GUACHOCHI, Mexico _ Isidro Baldenegro Lopez, a son of the jagged and often lawless terrain of the western Sierra Madre, had no illusions about the threats he faced from drug traffickers, illegal lumber harvesters and other criminal elements who have infiltrated the remote highlands that are home to Mexico's Tarahumara people.
But relatives and friends say the indigenous leader, who won worldwide acclaim for his defense of the region's ancient forests, could not be deterred from returning to Coloradas de la Virgen, his remote home village, a place cut off by mighty canyons and thuggish violence.
"Isidro felt like he had work to do, he had to help his people," said his sister-in-law, Maximina Carrillo Torres, who, like much of the extended family, has fled Coloradas de la Virgen. "That's what he always did. That was his life."
Baldenegro _ a 2005 recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize, the so-called Green Nobel _ was shot and killed Jan. 15 at his uncle's home in Coloradas de la Virgen, south of Sinforosa Canyon.
Two weeks later, a second Tarahumara community leader and environmental campaigner, Juan Ontiveros Ramos, was taken from his home in the same rural town and killed.
The killings, like the one last year of Bertha Caceres, an indigenous anti-dam campaigner in Honduras and 2015 recipient of the Goldman Prize _ dramatize how environmental issues have become a front-line human rights battleground in Latin America and elsewhere.
At least 185 environmental activists worldwide were killed in 2015, the highest such toll on record, according to Global Witness, a British-based watchdog group. At least 33 ecological activists were killed in Mexico from 2010 to 2015, Global Witness said.
This month Chihuahua state prosecutors said they had arrested Baldenegro's killer, whom they identified only as Romeo.
Authorities said he confessed to shooting Baldenegro in the chest, abdomen and right leg, because of longtime "personal" animosities.
But activists and relatives suspect that a crime boss deployed Romeo as a hired gunman to eliminate once and for all the meddlesome anti-logging campaigner, one of Mexico's best-known environmental advocates.
"We acknowledge that Romeo was the killer of Isidro, but not the mastermind behind the assassination," said Isela Gonzalez Diaz, an anthropologist who heads the Sierra Madre Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group. "We urge authorities to solve his murder and those of other indigenous people who have been killed for their environmental activities."
The mountain range here is named the Sierra Madre Occidental, but is often called the Sierra Tarahumara, after the indigenous group celebrated for its legendary ability to run for dozens, if not hundreds, of miles. They call themselves Raramuri, a Tarahumara word that refers to their acumen for running.
The Sierra Tarahumara is regarded as one of the world's most diverse ecosystems, a region of snow-covered peaks, pine-studded mountains and four canyons that rival the grandeur of Arizona's Grand Canyon.
"For us, the Tarahumara, all the hills are sacred because in them the (shamans) conduct their ceremonies to cure illnesses," Baldenegro said when he accepted the Goldman Prize. "All the forest, the sky, the sun, the stars, the moon we see as living beings with souls and life like us."
Activists blame endemic violence in the region on the influx of drug traffickers and allied illegal timber harvesters, among other criminal gangs, often acting with corrupt authorities. The mobs recruit as mules and foot soldiers area men who have few economic opportunities in the impoverished and drought-stricken highlands.
Crime bosses launder drug proceeds through timber and ranching operations in a region where 99 percent of the old-growth forest has already been logged, according to environmental groups.
"There has been a complete breakdown of the social fabric in some parts of the Sierra," Gonzalez Diaz said. "Criminal organizations intimidate the people and try to strip them of their land, provoking forced displacement."
The part of southern Chihuahua state where the two recent murders occurred is within Mexico's "Golden Triangle," a major cultivation zone for marijuana and the opium poppy used to produce heroin for the booming U.S. market. The region's rugged terrain, lack of law enforcement oversight and proximity to the U.S. border have made it a prime production and smuggling hub.
The triangle region, including parts of neighboring Sinaloa and Durango states, is generally regarded as turf of the Sinaloa cartel, once headed by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who was recently extradited to the United States.
Last year, Guadalupe y Calvo _ where Baldenegro and Ontiveros were killed _ led the nation in the number of opium poppy plants destroyed in Mexico's eradication program. Ranking third was Guzman's infamously lawless home region, Badiraguato, in neighboring Sinaloa state.
Guadalupe y Calvo, home to about 50,000 people spread across scores of rural settlements, was also among 50 Mexican municipalities named on a government list last year detailing where about 40 percent of the killings in the nation had been committed.
In the Sierra Tarahumara, battles have broken out both among rival gangs and between criminal groups and outgunned subsistence communities resisting infiltration, forced recruitment and illegal logging on land where communities have long kept livestock and farmed vegetables and wheat.
The violence has forced multitudes to flee ancestral land and resettle in Chihuahua city, the state capital, and elsewhere.
"We had no choice but to leave," said Cruz Sanchez Legarda, who, with dozens of others, fled the Tarahumara village of El Manzano in March 2015 after it was attacked by a group of about 60 armed and hooded men.
Sanchez, who was governor in his village, said one of his sons was wounded by gunfire in the assault, as outgunned residents resisted a seven-hour onslaught.
A month earlier, another son, Benjamin Sanchez, was killed when he refused to join a gang, according to a criminal complaint. A third son, Gilberto Sanchez, was killed in June 2016.
"There is no authority against organized crime, no one to help us," said Sanchez, a former small-plot farmer. He continues to fear for the safety of his wife and three children. "In truth, we have lost all hope of ever returning home to El Manzano."
Tarahumara children fleeing from the violence with their families often display signs of warlike trauma, advocates say.
"The kids draw pictures of hooded men with guns," said Diana Buticos, a teacher at a preschool in the generally secure town of Guachochi, where many Tarahumara have relocated. "That is what they are used to seeing."
Violence was all too familiar for Baldenegro, and it informed his activism.
His father, Julio Baldenegro, was killed in 1986 because of his opposition a local strongman's logging, according to family members. That motivated him to dedicate his life to the cause of developing nonviolent resistance against exploitation of Tarahumara lands, relatives and associates said.
In the early 2000s, he organized sit-ins and marches and a human blockade to halt logging operations. He was arrested in 2003 and spent 15 months in prison on what would later prove to be false charges of arms and drug possession, according to his official biography from the San Francisco-based Goldman Foundation.
"They won't shut me up," the jailed activist told Andrew Miller, a young scholar who visited Baldenegro while he was in custody. "They can't silence the truth," Baldenegro insisted, said Miller, now an assistant professor at First Nations University of Canada.
In recent years, associates said, Baldenegro lived mostly in various highland towns, including Guachochi, that were more secure than his secluded village. But he frequently went back to Coloradas de la Virgen to sell homemade machetes, buy and sell livestock, and meet with relatives and friends while continuing his efforts to protect native lands.
"Isidro knew his life was in danger," said Gabriel Valencia Juarez, a journalist here and friend of the late activist. "But he didn't want to leave, his life and work were in the Sierra. In the end, it cost him."
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(Special correspondent Liliana Nieto del Rio and Cecilia Sanchez of The Times' Mexico City bureau contributed to this report.)
