Recently, nine members of a Mormon community in northern Mexico died in an ambush by gunmen while travelling from their home on the La Mora ranch to a nearby settlement. But how did the victims, all US-Mexican citizens, come to be in the line of fire?
The dirt road that runs through the Sierra Madre mountains is remote, rocky and cold. It is controlled by men financed by Mexico’s illegal drug trade. It’s about as hostile a stretch of road as can be found in Mexico.
Eight-month-old twins, Titus and Tiana, died alongside their two siblings, Howard Jr, 12, and Krystal, 10, and their mother, 30-year-old Rhonita Miller.
Their grandfather filmed the aftermath of the cartel ambush with his mobile phone “for the record” as he put it, his voice cracking. The disturbing footage showed a blackened and still-smouldering vehicle, the charred human remains clearly visible inside.
Further up the road, two more cars, also full of mothers and young children, were attacked an hour later. In total, nine people were killed. Most were not yet teenagers, several were still toddlers.
Dawna Ray Langford and her sons Trevor, 11, and Rogan, two, were killed in one car while Christina Langford Johnson, 31, was killed in another. Her seven-month-old baby, Faith Langford, survived the attack. She was found on the floor of the vehicle in her baby seat.
Yet the story of how the LeBarón clan came to live in such a dangerous corner of northern Mexico is not one born of unity but of division, stretching back decades.
So now a little history:
The Mormon fundamentalists started to move to Mexico around 1890 when they split with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).
Primarily, they parted ways over the question of polygamy, which the breakaway Mormon groups continued to practice while the mainstream church, based in Utah, prohibited polygamy to comply with US law.
Polygamy was illegal in Mexico too – but there was an understanding that the authorities would “look the other way about their marriage practices”, explains Dr Cristina Rosetti, a scholar of Mormon fundamentalism based in Salt Lake City.
“The families who went there were not ‘fringe families’ or ‘bad Mormons’,” she says. “These were leaders of the church; they weren’t peripheral people. Big names went down there.”
The LeBarón group’s patriarch, Alma “Dayer” LeBarón, established Colonia LeBarón in Chihuahua in the early 1920s.
In time, the Mormon community south of the border grew in number and wealth.
They purchased land in the states of Sonora and Chihuahua and set up ranches and other colonies. They thrived as pecan farmers, grew wheat, planted apple and pomegranate orchards and produced honey to sell at farmers’ markets.
By the 1950s the Mormon colonies had populations in the high hundreds to low thousands.
After Alma LeBarón died, the offshoot was led by his son Joel. In essence, it was the LeBarón Church, an independent fundamentalist Mormon denomination of which today there are several branches.
It was at this stage that the LeBarón family name took on its notoriety. Joel’s brother, Ervil LeBarón, was the second-in-command until they fell out over the direction of the church.
An unhinged and dangerous cult leader who had 13 wives and scores of children, Ervil then split and created a separate sect.
In 1972, he ordered his brother’s murder and it is believed Ervil’s followers killed dozens of others on his command, including one of his wives and two of his children. He died in prison in 1981.
Yet the victims of the massacre in Sonora had nothing to do with Ervil’s church. There is an important distinction to be drawn, explains Dr Rosetti, between surnames and religious affiliation.
“Independent Mormons have been marrying LeBaróns, and vice versa, for generations,” she clarified on Twitter. “There are three distinct Churches that fall under ‘LeBarónism’.”
The majority of Mormons living in Mexico are members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), but those in La Mora are mostly independent, Dr Rosetti said.
In recent years, they have lived a broadly peaceful existence, free from US or Mexican government interference.
Their adherence to polygamy has slowly been phased out, although some still practice it. Most have dual citizenship and travel back and forth to the US freely and frequently.
“When you say Mormon, it is a very big umbrella term that covers lots of families,” says Dr Cristina Rosetti. “The fundamentalists are a big umbrella, and so are the LeBaróns.”
Yet it seems violence has again been associated with the LeBarón name.
It isn’t easy to remain shielded from the drug war when you live in cartel-controlled regions of Mexico. The drug-related violence began to worsen in late 2005, and grew in intensity and ferocity during the military deployment ordered by former-President Felipe Calderón.
His successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, oversaw the bloodiest term in office in modern memory as the cartels first expanded, then splintered and grew new tentacles.
In 2009, the Mormons in the northern states of Mexico were warned in the clearest possible terms that they inhabited “tierra sin ley”, a lawless land.
One of their number, Benjamin LeBarón – great-grandson of the group’s founder, Alma – had spoken out about organized crime. He criticized the extortion and intimidation being exerted on local farmers and created a group called SOS Chihuahua urging towns to denounce the abuses to the authorities.
In July of that year, Benjamin was dragged from his family home by gunmen with his brother-in-law, Luis Widmar, who had tried to intervene. The next day, their dead bodies appeared on the outskirts of town having been brutally beaten with signs of torture.
The drug cartel’s message to the LeBarón family was clear: don’t meddle with us; don’t meddle with our business interests or the smooth operation of our drug routes north.
Don’t talk to the police or draw attention to things that are happening in these states. To defy such a warning will cost you your life.
It is a little over 10 years ago since those armed men killed Benjamin LeBarón. During that decade, it seems his relatives have established a sort of uneasy peace with the local cartel in Sonora, a group called Los Salazar, which is a faction of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel of the jailed drug lord, El Chapo Guzmán.
“It’s not like they can uproot an entire community,” says Anna LeBarón, Ervil’s daughter, who wrote a book about life in her father’s sect called The Polygamist’s Daughter.
Anna says she has seen the calls for the Mormons to return to the US but points out that “it isn’t that simple.” The Mormon community pre-dates the drug cartels in Sonora and, even though they now live side-by-side to some very violent people, it isn’t realistic to expect them to simply leave. They are “very integrated” into the local area, she says.
“These kinds of events give people reason to consider their options. But it’s an entire community. It’s their livelihood.”
In fact, following the massacre, some Mormons have described how the drug gangs are simply an accepted part of daily life in Sonora. They would nod as they passed by cartel gunmen, might know their names, would stop at their checkpoints and show them they were only transporting agricultural produce in their pick-up trucks.
Almost from the moment that the news broke of the attacks, the Mexican government has claimed that the killings were a case of mistaken identity. An armed group called La Linea supposedly carried out the ambush and confused the SUVs of women and children with a convoy of Los Salazar, their Sonora-based rivals, the authorities say.
Were the murders of the Mormon women and children simply an accident in the wider story of La Línea versus Los Salazar? Certainly some representatives of the LeBarón family don’t think so. They believe their loved ones were deliberately targeted:
“The question of whether there was confusion and crossfire is completely false,” said Julian LeBarón from inside the Mormon settlement of La Mora, shortly before the funerals of his slain relatives. “These criminals who have no shame opened fire on women and children with premeditation and with unimaginable brutality. I don’t know what kind of animals these people are.”
Recently the family had become more vocal again in their opposition to the cartels, especially in calling for action on the illegal traffic in assault weapons and high-velocity arms from the United States. Whether their activism was enough to provoke such cold-blooded slaughter of their children is hard to say.
Meanwhile, the Mexican government argues the gunmen allowed some of the children to escape – evidence, they say, of the cartel’s realization that a mistake had been made. The Mexican government would doubtless prefer this to be the case.
As the victims were US citizens, the murders have an international dimension which has increased the pressure on President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Until now, he has tried to avoid becoming embroiled in an ever-escalating war with the drug cartels. “Hugs, not guns”, he famously said on the campaign trail.
In the end, perhaps the question of whether the attack on the Mormon community was an error or deliberate isn’t the point. Much like the murder of Benjamin LeBarón 10 years ago, the perpetrators’ desired effect was to sow fear and to terrorize people in the region.
So what can be done?
Again, let’s turn to our history.
The Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910, ended dictatorship in Mexico and established a constitutional republic.
A number of groups, led by revolutionaries including Francisco Madero, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, participated in the long and costly conflict.
Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary leader who controlled much of northeastern Mexico during 1914 and 1915, experienced military setbacks after breaking with the Carranza government and being subjected to a U.S. arms embargo.
“Pancho” Villa, turned against the new president, claiming with some justification that Carranza was not making good on his reform pledges.
Villa himself was a rascal, an enormous self-promoter and an occasional champion of the underprivileged. Villa was initially engaged in a struggle on behalf of the government against rival forces.
He became the darling of Hollywood filmmakers and U.S. newspapermen by granting open access to his campaigns. Some claimed that he actually staged battles for the cameras and publicity.
Villa’s horizons broadened considerably when he began to seek control of the Mexican government for himself. His method was to weaken Carranza by provoking problems with the United States.
On January 10, 1916, his forces attacked a group of American mining engineers at Santa Ysabel, killing 18. The Americans had been invited into the area by Carranza for the purpose of reviving a number of abandoned mines.
Pancho Villa’s men struck next on March 9, by crossing the border to attack Columbus, New Mexico, the home of a small garrison. The town was burned and 17 Americans were killed in the raid.
War fever now broke out across the United States. Senator Henry F. Ashurst of Arizona suggested that “more grape shot and less grape juice” was needed, a none-too-subtle criticism of the teetotaling Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan.
The Wilson Administration supported Carranza as the legitimate Mexican head of state and hoped that U.S. support could end Mexican political instability during the revolutionary period. So basically, while several revolutionary Mexican leaders were pushing for control of the country, the US stepped in and supported the guy we wanted (Carranza).
The installation of the Venustiano Carranza regime in Mexico City did not result in lasting tranquility with the United States. Events became so chaotic that the State Department issued a warning to U.S. citizens living in Mexico to leave the country. Thousands took the advice.
Prior to the Mexican Revolution, the U.S.-Mexico border had been only lightly policed. The instability of the revolution led to an increased U.S. military presence, while U.S. citizens along the border often sympathized or aided the various factions in Mexico.
In response, the Wilson Administration decided to order a punitive raid into Mexico with the goal of capturing Pancho Villa.
Because of earlier, more minor raids, Wilson had already considered ordering an expedition across the border, and so directed Newton Baker, the Secretary of War, to organize an expedition specifically to pursue Villa.
Wilson also attempted to appease Mexican President Venustiano Carranza by claiming that the raid was conducted “with scrupulous regard for the sovereignty of Mexico.” Nevertheless, Carranza regarded Wilson’s actions as a violation of Mexican sovereignty and refused to aid the U.S. expedition.
The task of capturing Villa was given to U.S. Army General John J. Pershing (Pershing’s Aid De Camp was Captain George C. Patton).
Pershing’s forces entered Mexico, but failed to capture Villa. Instead, they encountered significant local hostility, and engaged in a skirmish with Carranza’s forces who felt the US was trying to take control of Northern Mexico.
In the face of mounting U.S. public pressure for war with Mexico, Wilson and Secretary of State Robert Lansing hoped to improve relations with Carranza, and that the issue of border raids could be solved by negotiations with the Carranza government.
Wilson selected U.S. Army Chief of Staff Hugh L. Scott to negotiate with the Mexican government representative Alvaro Obregon. Scott and Obregon entered into negotiations in Juarez and El Paso, but failed to produce an agreement on anything more concrete than further talks.
Meanwhile, on May 6, another cross-border raid by Pancho Villa’s guerillas occurred in Glen Springs, Texas, causing more U.S. troops to enter into Mexico to pursue the raiders.
Tensions flared again when U.S. troops pursuing Villa instead clashed with Carranza’s forces at the Battle of Carrizal on June 21, resulting in the capture of 23 U.S. soldiers.
From March 16, 1916, to February 14, 1917, an expeditionary force of more than fourteen thousand regular army troops under the command of “Black Jack” Pershing operated in northern Mexico “in pursuit of Villa with the single objective of capturing him and putting a stop to his forays.”
Another 140,000 regular army and National Guard troops patrolled the vast border between Mexico and the United States to discourage further raids.
By April 8, 1916, General Pershing was more than four hundred miles into Mexico with a troop strength of 6,675 men. The expedition set up its headquarters in the town of Colonia Dublan and its supply base on a tract of land near the Casas Grandes River.
Demonstrators in Mexico marched in opposition to the U.S. expedition. Aware of Wilson’s anger over the recent battle, Carranza wrote to Wilson on July 4, suggesting direct negotiations.
Wilson and Carranza agreed to the establishment of a Joint High Commission, which met at New London, Connecticut on September 6.
The Commission issued a statement on December 24, 1916 which stated that U.S. troops could remain in Mexico if their presence was necessary, but otherwise should withdraw.
Despite several close calls, Villa always managed to escape the larger and better-equipped invaders. An exasperated Pershing cabled Washington: “Villa is everywhere, but Villa is nowhere.”
The chase lasted nine months and finally ended in February 1917, when Wilson summoned the soldiers home in anticipation of imminent hostilities with Germany at the outbreak of World War One.
So there you have it folks.
Our history once again raises a lot of questions.
I often wonder what would have happened had WWI not broken out and the US decided to keep our troops 400 miles into Mexico.
A 400 mile buffer zone would sure end a lot of our problems on our southern border.
What about Trump offering to send troops into Mexico? Obviously it has been done in the past, by of all people, a liberal Democrat, President Woodrow Wilson!
Finally, what about declaring the drug cartel a terrorist organization. In 1915 Pancho Villa was ruling northern Mexico just like a modern drug lord causing harm not only to US citizens, but the Mexican people as well.
I am sure you have thoughts on this as well.