TIERRAS COLORADAS, Mexico — Just after Christmas, drug hitmen rolled into the isolated village of Tierras Coloradas and burned it down, leaving more than 150 people, mostly children, homeless in the raw mountain winter.
The residents, Tepehuan Indians who speak Spanish as a second language and have no electricity or running water, had already fled into the woods, sleeping under trees or hiding in caves after a raid by a feared drug gang on December 26.
Using murder and intimidation, rival cartels are fighting for control of this drug-growing area. A group of armed men came searching for a man rumored to be cultivating marijuana.
He died trying to defend himself, but not before killing a suspected drug trafficking leader, andresidents were sure the gang would return for revenge.
“We saw they killed one person and we thought, ‘Now they are going to kill everyone.’ So we ran,” said Jose, a village leader, standing in front of the charred remains of the one-room pre-school, with mangled desk chairs strewn outside.
On December 28, two days after the initial raid, a column of 50 to 60 men, some in military-type uniforms and ski masks, filed on foot down a steep mountain road and torched three dozen homes — about half the village — as well as two schools, 17 trucks, the radio receiver and the community store.
The attack on Tierras Coloradas is one of the most dramatic examples yet of a still largely hidden phenomenon of Mexico’s drugs war: people forced from their homes by the violence.
“The situation is out of control,” Durango state prosecutor Ramiro Ortiz said in an interview at his office last week. “Organized crime has no limits any more. They don’t respect women or children. It’s a situation of total brutality.”
President Felipe Calderon’s four-year-old army-led campaign against the cartels has shaken up the balance of power in Mexico’s criminal underworld and sparked a wave of turf wars, sometimes trappingcivilians in their midst.
Tierras Coloradas lies in the heart of a marijuana and opium poppy growing region known as Mexico’s “Golden Triangle,” and is more than 11 hours by car on poor roads and dirt tracks from Durango’s state capital.
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