Part II: Heroin Devastates a Town

C H I M A Y O, N. M., July 11, 2000 -- Venessa Valerio was just 9 years old when she went to her first funeral. Soon her mother would bury her, too.

Venessa and her third-grade classmates walked to the local Catholic Church to say goodbye to their classmate, Audrey, who had been caught in the middle of a dispute over heroin, then shot and killed. “[Venessa] came home that day and she told me ‘I cried and cried,’” said Venessa’s mother, Annette Valerio. “She said to me ‘Why would anybody want to shoot a child?’ “Then it happened to her.”

A Way of Life, Death

The little girl nicknamed “Nessie,” who had dark almond-shaped eyes and hair so long it tickled the backs of her knees, was shot and killed by a burglar who surprised the mother and daughter as they returned home one afternoon in 1993. The killer, a heroin-addicted neighbor — a “tecato” in this part of the country — wanted the little girl’s insulin needles, which she used to help treat her diabetes.

Nessie’s death came at a time when heroin began to take a deadly grip on this New Mexico community, set in the red dirt foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Here in the Espanola Valley, where Spanish settlers made their home in the cradle of what Tewa Indians considered holy ground, heroin has become a way of life. It has also become a way of death.

Like never before, heroin is moving out of the inner cities and into America’s suburbs and rural communities, communities such as Chimayo, which has seen a surge in heroin-related deaths in recent years.

Lives Lost, Touched

Between 1995 and 1998, 85 people in Chimayo, a village of just 4,100 people, died of heroin overdoses, one of the highest rates of heroin-related deaths in the nation. The deaths were attributed to the prevalence in recent years of a high purity “black tar” heroin that authorities believe is being smuggled across the Mexican-U.S. border from Nayarit, Mexico, 1,300 miles away.

Last month, the U.S. Justice Department announced it had made nearly 200 arrests of suspected smugglers in 12 cities following a yearlong investigation into a Mexican trafficking organization (see graphic, above).