When I met Homero Gómez González last month, he pointed to the hilltop just above him in the town of Rosario, a dense forest where millions of monarch butterflies had recently arrived from the United States after their yearly pilgrimage to central Mexico.
“It’s been a fight to maintain it,” he said. “And it hasn’t been easy.”
He was referring to the decades-old battle against illegal logging in North America’s premier monarch butterfly habitat. Gómez González had been at the forefront of that public fight — against men who still wielded enormous power in Rosario. By the time we met, he thought that he had prevailed — and he spent as much time as he could with the butterflies he had helped save, a thundering, broad-shouldered man in a cloud of orange and black monarchs.
Last week, a month after we had lunch together, Gómez González disappeared. Investigators have not suggested any theories about what might have happened to him, but many in Rosario suspect that loggers kidnapped him.