On the morning of November 4, 2019, an unassuming caravan of women and
children was ambushed by masked gunmen on a desolate stretch of road in
northern Mexico controlled by the Sinaloa drug cartel. Firing
semi-automatic weapons, the attackers killed nine people and gravely
injured five more. The victims were members of the LeBaron and La Mora
communities--fundamentalist Mormons whose forebears broke from the LDS
Church and settled in Mexico when their religion outlawed polygamy in
the late nineteenth century. The massacre produced international
headlines for weeks, and prompted President Donald Trump to threaten to
send in the US Army.
In The Colony, bestselling investigative journalist Sally Denton picks
up where the initial, incomplete reporting on the attacks ended, and
delves into the complex story of the LeBaron clan. Their
homestead--Colonia LeBaron--is a portal into the past, a place that
offers a glimpse of life within a polygamous community on an arid and
dangerous frontier in the mid-1800s, though with smartphones and machine
guns. Rooting her narrative in written sources as well as interviews
with anonymous women from LeBaron itself, Denton unfolds an epic,
disturbing tale that spans the first polygamist emigrations to Mexico
through the LeBarons' internal blood feud in the 1970s--started by Ervil
LeBaron, known as the "Mormon Manson"--and up to the family's recent
alliance with the NXIVM sex cult, whose now-imprisoned leader, Keith
Raniere, may have based his practices on the society he witnessed in
Colonia LeBaron.
The LeBarons' tense but peaceful interactions with Sinaloa deteriorated
in the years leading up to the ambush. LeBaron patriarchs believed they
were deliberately targeted by the cartel. Others suspected that local
farmers had carried out the attacks in response to the LeBarons' seizure
of water rights for their massive pecan orchards. As Denton approaches
answers to who committed the murders, and why, The Colony transforms
into something more than a crime story. A descendant of polygamist
Mormons herself, Denton explores what drove so many women over
generations to join or remain in a community based on male supremacy and
female servitude. Then and now, these women of Zion found themselves in
an isolated desert, navigating the often-mysterious complications of
plural marriage--and supported, Denton shows, only by one another.
A mesmerizing feat of investigative journalism, The Colony doubles as
an unforgettable account of sisterhood that can flourish in polygamist
communities, against the odds.
