Review: Living under 'God's Middle Finger'

God's Middle Finger

Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre

By Richard Grant

The Free Press; 288 pages; $15 paperback

The Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz famously lamented his country's destiny for being "so far from God, so close to the United States." Nearly a century later, U.S. demand for drugs plagues Mexico's forbidding Sierra Madre mountain range with a shockingly violent illicit drug trade. Mexican traffickers now supply 90 percent of the drugs consumed in the United States.

The murder rate in some towns in the western Sierra Madre is several times that of the worst inner cities here. And these rates include only those murders that are reported. Drug-related murders are rarely reported because family members are made to fear for their lives, and officials, from police officers to judges to elected representatives, are often on the payroll of the cartels. In the town of Álamos, where just 23,000 people live, roughly 100 murders are committed each year.

Some murders are perpetrated by drug traffickers against peasant farmers, many of whom are indigenous Tarahumara or Guarijío Indians, who refuse to grow marijuana. Others are committed by police who are insufficiently bribed by the farmers or, less often, the traffickers. Then there are the soldiers, occasionally sent in by the Mexican government to give the semblance of fighting drug trafficking. The soldiers, too, are often bought off, or else they cut down fields of marijuana only to sell the confiscated drugs to the traffickers.

But as journalist Richard Grant shows in his fascinating, at times gut-wrenching, book, reality is more nuanced than such simple tales of good versus evil. Equal parts travelogue, diary and ethnography, "God's Middle Finger" tells the story of Grant's journey through the Sierra Madre, the individuals he meets along the way, the histories he discovers, and the murky reality of life there. Indigenous leaders boldly keep drug-linked loggers from destroying sacred old-growth forests, only to tear the trees down themselves and use the money to fund their own mini-cartel. Poor farmers, forced by the drug cartels to grow marijuana, begin violent feuds among themselves that wipe out entire families. The true story of the Sierra Madre, Grant learns, is, "horribly twisted and complicated, shot through with apparent contradictions and paradoxes, intractable problemas, devil's bargains, snakes in the grass, fantastic levels of corruption, disorganization, dissimulation, and sheer drunken madness."

The problemas indeed seem intractable. The initiatives of the Mexican government, prodded by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, often make things worse. The attempts to eradicate fields of marijuana and opium, and to capture the leaders of the major cartels, have led to their splintering into smaller cartels and gangs. These smaller groups now fight each other for control of territories and market share, and violent crime has surged as a result. Similarly, when a government campaign to eradicate corruption fired hundreds of crooked police officers, the unemployed cops turned to making a living as hit men for the traffickers.

While Grant learns the complexities of life in the Sierra Madre, he also discovers something about himself along the way. He starts his journey as a naive thrill-seeker, looking to "live an eventful, unpredictable life with as much personal freedom as possible, and have a few adventures along the way." And his early forays into Mexican highland culture elicit only incredulity and condescension. It seems illogical that assassins and drug traffickers would pray to their own patron saint, Jesús Malverde. Or that a chaotic annual festival for the Virgin of Balvanera in a small Sonora town includes "a solemn religious festival, a drunken party, a social occasion, and a flea market, all rolled into one." Grant is reminded that the French surrealist André Breton, on his visit to Mexico, concluded, "Our art movement is not needed in this country."

After weeks in the Sierra Madre, though, Grant also realizes his own contradictions. "Here I was," he writes, "getting my kicks and curing my ennui in a place full of poverty and suffering, environmental and cultural destruction, widows and orphans from a slow-motion massacre."

And it is not long before the cowboys-and-Indians thrill of the Sierra Madre dissipates. "At first it seemed amusing and outlandish," he writes, "the way they growled and swaggered and cursed and talked about their testicles and each other's mothers all the time. ... Then it got wearying, the constant crude sexual bantering and self-aggrandizement of the macho, his contempt for women, his bristling pride and enjoyment of violence."

Much of this violence and machismo, Grant seems to conclude, had always been a fact of life in the Sierra Madre. But this is no doubt an overstatement. The Sierra Madre may be where Geronimo made his last stand, where the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa was assassinated, and where cannibalistic indigenous tribes once lived and fought, but the drug trade has surely made life harder. It's no wonder so many Mexicans from the Sierra Madre make the difficult trek across the U.S. border, following much the same path as the drugs they flee. For them, the U.S. economy is both a curse and an opportunity.