that never before has drought been so
intense and devastating in Favela. The lake had dried up before – during the
2002 drought – but never before, he said, had the springs in the surrounding
hills stopped flowing and for the first time the lack of moisture and
intensifying heat of the last few years is ravaging the pines in the sierras
and canyons.

For the most part, the Mexican ejidos are sad testaments to the failure of the country’s agrarian
reform – disposing often-marginal land to landless campesinos while providing little in the way of agtech,
infrastructural, or marketing support. Government support from the
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the corporatist political party whose
presidential candidate won the most votes in the July 1 election, amid charges
of fraud and vote-buying, have traditional counted on the support of the
nation’s ejidatarios because of PRI’s
patronage programs.

From the village looking out toward the disappearing lake
and out over the long-since dead grasslands of the Chihuahua Desert, the scope
of the tragedy is overwhelming.

As elsewhere in the region, it is hard to say whether the
current drought is simply part of the cycle of droughts that have shaped
Chihuahua or the onset of a new era – when, because of climate change, we can
expect ever-more intense droughts and steadily rising spring and summer
temperatures. What is clear, though, is that the ejidatarios and others who live in the vicinity have badly abused
the land and water of their high-desert home.

Massive fish kill at Laguna de Bustillos / Tom Barry

View of lagoon from La Selva / Tom Barry

Just as I was about to return to the libre and make my way to Cuauhtémoc for the night, I saw the sign
for a museum and there I found some hope and inspiration – which I have found
routinely during my travels in Chihuahua. 
(See next dispatch.)

"¡Ah, Chihuahua!"

Chihuahua Chronicles #1

(The first of a series
of dispatches about Chihuahua with a focus on the water crisis.)

New deep well drilling on Mennonite farm near Colonia Valle / Tom Barry

Seldom does a name of
a place – Chihuahua – seem to capture so much of its identity and spirit. 

Perhaps that’s due to the name’s own expressive rhythm. Or
it may have more to do with the many emotions associated with the popular
expression

“¡Ah, Chihuahua!” whose beat and varied intonations
communicate its different meaning  --
whether lament, astonishment, surprise, annoyance, or dismay.

It’s an expression that transcends the border, as so much of
Chihuahua’s history, identity, economy, and culture is. Whether in English or
Spanish,

 “¡Ah, Chihuahua!” or
simply “¡Chihuahua!”

Chihuahua is certainly of pre-Hispanic origin, but its exact
derivation is disputed. Some scholars say it’s a name linked to the land’s lack
of water, while others argue that it signifies a place blessed with water.

Dry, Sandy Place

“Xicuahua,” a Nátuatl word meaning ‘dry, sandy place,” is
the most widely accepted origin of Chihuahua.  It’s a vast state – Mexico’s largest – that is
occupied by a desert with the same name. Chihuahua comprises one-eighth of the
nation’s land. It’s a state larger than many countries, including Great
Britain.

The Chihuahuan Desert, the largest and most diverse of North
America’s four deserts – spreads through the heart of the state, dropping south
from southeastern Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas.

Heading south across the border and through Ciudad Juárez,
there is nothing but desert -- a vast aridness of mesquite, creosote bushes, tarbush,
acacia, and occasional tuffs of zacate,
mostly trimmed to ground by starving cattle. (An estimated 400,000 cattle have
died on the range during the 2011-12 drought.)

More than 375 kilometers of desert pass before the toll road
approaches Chihuahua City, the state’s capital. In the early 18^th
century the Spanish founded Santa Fe Real de Chihuahua, a villa that served as
the midway point along the Camino Real between the rich mine of Hidalgo del
Parral in the southwest to El Paso del Norte.

Although Spanish explorers had first passed through the
northern territory that is now Chihuahua in 1528, it wasn’t until two centuries
later that the Spanish and criollo
elite began to settle in the region, drawn by the silver and gold mines in the
Sierra Madre Occidental.  In the 1700s,
the outpost of Chihuahua functioned largely as an administrative center for the
region’s mines.

The Chihuahuan Desert envelops the city, extending south
into Durango and east throughout Coahuila and edging into Nuevo Leon. In the
state’s southeast corner lies a barren and barely populated expanse sometimes
called the Zona del Silencio.

In many ways, the absence of water and the resulting
harshness of the terrain seem to define Chihuahua. Aridness is its essence, and
the struggle to survive in this stark land may help explain the reputation of Chihuahuenses
– their determination, independence, pride, and infectious appreciation of
life.

When the dust blows, when the sun parches, and when not a
single tree breaks the horizon in any direction, Chihuahua certainly seems
nothing but a dry, sandy, uninhabitable land – an unending, oppressive
aridness.

Drought scene north of Ascencíon / Tom Barry

Where Rivers Meet

But there is another way to see Chihuahua: looking beyond
the aridness to see how much the state is shaped and defined by the power,
presence, and fundamental importance of water.

There are many who say Chihuahua’s name has more to do with water
than desert. Before there was the territory, city, or state of Chihuahua, there
were Rarámuris or Tarahumaras living at the intersection of two rivers, the
Sacramento and the Chuvíscar.  When the
Spanish moved in, they adopted a variation of the indigenous phrase meaning “the
place where two rivers meet.”

No longer do these two rivers meet in Chihuahua. Only the
sandy and gravel-strewn beds of the Sacramento and Chuvíscar remain – the
rivers now running only immediately after torrential downpours during the
summer’s monsoons.

Where there are (or once were) rivers in Chihuahua, there
are also corridors and centers of human life. In the north, he Rio Bravo/Rio
Grande separates Chihuahua from Texas, while the Rio Conchos (which runs
southwest from the border town of Ojinaga) is that river’s largest tributary.

You don’t, however, need to spend much time in Chihuahua to
recognize that its life depends on the sierras.  A third of Chihuahua is mountainous, and no
other Mexican state has so much forested land. The melting snow and rainwater,
which comes rushing and seeping down from the mountains into the grasslands and
desert valleys, have made Chihuahua habitable.

Drug Wars Continue,
Water Wars Begin

Over the past six years, no other state has been so closely
associated with the horrors and the intensity of the drug-war violence of Mexico.
For most people not from Chihuahua, whether inside or outside Mexico, the
images and numbers of the drug wars have come to define Chihuahua.

In Chihuahua, you often hear the charge that the foreign media
and the State Department have colluded to paint a misleading picture of a land
besieged by crime, a type of “failed state.” In fact, they assert, most people,
particularly those not involved in the drug trade and other organized crime,
life has gone much as usual.

Yet, there is no disputing the graphic images of tortured
victims and numbers of dead that have the state’s largest city the reputation
as the world’s murder capital. The tens of thousands of Chihuahua residents who
have fled the state are also testament to high levels of violence and fear that
have swept across the state like a desert dust storm that blasts all in its
path.

For whatever combination of factors (including the
resolution of inter-cartel conflict, the decrease in social cleansing carried
out by government and organized crime elements, and cyclical shift in pattern
of crime), the drug-war related violence has diminished considerably over the
last couple of years in Chihuahua, most notably in the epicenter Ciudad Juárez.

There is widespread hope in Chihuahua that the state has
seen the worst of the drug wars – a hope engendered not only by the falling
murder rates but also by the end of the Felipe Calderón sexenio and the belief that Enrique Peña Nieto (the winner of the
contested election of July 1) and the PRI will engineer a truce among the
cartels when he becomes the new master of Los Pinos in December – although Peña
Nieto has explicitly discounted the prospect of negotiating with the cartels.

Overgrazed grassland south of Nuevo Casas Grandes / Tom Barry

In any case, the drug-war crisis in Chihuahua seems likely
to be overshadowed in the near future by the escalating water crisis and
accompanying water wars.

Wherever one travels – through the heart of the great
desert, past the parched and rapidly disappearing grasslands, into the sierra,
and off the traffic corridors into the colonias
of the capital city and Juárez – life in Chihuahua is threatened. The
essential aridness that has defined the region –giving rise to the Páquime
civilization a thousand years ago and birthing the Mexican Revolution a hundred
years ago – is threatened by a still greater aridness that is marked by higher
temperatures, more severe droughts, and rapidly depleting aquifers.