"It’s pretty calm up here today," says the driver of the gloss-black Ram Charger, as he fiddles with the radio dial, trying to get the station playing weepy ranchero music to come in clearly. "Maybe tomorrow it won’t be." He is wearing the ubiquitous regional uniform: ironed Levi’s, cowboy boots, and a ten-gallon hat, to go with his pencil-thin mustache.

We’re riding the Parral highway into the Sierra Madre, some 500 miles of high mesas, jagged peaks, and deep canyons that make up the most remote and rugged topography in Mexico. The drivers leans over to me and points out the window, toward the wreckage of a DC-3 jet rusting in an empty field. "One of Carrillo’s ‘angels’ that didn’t make it," he laughs. The rumor is, he tells me, that the Mexican army retrieved 300 kilos of cocaine from the crashed jet, but the crew somehow got away and the take was reported the next day as just five kilos. "That’s the war on drugs," he adds.

A little further on, the driver starts telling me about Baborigame, perhaps the most notorious narco-village in the Sierra Madre. There may be a million acres of drug plantations around the town. A known drug trafficker named Manuel Rubio even rigged the mayoral election so he would win. The cops all work for him and the army leaves him alone. When the mayor’s sister-in-law Trinidad, known as the "ugly fat woman," shot five Tarahumara Indians, she spent only three days in jail.

Between the drivers’ seat and mine is a six pack of Tecate and a cellular phone. Sometimes there’s a nine-millimeter automatic with a 50 bullet clip stashed in the passenger-side console, but not today. I decide not to ask why.

A deep canyon opens up to our left, lined in dense pine forest. "Two thirds of the remaining pine forest in Mexico is up here," the driver says. When he turn his face to look at me I catch a glimpse of his left eye, which is a watery white, the color of nonfat milk.

Now he gestures ahead of us, the mountain peaks draped in a brown haze. "The fires are always burning here. It’s part of the harvest." He catches me looking at his damaged eye a split-second too long. Embarrassed, I quickly refocus my gaze forward.

He tells me about another nearby village, Colorades de la Virgen, where three men were crucified in the church, in front of the congregation, and left there for three days. Perhaps 150 Indians have been murdered in the area around Baborigame during the last few years, he says.

The driver’s name is Edwin Bustillos, and he has been a relentless witness to the killing, torture, and burning in these mountains over the past decade or so, as narcotics growers and traffickers have followed the logging companies and their recently built roads deeper and deeper into the homeland of the Tarahumara, one of North America’s most isolated and most intact indigenous cultures. Lots of people in these mountains wish Bustillos were dead because of the work he does for the Indians. He suffered a serious spinal injury when he was run off the road by armed men in a truck. This gives him a hunch when he drives and a limp when he walks. He suffered a head injury and several broken ribs when he was beaten unconscious by five men. Two of them, he says, were police officers.

Bustillos himself is part Tarahumara; he grew up in the Sierras, attending Indian schools. He now runs an environmental group called the Advisory Council of the Sierra Madre, based in a rented three-bedroom house in the city of Chihuahua, a four-hour drive from the mountains. The council’s original intention was to organize agrarian workshops to teach the Tarahumara how to increase food production during drought years. But since the violence began in 1991, Bustillos and his staff of 13 work seven days a week trying to protect the Tarahumara culture and homeland from extinction. He often appears in court to represent Indians in land disputes. He has never lost a case. His work has brought him international attention, including the prestigious Goldman Award for environmental activism, but this sort of bravery has a price.

Besides the attacks on him, the violence has also spilled over to Bustillo’s family. His uncle, a volunteer with the council, was stabbed with screwdrivers in his shoulders, elbows, and knees, and buried alive under a thin layer of dirt. He survived for four days by eating insects and collecting the dew off the trees before a search party found him. Bustillo’s uncle doesn’t go out much anymore, and Bustillos himself rarely travels alone.

Leaning over to me one more time, Bustillos points to his eye. "This is the only thing that didn’t happen to me up here," he laughs. "It was an accident when I was a kid." Bustillos hasn’t told me yet that he has also suffered a heart attack and a stroke-or that he just turned 30 years old.

Over the centuries, the deep canyons of the Sierra Madre have attracted Pancho Villa’s rebels, Apache raiders, and generations of hikers and anthropologists. This labyrinth of rock is also home to the Tarahumara, or Raramuri, the running people. More than 60,000 of the reclusive Tarahumara, as well as a smaller population of Tepehuane, have lived in this treacherous canyon system for 600 years, their culture relatively untouched.

The Tarahumara have long been known among marathon athletes as the best distance runners in the world, able to run dozens of miles without stopping, or run a deer to death for dinner. But this area is best known to outsiders as the desolate frontier where Humphrey Bogart went looking for gold in the classic move The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. All the gold ran out long ago, but today the mountains are teeming with a new breed of prospectors, the narcotraficantes, or drug traffickers.

Although the drug lords have worked with many Sierra Madre Indians for more than 25 years, rising demand on the streets of North America has led cartel bosses to push their local chiefs to increase production. They need more and more land, and more and more labor. After centuries of fending off everyone from the Spanish conquistadors to the Jesuit priests, the Tarahumara are now in imminent danger of losing their land, their culture, and the entire ecosystem that supports them to these new invaders.

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