The Raramuri indigenous people, with a population of about 60,000, are the largest tribe in the Republic north of the Valley of Mexico. With quiet, individualistic determination they cling to the sheer rockslide flanks of some of the most remote barrancas of Mexico, surrounded by a demanding environment in which even the smallest error can be dangerous, a large mistake, fatal.

The disagreement, debate, argument and name-calling regarding the continued public display of the Confederate Flag on government properties – and widely accepted lies about the Confederacy – continues (with a heavy load of irony) today.  This in the wake of killings of nine parishioners at South Carolina’s  Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church June 17.  South Carolina was the first state to secede from the United States on December 20, 1860.  And continues to be the most recalcitrant.

We lay well up on a rising slope, chins on our crossed arms.  It was Father’s Day in the United Sates that morning.  But at that time in Mexico nobody paid that any attention.  Fathers didn’t seem to count.  “You see anything?” my companion said.   A hawk soared high on still wings noting us as he scanned the mountainside.  I nodded at the bird.  “There’s nothing to see.” 

This week, the state of Veracruz reported more than 3,000 homicides in just four years, while Guerrero earlier counted hundreds of slayings in a matter of days. A cue for large numbers of Mexicans to shed their hopefully held complacency.  

Unsurprisingly, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) came out on top in Mexico’s midterm election June 7.  

Don Elizar Dueñas got mad when a Hiuchol indian from the Rancheria Nayarit suddenly appeared.   He stood several feet from the front door, silently waiting in the sun-rinsed morning mist for Alma Rosa Molinas.