Only two months ago, the Wixáritari people (better known as the Huichols) were blocking the roads and closing the schools and medical facilities of San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlán in the Western Sierra Madre, in Jalisco, Mexico, where they live. The protests lasted 50 days. They were demanding the national government enforce the judicial decision of the agrarians lawsuits they had won from the ranchers of Huajimics. Nearly 2,000 hectares of their ancestral lands had to be returned to them.

Una de mis grandes experiencias de vida es la de interactuar y conocer de cerca los rituales, cultura y tradiciones de mis hermanos Wixárikas, mejor conocidos como huicholes y que a decir de Juan Negrín, han conservado a través de los siglos, una cultura independiente de la cultura mexicana mestiza desde antes de la llegada de los españoles; constituyen un grupo étnico-cultural muy sólido y coherente.

It was confirmed that the Secretary of Infrastructure and Public Works, Netzahualcóyotl Ornelas, is being detained at the meeting; as well as the Secretary of Education, Francisco Ayón López, and the Secretary of Development and Social Integration, Daviel Trujillo Cuevas; Lizana García, director of DIF Jalisco, and Mario Vladimir Avilés, director of agrarian affairs in the state; Mario Ramos Velasco, general director of the Secretariat of Rural Development (Seder); the municipal presidents of Bolaños, Juan Carlos Rodríguez Mayorga, and of Mezquitic, Misael de Haro.

Zeferino, un maestro rural en la región wixárika, regresó hace dos años de un exilio voluntario a los llanos de Xapat+a Tierra Blanca, una superficie intermontana cercana a San Juan Peyotán, que ayudó a rescatar para la comunidad indígena de San Andrés Cohamiata (Tatei-kie), dos décadas atrás. En vez de un potrero lleno de bovinos, vio un campo verde tapizado con los hermosos bulbos morados de la amapola o adormidera, Papaver somniferum, la codiciada flor del potente alcaloide del que se sintetizan la morfina y la heroína. "...entonces me senté a llorar".

“As long as the Mexican State, and particularly the Federal government, doesn't fulfill its basic commitment with the Wixarika people and keeps violating the rights of the Wixaritari, the indigenous community of San Sebastian Teponahuaxtlan will carry out different pressuring actions,” they said in a statement, at the same time they demanded the presence of President Enrique Peña Nieto in a community assembly to take place on May 9.

Lawyer Carlos Gonzalez Garcia and the assessor Cristian Chavez Gonzalez, both members of a coordination and monitoring commission of the CNI and the Indigenous Government Council (CIG), were traveling to the Huajimic community in Nayarit on April 12, along with local legal authorities, to reclaim the ancestral lands of the Wixarika (also known as Huichol in Spanish), when they were stopped and threatened by a group of about 200 people driving more than 20 cars.

“With their knives they ripped the tires of the truck owned by Benjamín Sandoval, a lawyer from Tepic who is supporting us; Cristian Chavez, our geographer, arrived, and they slashed two of his tires with knives, broke off a mirror, and tried to threaten him. They brought a rope with a noose and they put it through the window, so that I could put my head in (suggesting that I should be hanged).

On Sunday, February 25, the closing ceremony for the for the Conference on Sacred Plants in the Americas was celebrated in the Mexican lakeside town of Ajijic, Jalisco. The conference room overflowed with an audience that anxiously awaited the keynote speakers. Lead organizer, Dr. Bia Labate, motioned that the people she had invited to the front of the room were some of the indigenous tribal representatives participating in the event: medicine women and men, lawyers, small farmers and correspondents.