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Peter Frickwright (Host): This is the �����ԹϺ��� Podcast

One of the most beautiful migrations in North America, is also one of the most delicate.

Each May, Monarch butterflies move north from their wintering grounds in Mexico, arriving in backyards across the country—a flurry of bright orange that announces the coming of summer.

Then, in the fall, they travel back south, some flying 3000 miles on updrafts and air currents.

Scientists have pretty much always known that butterflies flew south in the winter, but for a long time, where the butterflies went to spend the winter was a mystery.

Then, in the early 70’s, a team of scientists followed the monarch's path to the Sierra Madre mountains in Michoacan Mexico. Here’s a Nova documentary from the 80s:

NOVA: …Having crossed half a continent, tens of millions of butterflies converge toward a pinpoint on the map of Mexico, a 30 by 50 mile area of high mountains and Spanish colonial towns.��

Peter: Monarch butterflies are actually the only butterfly that migrates both north and south. In the west they move up and down the Pacific coast or go to Colorado and over-winter in California. In the eastern US, though, they travel from as far away as Canada and New England to cluster in basically this one patch of forest.

At least for now.

NEWS 1: The Monarch Butterfly was officially designated as endangered

NEWS 2:�� Over the last several decades, scientists estimate that the population has dropped between 20 and 90 percent.

NEWS 3: This year's count was so low, experts are concerned they could disappear completely.

Peter: The threats facing Monarchs are nothing new. Habitat loss, pesticides, climate change. The same things that threaten a lot of species. But recently, these two reporters, Zach Golbaum and Michael May, brought us these two stories about Monarchs that were just not what you expect from stories about species conservation.

They were stories about people standing up to large, powerful groups, for reasons that are not the usual reasons environmentalists stand up to power.

So, over the next four weeks, we’re bringing you the two most hardcore stories you have ever heard about butterflies.

The first story, like the migration, begins where the monarchs hibernate in mexico. you’ll hear Zach first, then Michael.

Zach Goldbaum: Everyone comes to the annual fair near Ocampo, Mexico. Families. Cowboys. Politicians. Dozens of state police, and the leaders and foot soldiers of local criminal groups, who take a piece of the action.

Michael May: It’s a true Michoacan experience. For a few days in the middle of January, a field in this tiny hamlet in the foothills of the Sierra madre mountains is transformed into a massive party. White tents are erected in the dirt, goats hang by their feet from trees, ready to be turned into birria. Banda music tests the limits of the pa system.

Zach: On January 13th, 2020, the final day of the fair, a red compact car pulled into the grass lot. It was driven by Homero Gomez Gonzalez. He was 50 years old. Thick mustache. Salt and pepper hair. In a neatly pressed, white guayabera shirt.

Michael: Homero is somewhat of a celebrity in this part of Mexico. Famous for helping transform his sleepy, mountain town of El Rosario into a bustling tourist hub. That's because the mountains here hold one of the natural world’s most spectacular sights: it’s the winter home of the monarch butterfly.

Homero: Buenas tardes, amigas, amigos, los saludos desde el santuario, el rosario el más grande del mundo .

Zach: Homero posted this video to Twitter on the day before the fair. He was surrounded by hundreds of butterflies. They're landing on him, his arms outstretched as if offering a bounty. He's inviting us to witness the Monarchs. Or has he calls them:

Homero: — las novias del sol–��

Zach: The brides of the sun.

Homero: – el alma de los muertos–��

Zach: The souls of the dead.

Homero: simplemente patrimonio de la humanidad.��

Zach: Simply the heritage of humanity.

Michael: Homero had business at the fair. With local politicians. He was there to lobby for the butterflies. and his pitch? It was always the same. If the government can provide more resources for the local butterfly sanctuary, it would pay off in tourist dollars that benefit everyone.

Homero arrived at the fair around 5pm. Just in time to watch the night’s main event: the horse race.

Zach: Throughout the night people gambled. They drank. They sang. And as the fair wound down, Homero wandered off. Then, the king of the monarchs disappeared.

Michael: His wife woke in a panic — Homero wasn’t there. Within days, news had traveled all over the world — another one of Mexico's environmentalists was missing.

Zach: I’m Zach Goldbaum.

Michael: And I’m Michael May.

Zach: This week, the disappearance of the Monarch King.

Amado Gomez: My brother Homero… The truth is he was always a leader.

Michael: This is Amado Gomez, Homero’s younger brother.

Amado: Homero was the oldest in the family, and he was a leader since he was a kid. There were 10 of us. But he was a smart kid, like a different child. That is, with a lot of strength, with a lot of attitude, with a lot of desire to do things. Restless. We had a very humble childhood, but very happy and always in touch with the forest, with nature, with animals.

Michael: When amado and Homero were kids, their community relied on income from mining and logging.

Amado: Everyone at that time lived off the forest and forestry exploitation. My family worked with the ejido, which had its own sawmill.

Back then,�� there were a lot of butterflies.�� Plenty of butterflies. The forests were a little bit more dense, and we played a lot with the monarch butterflies.

Back in the day we thought that the butterfly was a plague, but little by little we became aware of the natural phenomenon that we have here, in the forests of Michoacán. And well… 20 or 30 years ago… everything totally changed.

Michael: In 1986, the Mexican government set out to create the butterfly sanctuary – a sprawling 139,000 acre area that included El Rosario.

In America, when we created the national parks, we removed indigenous people from the land. but the government of Mexico did not. The community had the right to stay, it’s enshrined in the Mexican constitution.

So the government faced a dilemma. How could they preserve the forest, when people used the forest to survive?

What they ended up doing was imposing strict limits on what people could do. Most logging was outlawed. Small farms were allowed, but they couldn’t expand into the forest.

Mining, agriculture, and logging were the only ways to earn a living.

Zach: Around the time that Mexico established the sanctuary, Homero had gone off to college. He returned in the early 90’s to find his community at a crossroads.

Abel Cruz: There were big changes once it became a protected reserve.

Zach: This is Abel Cruz Reséndiz, a friend of Homero’s and resident of El Rosario.

Abel: And ever since then, uh, the reserve has been more protected. The forest is also supervised, uh, particularly to create zones and areas in which, uh, people cannot chop off trees in order to, for instance, cultivate anything. And obviously there were some people who got upset…

Zach: Abel is a local ejidatario – or a communal land owner… and in order to understand how much power these local communities have, you have to understand the concept of ejidos.

After the Mexican revolution, the newly formed government created a system of communal land. The ejidos. These ejidatarios, like Abel, inherit control of the land.

And some of the ejidatorios resisted the reserve’s rules. They kept logging and expanding their farms.

Michael: Homero was also an ejidatorio, but he saw things differently. He looked at the new reserve and saw a phenomenon that could be harnessed to improve everyone's lives in El Rosario.

He laid out his vision: the butterfly tourists could transform the local economy. But first they had to drive out illegal loggers and pressure the government to build enough roads to handle the tourists.

Abel: I met Homero Gomez when I was elected. He was a very, very active colleague.

Michael: That’s Abel Cruz again.

Abel: He gave ideas at meetings, moved people, saying, well, let's ask the government for this, let’s organize to demand improvements and ask them to fix our roads, because these roads were really bad, in really bad conditions.

Zach: In 1997, Homero attended the north american conference on the monarch butterfly nearby in Morelia. it was the hottest ticket in town… if you’re into that sort of thing. He shared the stage with an old college friend. another agricultural engineer named Silvano Aureoles.

Silvano: …egresado de una escuela forestal,�� eh, algo, aprendí. No crean que también. Sé mucho, pero��

Zach: Homero and Silvano both urged the government to invest in the reserve. Homero is quoted as saying: “the law must be reworked based on an understanding of how it impacts people.”

But over the following decades, Homero and Silvano went in separate directions. Silvano went into politics and became the governor of Michoacan.

Homero became an advocate – and he constantly, relentlessly pressed Silvano to do more for the reserve.

Homero: Come come! All of you, come this way!!

Zach: At one point Homero convinced Abel and other ejidatarios to head to Michoacan's capital, Morelia, to protest. which made him a bit of a folk hero amongst the ejidatarios… but it also put him on the radar of the local police and politicians…

Michael: homero’s most intense fight took place in the forests themselves. here’s his brother amado again:

Amado: There began to be organized groups of loggers that he faced and prevented from continuing to work in the area of the Monarch Butterfly. It was years of fighting, with a lot of courage, with a lot of bravery, with great enthusiasm, every day. It was one of the main struggles here at the regional level with the authorities.

Michael: When he wasn’t trying to push the government to pay for infrastructure projects, he was trying to get their help in his lonely fight against illegal logging. Homero would organize small groups of ejiditarios to hunt down loggers.

The loggers are after the oyamel trees that the butterflies hibernate on. Each can grow over 30 meters tall and can fetch around $20,000 pesos – that’s more than $1,000. ��

Amado: When the goal is to eradicate illicit logging, you have to be very careful, walk quietly to be able to hear the motorcycles, chainsaws, to hear the cars…

Michael: On one of these nights, a local news outlet in Michoacan followed Homero and a group of a dozen ejiditarios into the woods.

Michael: They left at four in the afternoon and walked through the night. Armed with only flashlights, they hiked the steep slope of the sanctuary. By 2 or 3 in the morning, the temperature had dropped below freezing. It's difficult work. Here’s Homero that night:

Homero: Silvano, the governor, made a commitment. But he failed.��

Michael: He says “Silvano, the governor, made a commitment. but he failed”.

Homero: Let’s see if we find any of them around here now.��

Michael: We've never seen any of the government authorities around here.

Homero: We’ve risked it all. We take care to ensure that no one cuts down the trees.��

Michael: We've risked it all. we take care to ensure that no one cuts down the trees.

Michael: The interviewer asks one ejidatario in a white cowboy hat—

Interviewer: Who are you defending the forest from?��

Michael: —who are you defending the forest from?

Ejidtario: From outsiders who come from other places to steal wood. They are people who only go around at night. They go around stealing from the forests wherever there is no surveillance.

Michael: From outsiders, he says, who rob the forests when there is no surveillance.

Here’s Homero again:

Homero: A mí me secuestraron los grupos que operan aquí en Michoacán. Pero eso no nos ha impedido luchar...

Michael: Homero explains that he was once kidnapped by a local criminal group. Around this time, these organizations were moving from drug smuggling to taking a piece of logging and agriculture.

He was released, but the message was clear: stop the campaign against illegal logging.

Zach: But Homero didn’t stop. He kept working. … and as more butterfly tourists arrived from around the world, dollars started coming in. Tour buses traveled on the roads that Homero had fought to have built. Homero hired local farmers to plant trees. He was helping create a new economy and restoring the forest in the process. Here’s Homero again…

Homero: We are expecting a better year than the last one. Last year we received 160,000, this we are thinking that 180,000 will arrive just to Ejido el Rosario, the largest sanctuary in the world.��

Zach: Homero says that the sanctuary has seen a surge in tourists. 160,000 in 2015. With that kind of traffic, the ejidatarios were happy and the butterflies were protected.

Homero:  Dentro aquí ante esta maravilla de la naturaleza millones de mariposa buscando agua, como vemos aquí en el suelo, tan chupando agua, te invitamos a que vengas a conocer esta maravilla.��

Zach: Homero emerged as the public face of the sanctuary, taking to social media to promote the trees—

Homero: … También tenemos casi medio millón de árboles…����

Zach: The water—

Homero: Nos encontramos aquí en�� una pequeña cascada que se encuentra�� en la localidad San luis elegido del rosario.��

Zach: and of course, the monarchs.

Homero:  Me encuentro recorriendo la zona núcleo de mariposa monarca donde hay millones de mariposa volando por todos lados.��

Homero had transformed the monarchs into a natural resource that brought money to the community and benefited everyone, and as the leader of El Rosario, he controlled a lot of where those benefits flowed. and this shaping of where and how the tourist money flowed, also made him enemies. After the break, Homero’s enemies make a move.

[Advertisement Break]

Michael: Homero disappeared on January 13th, 2020. It started as a typical day of meetings and handshakes, shaping the future of the butterflies and the community. Abel Cruz remembers Homero had a meeting at the base of the reserve with local ejidatarios…

Abel: We had a meeting with people who work there in the sanctuary. There were about 50, more or less. The meeting was about how much money the reserve was bringing in to pay the workers.

Michael: They were in a simple cafeteria with tile floors and big windows. They overlooked the crowds funneling through the entrance to the reserve, under a big arch that says “mariposa monarca”.

Abel: Homero wanted the meeting to end because it was extending for a bit and he wanted to go to the fair.

Michael: Homero’s phone – which was always on his hip – was going off repeatedly throughout the meeting.

Abel: We never knew who he was talking to. But he said, “They're waiting for me and I have to go to the fair.” And he would constantly answer the phone. But from there we didn't know who was calling him or anything.

Michael: The meeting started at 1 and ended around 4pm. Homero took off from the sanctuary. He was short on time so he called his wife, Rebecca, and asked her to iron his shirt.

Amado: Next to his house, I have a business.

Michael: Amado Gomez.

Amado: So an hour — maybe two hours — before he left for the event, he went there, to his home. I even remember that he took his son into his car, because he was going to take him to San Felipe so that he could depart to Morelia where he studies. He was always active and smiling.

Zach: Homero arrived at the fair around 5pm.

Amado: At the fair he was with some public officials, There was a state congress man,�� a municipal trustee and his collaborators. There were around 10 people.

Zach: As night fell, Homero continued to eat and drink and even sing with these local politicians.

At some point… he was gone. No one saw him leave… or no one admits to seeing him leave.

Amado: It was like any other day… until his wife called us to let us know that Homero didn't come home. That had never happened. We got very worried. So we immediately went back to look for him at the last place he had been seen: the horse race site. For a couple of days, we went to hospitals, we went to police offices, fearing that he got into an accident or was arrested… but nothing.

NEWS 1: Gomez’s mysterious disappearance raises concerns among many in Mexico, who say violence against environmental activists, has become commonplace.����

NEWS 2: His family says he had recently received threats, warning him to stop the campaign against illegal logging.��

Amado: About 200 people, went to the city of Morelia, where we demanded the state attorney general support the search. And that the investigation should be carried out with qualified and committed personnel.

And that’s how the news spread. So by the fifth day after his disappearance, we had people from the entire region helping. People from human rights, missing persons organizations, and even the UN itself sent personnel to supervise the investigation.

Michael: Over two thousand people from the local community got involved with the search. Then Homero’s wife got a call demanding ransom.

Amado: Two days after his disappearance, we had to face a couple of disgusting situations. My brother's wife got an extortion call. They sent the image of a body, but without showing the face, and said it was him, that he was alive,but they asked us for money to set him free and my sister-in-law unfortunately deposited money for them.

Michael: Once Rebecca Valencia deposited the money, no response. investigators were able to trace the call… to a prison near Mexico City. It was a hoax.

Zach: And that’s when amado got another call. this time from a state prosecutor.

Amado: I remember it was around 11 in the morning. when I got the call from the person carrying out the investigation. He called me and told me to go to a place known as the Anonymous Soldier, where they had possibly found a lifeless body inside a well.

When they recovered the body, it was about one or two in the afternoon. They asked me to come closer to identify it. The body was next to the well. It was very, very hard for me. I was walking toward the well, which was about 200 meters away. And it felt like an eternity because I didn't want to get closer.

I was hoping that it wasn't him. Also at the same time. I wanted it to be him, because there were already many days of anguish and desperation. So many mixed feelings. And so, when I was more or less 10 meters away from the body and I saw his clothes, his shoes, I knew it was him.

And when I saw his face, I didn't dare approach him anymore.

Zach: The news of Homero’s death spread around the world. It was reported as another instance of an environmentalist being killed in mexico. a story that was becoming tragically common.

Michael: But as the investigation dragged on and international interest in Homero’s story began to wane, it started to look like maybe what happened to Homero wasn’t just a simple case of standing between loggers and their trees.�� and pretty soon�� other, credible theories began to emerge.

Amado: I have bodyguards because we are not safe. We have to take precautions

Falko: When there is resistance to making way for avocado orchards those interests are being enforced by violence.

Emiliano: With the thesis�� that basically Homero had been murdered by�� the collusion between politicians and organized crime we were treading dangerous territory.

Zach: That's next week.

Peter: Zach Goldbaum and Michael May.

This episode was written and reported by Zach and Michael, with help from Rodrigo Cervantes.

Editing by me, Peter Frick-Wright, and Robbie Carver. Music and sound design by Robbie as well.

The �����ԹϺ��� Podcast is made possible by our �����ԹϺ��� Plus members. Learn more about all the benefits of membership at outsideonline.com/podplus.