Chiva: After the Bust

Editor's Note: The following is excerpted from Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade (New Society Publishers), by Chellis Glendinning. As this chapter begins, a massive drug bust has just netted the town's biggest dealers.

The overdoses continued. In fact, we witnessed a surge after the bust. The reason? Lines of distribution had been cut, and the tecatos, desperate for their fixes, got creative: they began to cook up a deadly concoction of cocaine and the prescription opiate Lortab.

A stranger in a pickup truck honked his horn in my driveway. That's how you make your presence known around here: you honk your horn. The man's plaid flannel shirt was buttoned up all wrong, and the bench seat of his Chevy was littered with crushed Bud Light cans. Where are you from? I asked. He hesitated. Ojo Caliente. It was a village a good 25 miles to the north.

The man locked his frantic eyes to mine. "Help me," he pleaded. "I need chiva."

I am still horrified at what I did next for I was momentarily filled with the bravado of having beat the dealers out of town. "You know where the Santuario is?" I asked. "Drive out this dirt road. Turn right, then right again at Juan Medina. Go pray for yourself."

Inside the house, on my desk, lay a neon-orange flyer with phone numbers to call to get help. I crumpled into a heap of sobs for my insensitivity.

In October Española Hospital treated nine people for overdoses; two died. The deaths continued into 2000. "Physiologically there's nothing more addictive to the human body than heroin," Española's police chief Wayne Salazar told the Albuquerque Journal. "We see (heroin addicts withdrawing) here in jail. It's just traumatic." A Chimayoso named Alfonso Martinez succumbed in January. Over in Chamita Thomas Rodriguez's girlfriend discovered his cold body lying next to a spoon cooker and syringe. Upon returning home from her own rehab, Norman Valdez's wife found him dead of a morphine overdose; he had been in recovery at Amistad. Carlos Martinez died from a mix of heroin, cocaine, and alcohol. Friends dropped Gilbert Trujillo at the Española Hospital ER after they discovered him unconscious in an arroyo. There were women too: Cathy Chacón passed out on a couch at the Santa Clara Apartments. Lisa Tafoya died up the mountain in Chamisal.

Of the seven guys he used to shoot up with, Joaquin offered, he was the only one still alive.

Something else happened. It was as if invisible fingers had been busily drumming at the edge of the action and then, the moment the dealers were cleared out, they sprung. Here we were barely disentangling ourselves from the clench the dealers had had on us. Before Sept. 29 precious few in the village had even been able to form words around the machinations behind the robberies. Few had dared to name the dealers outloud or even speak the word chiva.

And then -- lo and behold, big and bold -- New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson showed his hand: he wanted to legalize heroin, cocaine, and marijuana.

His thinking was based on the growing failure of the effort to suppress drug abuse by interdiction abroad, intercepting shipments at the borders, and arrests of dealers and users at home. In 1972, the federal anti-drug budget was $101 million; in 1980 it was roughly $1 billion; by 2004 the amount had shot up to $30 billion,92 with the 50 states spending that much again. And these expenditures only covered the enforcement of drug laws; they did not include the fiscal impact of criminalization on the public health and criminal justice systems. Still, with all the outlay of monies, drugs did not dry up in the U.S. As retired San Jose police chief Joseph McNamara reported at a 1999 tribunal on narcotics, they became cheaper, purer, and more plentiful.