The Mennonite connection isn’t as mysterious as it may appear. By the late 1980s the Mennonites’ desert community of Cuauhtemoc, 200 miles south of El Paso, had grown to 50,000 people. In any group that size-even members of a pious, plain-living Protestant sect–some people are bound to stray. President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s economic reforms promised an economic boom, and some Mexican Mennonites developed a yearning for video players, pickup trucks and fancy houses. But droughts, and finally the peso crisis, put the squeeze on the Mennonite farmers. They were ripe for recruitment as couriers by big dealers, who were constantly on the lookout for new seams.
The Mennonites are divided over how to fight the drug scourge. The sect’s elders can no longer deny that a problem exists: marijuana has been found growing in some members’ fields, and Mexican police say they suspect that two fatal shootings this year were tied to the “Mennonite mob.” “It’s been hard to watch more than a few Mennonite kids become rowdy vagrants,” says one cop. Some Mennonites now have broken with tradition to embrace U.S.-style PR techniques. “We can’t fight this until we start bringing it out in the open like modern people,” says Cornelio Peters, whose son Enrique, 32, was caught smuggling marijuana last summer after his cheese business went bust. Among the anti-drug campaigners is Mennonite talk-show host Abram Siemens. “The vices of 100 out of 50,000 people aren’t going to ruin the community,” he says. “In fact, it might end up making us stronger.” But public awareness won’t eliminate the profit motive. The best hope may be that the authorities’ heightened surveillance of the brethren will raise the stakes–or that the rains that have recently returned to Cuauhtemoc will ease the farmers’ misery.
