Protecting the Mountains and Their People.

Chihuahua City, Mexico

"Number one, we want to stop the logging," says Randy Gingrich. In the Sierra Madre, he explains, the twin demons of drugs and timber are inextricably entwined. Gingrich heads the Sierra Madre Alliance, a group fighting to protect the rich ecosystem of Mexico's remote Sierra Madre Mountains from the international lumber industry. The alliance is also working to protect roughly 60,000 Tarahumara Indians from the ravages of Mexico's pervasive drug trade.

International development money has encouraged logging with massive road-building projects into the mountains. But Gingrich and the Alliance plan to counteract the development. "We want to establish a federal certified reserve, a 1.3 million-acre protected area," says Gingrich. That sanctuary would eventually become part of a three-million-acre Sierra Tarahumara Biosphere Reserve. The reserve would employ indigenous people as trained stewards.

The Alliance is seeking economic alternatives for the Tarahumara that don't involve the timber industry or cultivation of marijuana or opium, Gingrich says. The group has also helped to market Tarahumara art such as textiles and pottery in New Mexico.

But drug barons are leading a terror campaign against the area's Indians, driving them from their communal lands. More than 150 Indians have been killed in the past decade, Gingrich says.

The Alliance and its sister group, the Advisory Council of the Sierra Madre, have helped train the Tarahumara to fight back in Mexican courts. And in April, the Tarahumara demanded that their communal property rights be recognized at a large protest in Chihuahua City. The protest was met with a police crackdown.

Gingrich says he has been officially denounced for his work with the Alliance, which in Mexico can be a precursor to imprisonment or deportation. But he's not about to stop. "There's still so much to be done," he says. "Really, it never ends."