My mother, then the principal of Chimayó Elementary, can still picture the swarm of helicopters hanging low on the skyline when she drove to school that morning.
The bust has hung like a specter over Chimayó ever since. It wasn’t lost on me that the raid happened on the day the Archangel Michael is said to have defeated Lucifer in a war over heaven. At 13, I saw our communities become a spectacle. I grew up eight miles northeast, in an even tinier village called Truchas, and watched the news coverage from our living room that night. This story isn’t just a news headline to me it’s personal history. “I was too hurt and sad and confused” to know, she says. Francesquita says her grandparents’ place still stands on the other side of town, across the arroyos that overflow in the monsoon season and State Road 76, where lowriders cruise on Sundays. Just down the road is the seven-acre Barela compound, where dealers once plied their trade: Confiscated by the federal government, it’s now overgrown with mullein, wild lettuce, juniper and cota plants among half-buried car parts and tangled barbed wire.
“Beautiful land, ugly addictions,” as The Los Angeles Times put it.įrancesquita describes the day of the bust during a recent visit to her mother’s house, a single-wide in Chimayó, located off a labyrinthine county road lined with soaring cottonwoods, thick-walled adobe homes and a morada, a meeting house for a religious brotherhood. This wasn’t the standard news story about addicts in urban hellscapes: It was about a Hispanic hamlet with breathtaking vistas. The national media pounced at the opportunity to narrate Chimayó’s demise: The village became a news sensation, drawing reporters from across the country, eager to mine an exotic new narrative about heroin. At dawn, 150 law-enforcement officers, including DEA and FBI agents, descended on the town, beat down doors, and in one instance shot and killed pet dogs in their determination to find suspects in the heroin trade. If nothing else they remember the sounds - the sirens and helicopters - and the overwhelming feeling of confusion. “I just wanted so badly to run to my dad and lay on him and tell them, ‘Please don’t take him! Please don’t take him.’ But I couldn’t - I was frozen.”Īlmost everyone in Chimayó, a rural New Mexico village located halfway between the art meccas of Santa Fe and Taos, can recall a fragment of that morning. “I sat on the couch watching my dad being slammed to the floor, guns pointing at him, at my grandma, even one at me,” Francesquita, now 30, recalls. “GET DOWN ON THE FLOOR!” they shouted, assault rifles drawn. Within seconds, men in SWAT gear battered down the door of the house. “Good morning, baby,” he said, placing his index finger over his mouth and listening as if he heard movement outside. She was getting ready for school that morning when she came across him, looking worried. The day the war on d rugs came to Chimayó.įrancesquita, 8 years old at the time, had slept overnight at her grandparents’ house, where her father was living.
Francesquita Martinez’s words are slow and deliberate, perhaps a result of the methadone she’s taking to kick her addiction, perhaps because she is lost in the memory of Septemthe Archangel’s day.