Who Killed the Butterfly King?

A conservationist in Mexico put himself between threatened monarchs and the avocado and timber industries

- Matthew Bremner

At midday on Jan. 13, 2020, Homero Gómez González, one of Mexico’s most respected conservationists, attended his final meeting. Like most of his appointments, this one was about butterflies. For years, Gómez had been the leading defender of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a collection of sanctuaries in Michoacán, about a two-hour drive west of Mexico City, that attracts swarms of orangeand-black butterflies migrating south for the winter, some of them the size of a small dinner plate. The migratory phenom enon, recognized by the United Nations as a cultural heritage worthy of protection, draws millions of monarchs from as far as Canada and Alaska and, in pre-pandemic times, some 300,000 tourists.

That day in January, the middle of butterfly season, Gómez was visiting the monarch sanctuary in a village called El Rosario. In most ways, attendees recall the meeting as unremarkable, focused on the sanctuary’s finances, visitors, and tree plantings. If there was one odd thing, they say, it was that Gómez’s phone was buzzing the entire time. They’d seen the butterfly activist, a onetime community president, get lots of calls from tourist agencies, politicians, and journalists. But this barrage seemed relentless. Eventually, Gómez picked up.