Desert drug remains a small-town attraction amid Mexico's raging drug war.
October 23, 2005 - statesman.com
REAL DE CATORCE, San Luis Potos? -- The fleshy, button-shaped plants barely peek from the desert floor, but Enrico Baldella knew how to scout for them. Walking gingerly through waist-high cacti and mean thorns, he quickly spied a cluster of peyote, a hallucinogenic plant considered sacred by some Mexican Indian tribes.
"There's a colony of them," said Baldella, an Italian expatriate who has lived in Mexico for years. He knelt and sliced an inch-high, palm-size button carefully from its long subterranean root. It may have taken a decade for it to reach this size.
Before leaving, Baldella built a small fire and coaxed smoke toward the remaining colony, bowing his head and murmuring prayers he learned from Mexican Indian and American Indian acquaintances.
Peyote (pronounced pay-O-tay) is an attraction for Mexican, American and European tourists in Mexico's San Luis Potos? state, on the southern edge of the vast Chihuahua Desert.
Not everyone who visits Real de Catorce, an old mining and tourist town, is looking to get high. But the little mountaintop town has a reputation for being a place where one can readily -- albeit illegally -- seek peyote to eat fresh, dried or mixed into a drink. Under the watch of guides such as Baldella, tourists can descend to the desert valley below, harvest and chew the plant, and contemplate their surroundings for hours in an altered state of consciousness.
The tolerance for peyote experimentation is an odd juxtaposition to Mexico's violent drug cartel wars. Peyote, which is also found in the deserts of Texas, grows naturally. It isn't of interest to traffickers because, police say, there is no big money in it.
In contrast, more than 900 people have been killed this year alone as organized crime cartels battle over the lucrative trafficking of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana into the United States.
Mexico's Huichol (wee-CHOL) Indians have consumed peyote for millennia as part of a traditional spiritual pilgrimage they make from Mexico's Pacific coast to San Luis Potos?. Mexican law permits the use, an exemption that allows the Indians to collect and consume the cactus as long as they don't possess substantial amounts for the purposes of trafficking.
In theory, non-Indians are prohibited from possessing any peyote and can face stiff sentences if convicted of trafficking large quantities. But the law doesn't seem to deter on-the-spot experimentation.
Residents of Real de Catorce complain that local police sometimes extort money from tourists if they discover the outsiders have a few buttons in their pockets.
Environmentalists, though, seem more concerned that peyote tourism is endangering the slow-growing plant.
"In general, there's always been quite a bit of tolerance when it comes to peyote," said Pedro Medellin, a professor at the University of San Luis Potos? who in 1994, as a state ecology coordinator, helped turn a swath of peyote-laden desert here into a state protected area.
Communities allow outsiders to enter the protected zone as long as they present identification and submit to a search when they leave to make sure they haven't loaded up their cars with peyote.
On highways here, soldiers regularly search vehicles at roadblocks for weapons and drugs. In the past three months, only one person has been detained, for possessing about 30 buttons of peyote, enough to trigger an accusation of suspected trafficking, said Enrique Buendia, the San Luis Potos? representative of the federal attorney general's office.
The accused could face a minimum sentence of 10 years or up to 25 years in prison, Buendia said.
Officials in the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey declined to respond to requests for information about American citizens arrested for peyote possession.
"It's a small number of people who do this," Buendia added, denying that peyote is the main draw in the area.
"It's a great place to come to just rest, to get away from the summer heat," said Natalie Lake, a midwife from Austin who has close friends who live in the town.
Hotel owner Humberto Fernandez, a fountain of knowledge about Real de Catorce, said that, on occasion, he's had to deal with youths who got high, regretted it and wandered back to his hotel to request help.
"Once, a big blond guy came and said he wanted to search for the plant by himself. He would come back every night, sunburned and disappointed," said Fernandez, who has been invited to peyote ceremonies with the Huichol.
"Some people think they can do it on their own," the hotel owner said with a shake of his head.
Huichol Indian Martina de la Cruz, 51, sells beaded jewelry and boxes emblazoned with peyote designs. She smiled at inquiries about the plant. She's heard the questions before.
"Where do you think we get the design ideas for the things we make?" she said. "We all consume it."
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