78 The EconomistFebruary 8th 2020
E
very year, in early autumn when the chill begins, clouds of
bright orange Monarch butterflies rise from the flowers on
which they have been feasting in eastern Canada, and head south.
They overfly the American Midwest and Texas until, below them,
lie the scattered stone houses and corrugated shacks of El Rosario
and Ocampo, in the western Mexican state of Michoacán. There,
after an astonishing flight of around 4,500 kilometres, they de-
scend to mountain forests of oyamel pine, their favourite tree; and
on these they hang to rest and overwinter, so many thousands of
them that the branches are weighed down and the trees seem
draped with orange leaves. About half of all Monarchs come to this
exact, remote place every year, and always from around the same
day: November 2nd, Día de Muertos, the day of the dead.
For two decades no one welcomed them more eagerly than
Homero Gómez, manager of El Rosario’s Butterfly Sanctuary. In the
videos he tweeted daily he stood among them as they arrived, a big
moustachioed man in a white guayabera, his arms spread wide as
if he longed to fly himself. They greeted him too, settling on his
head, his chest and even his nose, basking. They were his darlings,
his little voyagers—and also angels, the souls of the local dead re-
turning home. So his grandfather said, and so ran the legends of
the indigenous Purépecha, who saw ancestral spirits in their col-ours. Nothing else so neatly explained why they always came back
to this particular place, flexing their marigold wings as if they
knew that was the flower of the dead, at this particular time.
Yet he also loved them for more down-to-earth reasons. He had
built the El Rosario Sanctuary into the largest reserve for Monarchs
in Mexico and, therefore, the biggest in the world, and every video
was an appeal for more visitors in the four months the Monarchs
were there. “Gran espectáculo”, cried his tweets; “Open daily, 8-5”.
Visitors could take a guided tour for 50 pesos, or go on horseback
for 100; buy their own butterfly wings in the shop, or have their
wedding photos taken, with Monarchs attending, under the trees.
In good seasons about 140,000 people came, and from November
to March the villagers had money in their pockets.
They had few other ways to make it. Before the reserve people
simply cut and sold wood from the forest, and grew maize on plots
of cleared communal land to which, under the ejido system set up
in 1912 after the revolution, they had no rights of ownership. He did
the same. His parents, bringing up ten children, were timber mer-
chants, and he—though he studied agronomy at Chipango Univer-
sity—ended up as a logger, felling the butterflies’ oyamel pines.
When the reserve was first proposed, he was fiercely against it. As
the natural straight-talking leader of the ejidatarios, he wanted
compensation if they were going to save any trees.
But then, around 2000, he changed his mind. He had always
marvelled at the butterflies, like everyone else; with a memory as
exact as a Monarch’s, he remembered the very date, January 9th
1975, when as a four-year-old he had first brushed close to one. And
now, with over-cutting, their forest was fast diminishing. He want-
ed both to preserve and extend it, planting new trees even on the
maize plots and growing more in nurseries. Most of the 260 other
ejidatarios thought him crazy, but he talked them round. True, the
butterflies did not stay long; but then he himself ran a poinsettia-
growing business that did almost all its trade on Christmas Eve.
The reserve did not make anyone rich; he still had to struggle to
support a wife and four children, and the plaster was still peeling
off his sitting-room walls from among the china birds and butter-
flies. But it gave quite a boost to a poor spot in Michoacán.
Over the years, powered by his enthusiasm, El Rosario pros-
pered. It weathered even the terrible snowstorm of March 2016
when butterflies froze on the pines—though, he was quick to say,
the great majority survived. Volunteers helped to plant at least 1m
new trees, reforesting 150 hectares. The World Wildlife Fund gave
money and bright blue jackets for the guides. State and national of-
ficials, on the other hand, once they had banned logging there, did
very little beyond coming to get their pictures taken and their sala-
ries justified in a pleasing cloud of Monarchs.
But he faced increasingly dangerous enemies. Illegal loggers,
many tied to narcotrafficantesand often armed, came at night to
take out timber or to clear the ground for avocados, which made big
money. He organised patrols of ejidatariosto keep constant watch:
at four in the afternoon, every day, ten men would go into the for-
est, walking ceaselessly, in silence and without lanterns, all night
long to intercept intruders. He swore that if they did not stop cut-
ting down trees he would beat them to a pulp, and worse.
This was risky talk. He told some family members about death
threats, though he reassured others that no one had troubled him
recently. Nonetheless when his body was found in a holding pond,
after he had been to celebrate a patronal festival in Ocampo, few
people thought it was just a death by drowning. There were signs of
a blow to the head; and some days later one of his guides, Raúl Her-
nández, was found dead too, battered by something sharp. They
were two more in the tally of around 1,600 murders in Michoacán,
almost 35,000 in Mexico as a whole, with journalists and activists
picked out, in a little over a year.
In El Rosario, at peak season, the trees and the air still thronged
with butterflies. There could never, he thought, be too many. But in
Mexico there were far too many days of the dead. 7Homero Gómez Gonzáles, protector of the Monarch
butterfly, was apparently murdered on January 13th, aged 50Logger turned saviour
Obituary Homero Gómez