The Last Days of Mary Han

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 22:02:13 -0700

By DAVID CORREIA

At 3:26 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2010, prominent Albuquerque attorney Mary Han emailed her banker at Wells Fargo. “I’m about to pay off the remainder of the balance on my line of credit,” she wrote. “I would like to know whether I will be able to borrow another $120,000 next year and at what interest rate. Thanks. Mary.”

Less than 24 hours later she would be dead. According to at least one Albuquerque Police official, she killed herself because she was depressed. The New Mexico Office of Medical Investigation called it a suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. But the events of the last few days of her life – days spent making short- and long-term plans for the future – and the strange circumstances surrounding what her family calls a “botched” investigation of her death, have led her family, friends and even some former Albuquerque police officers to doubt the claim by APD officials that she killed herself.
Wednesday,

Nov. 17, 2010
Mary’s friends and family describe her as a creature of habit. She was predictable and kept to a routine. Most days she got up early, before dawn, and either worked out at the gym or went for a run. She often stopped at the La Montañita Co-op on Rio Grande Boulevard Northwest before meeting her law partner, Paul Kennedy, at a coffee shop and then heading to her downtown law office. Just after 8 a.m. on Nov. 17, she stopped at the co-op to buy a small breakfast and a sandwich and soup for lunch later. If she stuck to routine, she then met Paul Kennedy for coffee.

Kennedy is a prominent defense attorney and widely regarded as one of the best criminal defense lawyers in New Mexico. In 2010, he led Susana Martinez’s transition team after she was elected governor. He was appointed to fill unexpired terms on the New Mexico Supreme Court by Martinez in 2012 and former Gov. Gary Johnson in 2002.

Just after 1 p.m., Han went to her regularly scheduled acupuncture appointment where, before leaving, she confirmed a follow-up appointment for the next week. After a quick lunch, she met with her accountant in Uptown. In late October, Han had told a family member that she planned to dissolve her law partnership with Kennedy. “I’m done,” she said. “But this will be worse than a divorce, but I’m going to just get out because I’m sick and tired of Paul.” She said she might take the bar exam in California, where her daughter lived. But she also considered staying in Albuquerque. Twice in early November, once with Kennedy, she took a tour of available office space on Albuquerque’s West Side. The owner asked if Han was looking for space to house the Kennedy & Associates Law firm. She said they would be offices for her alone.
It was after the meeting with her accountant that Han sent the email to Wells Fargo asking to keep her line of credit open. Sometime after 4 p.m. she went to her office for a late meeting with Kennedy and a prospective client. After the meeting, she left the office and drove the 10 minutes home in her BMW 330i.

At 6:25 p.m. she called her sister Liz. They talked, as they usually did, about their day. They discussed Thanksgiving plans. Fifteen minutes into the conversation, Mary interrupted Liz to say that someone was at the door. “I’ll call you back,” she said. She never did.

Thursday, Nov. 18, 2010
Former APD Officer Tom Grover and Mary Han were regular workout partners. They planned to meet that morning at 6 at a local gym. Han never showed up. Her assistant Andrea arrived at the law office around 8 a.m. She was still in training and new to the job. Usually, each morning, Han would text or email her assistant a lengthy and detailed to-do list. Neither arrived that morning. While waiting, Andrea worked on unfinished business. At 10 a.m., Andrea asked Kennedy if he knew where Han was. Kennedy called Han’s cell phone at 11:30 a.m. There was no answer. He left the office and drove to Han’s home.

An unattended death
APD Officers Jacob Welch and Tim Lonz were dispatched to 3022 Colonnade Ct. N.W., a territorial-style townhouse in a cul-de-sac near Rio Grande Boulevard and Candelaria Road Northwest at 12:39 p.m. The call was “in reference to a 52-year-old female in a vehicle in the garage no longer breathing.” Welch was first on the scene minutes after dispatch contacted him.
 An Albuquerque Fire Department rescue engine arrived at 12:45. The front door was wide open and the garage door was up. Welch reported finding Kennedy standing in the open garage next to Han’s BMW.
According to police reports, Kennedy told the officers that Han didn’t answer the door when he knocked so he entered the house with a key that he said Han had given him. He called out for Han from the foyer, he told Welch. Hearing no response he walked to the kitchen and through the living room and into the garage where he told police he saw Han sitting in her car.
 He told Welch he opened the driver’s-side door of the car and tried to “wake Ms. Han or get a response.” He called 911 and reported an “accidental suicide.” He then opened the garage. Welch checked for vital signs and found none. He noted that the car was turned off and the windows rolled down. Han’s feet were propped up on the dashboard to the left of the steering wheel and her arms were folded and in her lap. She was wearing work-out clothes and reading glasses. The key was in the ignition and a glass of what Lonz reported as “an unknown clear liquid” was on the center console. Welch said it “smelled like vodka.” The glass, however, was not collected into evidence and was never tested. Welch noted that “the vehicle engine was completely cold to the touch and the vehicle also appeared to have a dead battery.”
 APD Field Investigator Mike Muniz arrived on the scene along with additional APD officers, sergeants, and commanders. This was the beginning of what would become a parade of APD and City officials and even civilians into and throughout the house and garage. Welch reported that 15 APD personnel, from deputy chiefs to officers, were in the house as well as city officials, and “additional personnel that were not identified” entered the house and garage. Days later Muniz would tell APD Forensics Unit Lt. Brian McCutcheon, who investigated APD’s response, that officers had “lost control of the scene.”
APD officers removed Han’s body from the car and laid her on the concrete garage floor. It took 20 minutes to jump-start the car. When it started Welch noted that the gas tank was half-full and nothing electrical was turned on. Emergency personnel from the fire department concluded it was a “possible crime scene.” They left and turned the scene over to APD. If the tank was half-full, how had the car shut off? Welch called the local BMW dealership, Sandia BMW, and talked to a technician who told him the vehicle “did not have any built-in safeguards that would automatically shut the vehicle off for running for an extended period.” Welch passed this along to Detective Muniz. Nothing in any of the official police reports answers the question.

A thorn in APD’s side
Han was prominent among civil rights and criminal defense attorneys, but was especially prominent for her success in bringing lawsuits against the Albuquerque Police Department, against which she had won judgments. News of Han’s death began to spread via texts and phone calls among APD officers and officials. Within an hour of Kennedy’s 911 call, every one of APD’s deputy chiefs was on the scene.

Then-City Attorney Rob Perry and Albuquerque Public Safety Director Darren White, who had previously served as director of New Mexico’s Department of Public Safety under Gov. Gary Johnson, arrived at the scene. Some people stood in front of the house with Kennedy and Han’s sister Liz. Some walked into, around and through the house. Muniz put up crime scene tape in order to secure the scene during the investigation, but between 30 and 50 civilians unconnected to APD ducked under the crime scene tape and walked around the house. Muniz later found the tape torn down.

According to Grover, who arrived at the scene with Officer Robbin Burge shortly after the first responders, Deputy Chief Alan Banks, who would later serve as APD’s interim police chief, entered a section of the house at one point and shut out the principal investigating officers. Grover said that action “displaced the principal officers and obviously acted in concert with [APD Commander Paul] Feist to thwart proper processing of the scene.” Sgt. Tim Lopez, who also arrived on the scene after the first responders, would later tell McCutcheon that he found Banks in the house looking through Han’s private legal files, which included an active lawsuit in which Banks was named as a defendant.
 Rob Perry, an attorney and a former prisons chief under Gov. Johnson, was friends with Kennedy and Han and once shared office space with them. According to McCutcheon, Kennedy told Perry he wanted Han’s computer. Perry ordered Banks to retrieve it from the BMW. Banks directed APD officer Robbin Burge to walk into the garage in the middle of the investigation, open the trunk, take out Han’s computer and give it to Kennedy. Kennedy eventually left the scene with Han’s computer. McCutcheon described this as an “absolute violation of every APD policy, word-for-word.” Banks retired from APD in January 2014 to become chief of police in Round Rock, Texas, a town north of Austin. I called Banks in Round Rock, leaving a message and asking if he could explain his actions, as reported by other APD officers, on the day of Han’s death. He did not return the call.

Suicide or homicide?
APD Commander Paul Feist walked into the garage with crime lab director Mark Adams while Muniz and a medical examiner were taking photographs of the body and the car. Feist had 20 years experience in the criminalistics unit. McCutcheon described Feist as someone who “literally wrote the book on crime scene investigation,” telling me, “If you were at a crime scene you wanted Feist there. He did things by the book. He always took the extra step. And yet on this case he violated every standard operating procedure,” McCutcheon said.

According to McCutcheon, a field investigator at the scene of a possible suicide or accidental death should determine “if it’s immediately obvious it’s a suicide.” Is there a suicide note? An eyewitness? Lacking that, he said, an unattended death should be investigated as a possible homicide. The BMW technician could not explain why the car had shut off. There were no eyewitnesses to her death and no one found a suicide note. Sgt. Mike Meisinger told Grover and other officers on the scene to prepare to investigate the death as a homicide. Feist put an end to these plans. According to McCutcheon, Feist looked quickly around the garage and told Muniz to stop taking photographs. “This is a suicide,” he said. “Let’s get this done quick.”

In a nine-sentence supplemental report filed more than four months later, Feist wrote, “I learned that the victim was located inside her vehicle inside the garage and the death was possibly a suicide.” His report does not explain how he learned this. Despite the fact that first responders found Han’s front door and garage wide open when they arrived on the scene, Mark Adams filed a late supplemental report as well, writing “[Commander Feist and I] were told the scene was consistent with a suicide scene being that the residence was locked and the victim was sitting inside a vehicle in the garage.” After telling Muniz to stop taking photos, Feist told Welch and Lonz not to canvass the neighborhood.

One of McCutcheon’s criminalistics sergeants, Keith Johnson, was at a conference when he got a text about Han’s death. Johnson got up to leave the conference in order to join the investigation. Feist contacted him to say he wasn’t needed. Han’s cell phone was not recovered at the scene. Weeks later, Kennedy returned it to Han’s sister. The phone’s data had been deleted. A second laptop was in the house on the day Han died. A few days later Han’s family noted that it was missing. There were no signs of forced entry.

A few months after her death, Mary Han’s family reported that two diamond rings were missing. When McCutcheon told Feist that APD should investigate, Feist reportedly told him, “We don’t know if on the day before she died she didn’t give those diamonds to some transient on the street.”

The New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator found that Han died with a carbon monoxide saturation in her system of 84.8 percent. According to Forensics Unit investigators, most saturation levels in suicides by carbon monoxide poisoning are in the 30 to 40 percent range. McCutcheon was unable to locate a single suicide case by carbon monoxide poisoning with levels as high as Han’s.

Despite these discrepancies, the OMI ruled Han’s death a suicide. When McCutcheon called to ask how they arrived at that determination, he was told the determination was based partly on a call made by Paul Feist to the OMI in which Feist said that Han was depressed at the time of her death.

Feist also called the crime lab and told the photo manager to personally call him with the name of anyone who requested access to any of the photos from the scene. I asked McCutcheon why Feist would make such an order. He told me, “It’s not uncommon in an officer-involved shooting, but I’ve never seen it done for a suicide.”

I reached Feist by telephone seeking to clarify his role in the investigation and to ask questions based on other officers’ accounts of his actions at Han’s home that day. He cut off my questions and said only, “I’m not going to comment at all on this story.” Feist is no longer with APD. He now works as a hearing officer at the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy in Santa Fe.

I repeatedly left phone messages for Kennedy – through his law office number, a cell phone number that another lawyer told me was his, and to a second office number – telling him I had questions about his actions the day he said he found Han’s body. I left a message with one of his office staff outlining in detail the nature of my inquiry. Kennedy did not return the calls.

A year after Han’s death, Rosario Vega Lynn, an Albuquerque attorney representing Mary Han’s estate, arranged to have the BMW 330i tested to find out why it had turned off. On two separate occasions in the fall of 2011, McCutcheon, by then retired from APD, and another technician placed the car in an enclosed trailer with a tank full of gas and a carbon monoxide monitor. With cameras running, they sat around a video display and a bucket of chicken and waited. They were long nights. The car never shut off. On both occasions it ran until it was out of gas. In both tests, in a trailer three-times smaller than Han’s garage, it took nearly four hours to achieve fatal levels of carbon monoxide.

Han’s family sued the City of Albuquerque claiming that APD “hindered, obstructed, and defeated the due course of justice with the intent to deny Plaintiffs equal protection under the law.” A judge dismissed their claim. In a move that has generated controversy in the city’s legal community, the City is now suing Mary Han’s family to recoup its legal costs in the lawsuit. That case, and an appeal of the dismissal, is pending.

Regardless of the outcome of the legal cases, it would be difficult now to investigate Han’s death as a possible homicide, or even prove a suicide. Evidence is missing. The scene was unsecured. Many of the people at the scene were not interviewed.

“When I realized what happened at that house,” McCutcheon told me, “the hair stood up on the back of my neck. One of two things happened that day. Either it was an absolute case of total incompetence by everyone involved, or it was cover-up. Those are the only two possibilities.”

This essay first appeared in the ABQ Free Press

Welcome to Albuquerque: Nuclear Meltdown Capital of the World

Thu, 27 Nov 2014 16:31:26 -0700

By DAVID CORREIA

When Ohio’s Shippingport Atomic Power Station opened for business on May 26, 1958, the Atomic Energy Commission advertised it as the dawn of a new era of cheap, clean energy in the United States.

By the mid-1970s, nearly one hundred nuclear facilities had been built, and scores more were on the way. But the unbridled enthusiasm of the 1960s gave way to growing concerns over safety in the 1970s. The authors of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s 1975 “Nuclear Safety Report” raised alarm over the lack of a coordinated plan to deal with the risk of human error or mechanical failure, particularly when combined with the likelihood of tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes. How would a nuclear meltdown actually happen and what would it look like?

A partial answer to that question came in March of 1979 when mechanical failure and human error at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island led to a partial meltdown and the escape of radioactive gases into the environment.

In the wake of the Three Mile Island accident, a large and organized anti-nuclear movement focused critical attention on the very real threat posed by nuclear energy production. The result was an about face in reactor construction in United States. The annual increase in new nuclear reactor construction prior to the Three Mile Island accident ground to a halt after it.

Partly in response to both the Nuclear Safety Report and Three Mile Island, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) launched an ambitious program to study “severe accident” nuclear meltdowns. The goal was to learn how they happen, how bad they can get, and how to stop them once they’ve started.

Beginning in the 1970s, commercial nuclear plants all over the world sent enriched uranium to Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque where scientists conducted scaled-down nuclear catastrophes by irradiating nuclear fuel pins at temperatures greater than 4,000° F in its Annular Core Research Reactor (ACRR).

Sandia scientists collected data from these nuclear meltdowns, while high-speed cameras recorded the progress. The experiments contributed to the creation of failsafe computer codes based on various worst-case scenarios. Nuclear reactors worldwide reprogrammed their computers based on these codes.

But the legacy of the “severe accident” program lives on in more ways than one. These were real nuclear meltdowns that produced dangerous nuclear wastes. When Sandia began these experiments, there was no permanent facility for the safe storage of radioactive waste. So the NRC allowed on-site storage at commercial nuclear plants and research facilities such as Sandia as a temporary solution until engineered facilities located in deep geologic repositories could be constructed.

Standards for the safe storage of nuclear waste follow procedures based on waste classification. The NRC classifies nuclear waste as either low-level, which refers to clothing, tools, or materials contaminated with radioactive material, or high-level nuclear waste, which refers to the byproducts, such as plutonium, strontium or cesium, produced in nuclear reactors. On-site storage is particularly difficult when dealing with high-level nuclear waste, because the rate of decay for spent nuclear fuel is slow—some of the waste material that comes out of nuclear reactors won’t be safe to handle for hundreds of thousands of years. The only safe storage option for high level wastes is in deep geologic repositories.

The problem was even more difficult for Sandia because the wastes it produced in its “severe accident” experiments did not fit either category. This was not simply high-level waste, but rather the radioactive debris of dozens of nuclear meltdowns. There is no waste category for this material and therefore there are no standards for its safe storage. It never occurred to anyone to create standards for the safe storage of wastes produced in catastrophic core meltdown nuclear accidents.

So Sandia decided to wing it. Based, it seems, more on convenience than science, it buried dozens of radioactive canisters full of meltdown material in vertical holes drilled into shallow, unlined trenches, some of which remain classified, in its existing 2.6-acre Sandia Radioactive Waste Dump, later renamed the Sandia Mixed Waste Landfill (MWL). The dump opened in March of 1959 and for nearly thirty years, until it closed in December of 1988, received as much as 1.5 million cubic feet of radioactive and toxic material.

Into its open pits less than two miles from the Pueblo of Isleta, Sandia dumped carcinogenic solvents such as tetrachloroethylene (PCE), trichloroethelyene (TCE), and dichlorodifluoromethane (CFC-12). Into its unlined trenches a few hundred feet above the aquifer, it dumped metals like beryllium, cadmium, chromium, nickel, and 281,000 pounds of lead. In the middle of it all, it buried tons of various radioactive elements, including amercium-241, cesium-137, depleted uranium, and more than 100 drums of plutonium, which has a radioactive half-life of 24,100 years.

Sandia routinely received and studied radioactive material from various US nuclear test sites and proving grounds. All of it found its way into the landfill. They dumped weapons components contaminated by depleted uranium and unknown amounts of radioactive material from the Nevada Test Site, where the US exploded nearly 1,000 nuclear bombs. They landfilled radioactive residue from the Kwajalein Missile Range in Hawaii, where the US tested the MX, Minuteman, and Trident nuclear missiles. And even seven 55-gallon drums of contaminated material from the Three Mile Island meltdown.

All told Sandia dumped tons of more than 100 radioactive elements, carcinogenic organics, and chlorinated solvents into open, shallow, unlined trenches. Some material was landfilled in steel drums, but tons of material was just tossed into the landfill in plastic bags or cardboard boxes. In 1967 the Lab turned MWL into a toxic-radioactive stew when it poured 271,000 gallons of reactor coolant water into the landfill. It’s a flammable stew too; in 1974, the depleted uranium caught fire.

So much for the highly engineered or deep geologic repository required by law when storing hazardous or radioactive wastes. But when Sandia closed the landfill in 1989,
The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) suddenly had the authority to require just that. According to the Federal Resource Conservation Recovery Act (RCRA), the authority to protect the public from hazardous materials at the landfill fell to NMED. According to the law, the environment department could have forced Sandia to excavate the landfill and remove the wastes or, at the very least, it should have forced Sandia to construct an impermeable liner to keep wastes from leaching into soils and groundwater, install soil gas monitoring wells, and construct an effective network of downgradient groundwater monitoring wells. None of these things happened.

While a network of four groundwater-monitoring wells was installed to the north, west and southeast of the landfill, a 1993 study by NMED revealed that they were placed in the wrong location. While surface water moved to the northwest, groundwater travelled to the southwest, and thus none of the wells could monitor the possible migration of contamination into the aquifer. One of the wells did record elevated levels of chromium, cadmium, and high levels of nickel contamination to the northwest of the landfill. Sandia dismissed those readings, saying that they came from corrosion at the site of the well, not from the landfill, despite the fact that none of the other wells exhibited similar corrosion. In addition, field investigations conducted in 1994 found elevated levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and tritium in soils below the landfill’s unlined trenches. Tritium and VOCs from nuclear waste easily migrate through soils and groundwater. Sandia, however, downplayed any concern, concluding, despite subsequent evidence to the contrary, that the material would decay before ever reaching groundwater.

A 1994 report by the US Environmental Protection Agency identified a series of deficiencies in the groundwater-monitoring network. A 1998 NMED report concluded that the nickel contamination in the aquifer should prompt a broader study of potential risks to local and regional groundwater quality.

Despite RCRA disclosure requirements, none of these troubling issues—not the elevated tritium levels in soils, not the nickel contamination in groundwater, not the misplaced network of monitoring wells—were presented to the community in a 2004 public meeting held in Albuquerque. Even with the evidence of soil and groundwater contamination withheld, public testimony overwhelmingly favored excavating the landfill. But in April of 2005, despite a federal law that prohibits the burial of plutonium-contaminated waste in shallow pits covered in dirt, NMED secretary Ron Curry ordered Sandia to bury the waste in shallow pits covered in dirt.

Sandia’s permit included a “long term monitoring and maintenance plan” that came with a number of conditions, including one that read, “Sandia shall prepare a report every 5 years, re-evaluating the feasibility of excavation and analyzing the continued effectiveness of the selected remedy. The report shall include a review of the documents, monitoring reports and any other pertinent data, and anything additional required by NMED. In each 5-year report, Sandia shall update the fate and transport model for the site with current data, and re-evaluate any likelihood of contaminants reaching groundwater.”

In the nine years since it received its permit from NMED, Sandia has never conducted a comprehensive “fate and transport” computer model that analyzed all the possible sources of groundwater contamination and has not submitted a report analyzing the feasibility of excavation. Despite this, NMED waived the requirement for the five-year report and just this month issued Sandia conditional approval for a Certificate of Completion for its permit.

This brings Sandia one-step closer to a permit that would require “no further action,” reduce monitoring requirements, and allow Sandia to permanently store high-level nuclear waste, intermingled with unknown amounts of carcinogens and volatile compounds, in unlined trenches covered in dirt, forever. And this is an outcome Sandia anticipated as early as 1997. Despite years of official study with public hearings ostensibly designed to weigh the risks and benefits of excavation versus permanent storage, recently acquired internal Sandia memoranda reveal that NMED’s decision to give Sandia a Certificate of Completion may have been a fait accompli all along. According to documents acquired by the watchdog group Citizen Action New Mexico, Sandia managers decided in 1997 that they would never excavate material from the landfill and would instead pursue permanent, on-site storage, despite the fact that they didn’t even have a complete inventory of wastes in the landfill and at that time hadn’t yet conducted comprehensive studies of groundwater contamination. And NMED appears ready to give them that permit. If such a landfill were proposed today it would violate every state and federal law governing the regulation of radioactive and toxic waste management.

Dozens of Sandia representatives attended a public meeting on the permit held last week at the Manzano Mesa Multigenerational Center in Albuquerque. Dave McCoy, the director of Citizen Action New Mexico, was there. McCoy has been a tough critic of Sandia’s plan to keep high-level nuclear wastes on-site. During the meeting he asked Sandia engineer John Cochrane about the elevated levels of toluene and tritium and nickel in soils and groundwater. Cochrane dismissed these issues as unrelated to the landfill. I asked Cochrane how he could be so confident that the toxic and radioactive wastes have never and would not in the future contaminate groundwater. “These are unlined pits holding high-level nuclear wastes, after all.” He paused to consider the question and then said, “I know. It feels wrong.”

Eric Nuttall, emeritus professor of Chemical & Nuclear Engineering at the University of New Mexico and an expert on in situ remediation of groundwater, thinks it’s more than just a feeling. “This is no ordinary landfill,” he told me at the meeting. “It’s unlike any other dump in the United States. It’s full of extremely hazardous and highly radioactive materials. In order to protect the environment and human health, it should be excavated and landfilled in a secure, engineered facility. It’s no exaggeration to say that if the material in the landfill were distributed around the world and people were exposed, it would kill everyone on earth.”

[A shorter version of the essay first appeared in The Weekly Alibi]

Albuquerque Spring: A Season of Police Violence and Civil Disobedience

Thu, 19 Jun 2014 20:58:45 -0600

By DAVID CORREIA

Spring is a time of rebirth: a season suspended between the end of winter’s suffering and the beginning of summer’s warmth. This is true everywhere except Albuquerque, where spring brings fear and anxiety. It’s our season of dry wind and relentless drought. This Albuquerque Spring offers no escape from that cruel pattern. But our suffering is not defined by the axial tilt of the earth as it races around the sun, but rather by a culture of violent policing that seems just as inevitable.
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Albuquerque Spring began early, on March 16, when James Boyd, homeless and suffering from schizophrenia, hiked the Copper Trailhead seeking a safe place to sleep. But amid the beauty of the Sandias, just beyond the wealthy neighborhoods of the Foothills, he found an aggressive police response to his presence. After a four-hour standoff with APD, he died in a barrage of gunfire and flashbang grenades. Millions have seen that shocking video by now. Boyd’s violent death, and Police Chief Gorden Eden's deranged claim that officers' fatal shooting of a mentally ill, homeless man was justified, resurrected old fears that a long history of police violence was gathering new momentum.

Anger and grief brought a thousand people into Albuquerque streets on March 25. But just hours after protesters marched to condemn police violence, APD shot and killed Alfred Redwine. An eyewitness video showed Redwine holding a cellphone when APD officers opened fire. APD claimed Redwine fired a weapon at officers, but no lapel camera video exists to confirm this claim.

Another march followed another person's death. APD responded with urban assault vehicles, combat-equipped SWAT units, a squad of ominous-looking mounted police, K9 units and riot police who fired tear gas at protesters. That militarized response to a peaceful protest brought national and international media to Albuquerque; they struggled to explain what was happening here. It didn’t take long for an official explanation. On April 10, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) ended its nearly two-year investigation of APD with a 46-page findings letter on APD’s use of excessive force. Boyd was not an exception, and APD routinely uses unjustified, unconstitutional lethal force. The problem begins at the top, where APD brass fosters a climate of violent, crisis-mode policing in which officers are free to use force with impunity.

The next day Mayor Richard Berry hired Tom Streicher to represent the city in negotiations with the DOJ over federally mandated reforms. Streicher is the former chief of the Cincinnati Police Department. In April 2001, a Cincinnati police officer shot and killed an unarmed 19-year-old black man named Timothy Thomas. Streicher refused to release information about the shooting. Thomas was the 15th young black man killed by Cincinnati police in six years. Rioting broke out in African-American neighborhoods terrorized by decades of police violence. The mayor called in the DOJ. That investigation produced an April 2002 agreement that Streicher routinely flouted. He blocked monitors at every step and frequently violated the agreement. Streicher, the chief of a police department that routinely engaged in violent racialized policing, with documented experience in evading DOJ-imposed remedies to unconstitutional policing will now represent Albuquerque in negotiations with the DOJ.

On April 15 three members of the Police Oversight Commission resigned in protest. Jonathan Siegel wrote that he “cannot continue to pretend or deceive the members of our community into believing that our city has any real civilian oversight.” Jennifer Barela also resigned. “I will not mislead the citizens of Albuquerque into believing that our City has any civilian oversight.” Richard Shine followed, complaining that obstruction from the City Attorney’s Office “makes a complete and final sham of any meaningful civilian oversight of police in Albuquerque. I refuse to contribute to the deception of the public by continuing to serve on the POC.”

Andrew Jones, brother of APD victim James “Abba” Boyd, spoke at the three-month memorial for Boyd in the Sandia Foothills on Sunday, June 15 (Photo by Willa Correia-Kuehn)

One week later Jeremy Dear killed 19-year-old Mary Hawkes. APD claimed Hawkes had a gun and the officer fired in self-defense. The gun has never been produced, and no lapel camera video of the shooting exists. Eyewitnesses recounted a harrowing story of her final hours. APD hunted the homeless teenager after she allegedly broke into a truck to find safety in the night. Hawkes had no violent criminal history, but APD sent an army into the streets after her. They tracked her to a mobile home park where they released dogs as police cruisers blared warnings from loudspeakers. Dear shot her to death on the sidewalk.

The DOJ concluded that the problems at APD were not only about excessive force, but also a function of serious failures in leadership. On April 23 KRQE reporters obtained months of emails between Former APD chief Ray Schultz and representatives of Taser, a company that manufactures electroshock weapons and lapel cameras. A week before his retirement in 2013, Taser offered Schultz a lucrative job offer: “Is consulting something you’d consider?” Schultz replied he was interested and also that he’d cleared a path for Taser to receive a no bid, multimillion dollar contract with APD to provide weapons and lapel cameras. “Everything has been greased,” he wrote Taser, “so it should go without any issues.”

Taser collects former police chiefs like a child collects baseball cards. Streicher, too, is on their payroll.

APD SWAT killed Armand Martin on May 3. DOJ says that APD’s SWAT Unit suffers from serious deficiencies that contribute “to the pattern of unreasonable use of force.” It deals poorly with subjects who are suicidal, barricaded or suffering from mental health crises. All of which were on display in the death of Martin, a 50-year-old Air Force veteran. Armed and suicidal, Martin barricaded himself in his house. SWAT spent hours blasting warnings by loudspeaker at him while combat-equipped officers swarmed his home. They fired flashbang grenades, a weapon designed to shock and disorient, through the windows. Martin fled the barrage, and he was shot to death as he exited the house.

APD claimed Martin fired at officers with two handguns, but the only video of the encounter shows APD officers handcuffing a dying Martin. Armand Martin’s brother Tommy was talking to his brother by phone moments before he was killed. The cellphone is visible in the video of officers handcuffing Martin, contradicting APD claims that Martin fired two guns. Tommy Martin is still waiting for the results of his brother’s autopsy. In preliminary conversations, Martin says the coroner found no gunfire residue on his brother’s hands.

A coalition of activists and family members of victims of police violence, including myself, held a vigil for Martin. There we decided to launch a campaign of civil disobedience. At the City Council meeting on May 5, 40 people stood at the podium as I read a collectively written statement that included the following section: “Tonight, in the true spirit of democracy and with the seriousness to which it deserves and with the power given by the people of New Mexico and its courts of law, we now serve a people’s warrant for the arrest of Albuquerque Police Chief Gorden Eden, who is charged as an accessory after the fact in the second-degree murders of James Boyd, Alfred Redwine, Mary Hawkes and Armand Martin.”

Eden and his entourage fled the chambers while most City Councilors abandoned their chairs. Council President Ken Sanchez cancelled the meeting. Protesters took their seats, and we held a “People’s Assembly.” Three days later, under new restrictions on free speech, Sanchez ordered that police forcibly remove seven people, of whom I was one, for standing in silent protest against City Council inaction.

Descanso for James Boyd (Photo by Willa Correia-Kuehn)

The killing continued. APD killed Ralph Chavez on May 22. Chavez, who had a long history of violence and mental illness, was killed after he attacked a woman and slashed a good samaritan who came to her defense. APD officers found a suicidal Chavez holding a small box cutter. They shot him to death from 20 feet away. No video of the shooting exists.

We turned our attention to Mayor Berry. On June 2, 32 people, including family members of victims of police violence, walked into the office of Mayor Berry to stage a sit-in. APD’s SWAT unit swarmed the building in a show of force consistent with DOJ criticisms of APD’s culture of aggressive policing. Thirty riot police arrested 13 peaceful protesters.

On Monday, June 9, Eden placed a gag order on police and civilian employees of APD banning them from talking to the DOJ. Later that day the City Council placed more restrictions on public comment. Councilor Diane Gibson declared herself “a defender of free speech and the right to speak openly,” moments before voting to limit free speech and the right to speak openly.

The next day the District Court found in favor of the family of Christopher Torres in a lawsuit against the City and awarded the family $6 million. In April 2011 two APD detectives shot an unarmed Torres three times in the back. Just four months after District Attorney Kari Brandenburg declared the shooting justified, a judge disagreed, “Detectives Brown and Hilger’s testimony is inconsistent with the eyewitness' testimony and the physical evidence.”

In an interview last week, Renetta Torres, Christopher Torres' mother, criticized Berry, the Council and APD for offering little more than “cosmetic changes.” Real change comes not from individuals but rather, like the seasons, from forces larger than us. Our Albuquerque Spring will end this Saturday, June 21, on the summer solstice, when thousands will gather in Roosevelt Park at 11am for a March to End Police Brutality. And a spring that began with horror will end with hope. But as Torres told the press last week, “We’ve only just begun.”

[First appeared in The Weekly Alibi]

Is There Justice For James Boyd?

Fri, 18 Apr 2014 23:43:47 -0600

By DAVID CORREIA

On March 16, 2014, officers of the Albuquerque Police Department attempted to arrest a homeless man named James “Abba” Boyd for “illegally camping” in the Sandia Foothills. But instead of removing him or arresting him, they killed him. He became the 22nd person killed by APD since 2010.

Less than a week later, the City released a disturbing video of the shooting. Lapel camera footage from one of the officers shows Boyd, visibly tired after a long standoff with APD officers, ready to finally walk down the mountain. In his final moments, he grabs his bag and makes a move to come down. But they fire a flash-bang grenade at his feet. Boyd is startled and drops the bag. “Please don’t hurt me,” he yells. They sic a police dog on him. It menaces him. He raises small knives in defense. Police are swarming. They have assault weapons. But the chaos quickly resolves in agreement. He tells officers he’s coming down. “I’m going to try to walk with you.” He turns away from officers, maneuvering to surrender. They fire fatal shots into his back.

The video is shocking. The images linger. What explains the senseless shooting death of James “Abba” Boyd? The anger and sadness that the video—watched by at least a million people—provoked served as catalyst for thousands to take to the streets of Albuquerque, searching for answers. On Tuesday, March 25, more than a thousand people marched through Downtown to APD headquarters, where they occupied the steps of the police department in organized rage and resolution.

On the following Sunday, a protest called by hacktivist group Anonymous was less organized, more raw. For much of the day and into the night, protesters roamed around Downtown, marched on APD—up to the University of New Mexico and Nob Hill and back Downtown again. Police in riot gear and military equipment rode around town in mounted patrols and urban assault vehicles, brandishing truncheons and pointing assault rifles at people. They fired tear gas to disperse angry but peaceful protesters. Mayor Richard Berry called the protesters violent, but there were no injuries to point to, no property damages more serious than one case of graffiti to show—just images of tanks in the streets and menacing lines of riot police discharging pepper spray and advancing on angry young people who ducked for cover as tear gas canisters rained down on them.

The spontaneity and rage of the protests and the protesters—they briefly occupied I-25 and swarmed the Nob Hill police substation—frightened City Hall and launched the story into the national and international news. What were the protesters mad about? The killing, of course, but also a political structure digging in its heels. Berry was asked if he still thought APD was the best police department in the country. He said yes. Outrage. He began making statements to the press from what appeared to be an underground bunker. Police Chief Gorden Eden claimed the shooting of Boyd was justified. More outrage. Berry backtracked, and Eden has all but disappeared from public view. The Boyd killing and video shifted the ground under their feet. Their heels are digging in quicksand.

Critics of APD grew by the day. They got louder and more organized. Nearly 200 people packed the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice on Monday, March 31, and they emerged with demands for resignations, recalls and indictments. Berry and Eden reacted by offering reforms: more non-lethal weapons, better crisis intervention training, more transparency, collaboration with the Department of Justice and more money for training. These reforms offer a seductively simple, straightforward explanation for Boyd’s senseless death. These were bad cops: poorly trained, heavily armed and incompetently led.

Berry and Eden are betting their professional and political futures that we will agree with them. Officer Keith Sandy, who fired the fatal rounds at Boyd, had previously been fired from the New Mexico State Police for lying. New scrutiny of police training has revealed a troubling “shoot-first” focus. APD’s heavily armed response to the Anonymous-summoned protest two Sundays ago more closely resembled a military operation than anything that anyone might recognize as policing. And Eden’s bumbling news conference after the Boyd killing and his subsequent refusal to release lapel video of the police killing of Alfred Redwine on Tuesday, March 25, offers no evidence or assurance of competency.

So let’s adopt these reforms and more. Let’s raise hiring and training standards. Let’s give bite to the currently toothless police oversight commission. Let’s demand the release of all lapel and helmet camera videos of every police shooting—all 37 since 2010. These are important reforms; families of APD's victims have been calling for them for years. And Mayor Berry, who once stonewalled their calls and obstructed their efforts, now joins the chorus.

But the chorus is singing a tired old tune. When APD killed 17 people between 1987 and 1991, community leaders demanded and received reforms related to training, but people kept dying in police shootings. The police oversight commission was created in 1997 when a decade-long period ended with 31 people dead by police violence. A “reformed” APD promptly went on a shooting spree, killing 23 people in the six years that followed.

Perhaps the question should not only be “What explains the senseless shooting death of James ‘Abba’ Boyd?” It must also be, “What explains the relentless history of police violence in Albuquerque?” And there are no simple answers to that question. But we may begin to seek an answer in the hard life and violent death of James Boyd.

DAVID CORREIA/LA JICARITA
Vigil-goers gather around a small shrine erected where James "Abba" Boyd died. Some added flowers and candles behind a rock cross constructed on the spot where he tried to camp on the night of March 16, 2014.

On Tuesday, April 1, the day after the community forum on APD violence at the Peace and Justice Center, US Marshals shot Gilberto Angelo Serrano in the head while trying to serve a parole violation warrant at the corner of Bridge and Sunset in Albuquerque’s South Valley. He was listed in stable condition at UNM Hospital.

While on the scene, I interviewed an eyewitness to the Serrano shooting, Gabriel Valdez. Sheriff’s deputies had seized Valdez’ cell phone because he was filming the bloody aftermath of another police shooting in Albuquerque. I asked if he’d been following the recent protests about police violence in Albuquerque. He said yes.

“I knew James Boyd when he was a kid,” he told me.

“You did? How did you know him?” I asked.

“We were in the boys’ school together briefly. And then I always saw him around town over the years. I’d share food or money with him when I saw him.”

“What was he like?”

“He was a good person. I think he had this ability to switch off any pain receptors. He didn’t feel pain.”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean he didn’t feel pain?”

“The other kids. They’d poke him with needles and stick him in the arm with nails, but he never showed pain.”

After juvenile detention, as an adult, Boyd spent time in the Metropolitan Detention Center on various charges; one, an assault against a police officer, was dismissed because he was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial. On at least two occasions, Boyd was committed to the Behavioral Health Institute in Las Vegas, N.M., the only psychiatric hospital for adults in New Mexico. Long stretches of homelessness were punctuated by involuntary commitments to the Institute that often followed short stays in jail in Albuquerque and Las Cruces.

On the night of his death, with Eastside homeless shelters closed upon the arrival of warm weather, Boyd made his way to a favored spot above the popular Copper Avenue Trailhead in the Sandia Foothills. Maybe he picked it because it was secluded, a place where he might not need the small knives he carried to protect himself when sleeping on the streets. And then Boyd did what hundreds of thousands of other Albuquerque residents also did that night. He lay down his head to go to sleep. And this we called a crime.

It was violence and pain, not safety and security, that defined Boyd’s everyday experience. His violent death brought into sharp focus the cruel connections linking poverty, mental illness, policing and violence. These are connections made strong in New Mexico, a place where one of the nation’s highest rates of police violence is matched by an equally high poverty rate. We have produced a city where violent confrontations with police are always only a matter of time for people like James Boyd. And this is precisely why families of victims of APD violence, those with so much taken from them, demand that APD stop treating homelessness and mental illness as crimes.

So it’s time to join those mourning families and recognize that their fight for justice is everyone’s fight. It’s time we make a different city with a different future; one that finds ways to care for people rather than confine them, to comfort rather than coerce them. These are not merely demands; they are moral imperatives, and they are all of ours. And there will be no justice for James Boyd or any of the other victims, until we refuse to accept the pain and violence of homelessness and mental illness and instead build a community in which everyone, including James Boyd, finds a sacred right to a safe life.

[First appeared in The Weekly Alibi]

Life and Death and APD: The problem of police violence in Albuquerque

Mon, 3 Feb 2014 18:55:18 -0700

By DAVID CORREIA

Kenneth Ellis III, 25, bled to death in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven at Eubank and Constitution at 9am on Jan. 13, 2010. Albuquerque police officer Brett Lampiris-Tremba shot the Iraq war veteran in the chest after Ellis, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, placed a gun to his own head.

Chandler Barr, 19, lives with bipolar disorder. He told a 911 dispatcher in September 2010 that he was suicidal. After three days at UNM’s Psychiatric Center, he was released from the hospital and turned up at the Downtown bus station where he argued with an attendant over the price of a bus ticket. Employees called police after Barr began cutting himself with a dull butter knife. APD dispatched officers to what it described as a “welfare check.” Witnesses told authorities that APD officer Leah Kelly was smoking a cigar as she yelled at Barr before shooting him twice in the stomach, nearly killing him.

Officer Trey Economidy stopped Jacob Mitschelen, 29, near the corner of San Pedro and Kathryn SE on Feb. 9, 2011 in a routine traffic stop. Mitschelen fled the scene on foot. According to the statement the officer made to investigators, Mitschelen stumbled as he ran, and a gun fell from his jacket pocket. Economidy fired fatal shots when, he said, Mitschelen grabbed the gun and turned to fire. The autopsy revealed, however, that Mitschelen died of gunshot wounds to his back.

Just days after Mitschelen’s death, on Feb. 13, a hotel parking garage security camera captured video of APD officers John Doyle and Robert Woolever kicking an unarmed Nicholas Blume in the head more than a dozen times. Doyle claimed that Blume, who they pulled over in a routine traffic stop, had a gun and needed to be restrained, but evidence later proved that Blume was unarmed at the time of the beating. The video of the attack ended with the two officers celebrating with chest bumps and high-fives over a bloody and unconscious Blume.

Alan Gomez, 22, who endured mental health issues and drug addiction, arrived at his brother’s house in May 2011 under the influence of methamphetamine. His brother, frightened and concerned that Alan might hurt himself, called 911 for help. As an agitated Alan Gomez smoked cigarettes and paced in the kitchen, a SWAT team swarmed the property. APD officer Sean Wallace shot and killed Gomez with a bullet to the chest while Gomez stood in his brother’s doorway holding a spoon.

Since 2010 Albuquerque police officers have killed Ellis, Gomez, Mitschelen and 19 other people and shot and wounded Barr and 11 others in a pattern that, according to the Los Angeles Times, gives Albuquerque one of the highest per capita rates of police shootings in the United States.

Beginning in 2010 APD internal affairs has investigated each shooting and has cleared every officer of wrongdoing. In addition to internal affairs, police shootings are also investigated by the Office of the Second Judicial District Attorney. An April 2012 Albuquerque Journal investigation examined the DA’s special “investigative grand juries.” The DA investigates police shootings through the use of unique panels that are unlike regular grand juries. Jurors cannot indict police officers but can only investigate to determine whether a shooting is justified or not. In the decades since the special panels were created, every single police shooting has been found justified.

Despite the official exonerations, Albuquerque has found itself constantly defending APD in court. Those lawsuits have brought to light a disturbing culture of violence in APD. In the days after Trey Economidy killed Jacob Mitschelen, a local reporter scoured social networking sites and found that Economidy had listed his occupation on Facebook as “human waste disposal.” Another officer, Pete Dwyer, the former president of the Albuquerque Police Officers Association, wrote on MySpace that, “some people are only alive because killing them is illegal.” He listed his occupation as “oxygen thief removal technician.” The wrongful death suit in the Kenneth Ellis case revealed that Officer Lampiris-Tremba had once Tasered a motorist during a routine traffic stop, and he was suspended for lying during an investigation. Alan Gomez was not the first person Sean Wallace killed. As an undercover New Mexico State Police officer in 2004, he shot an unarmed man four times in the back. Just days after Lampiris-Tremba killed Kenneth Ellis in 2010, Wallace killed a mentally ill man named Wayne Córdova. According to a complaint in the case, Wallace shot and killed Córdova while he huddled “on a rooftop, crying and asking to be killed.”

After a multi-million dollar jury award to the family of Kenneth Ellis last year, the City settled out-of-court this week for $8 million. The family of Jacob Mitschelen filed a wrongful death and civil rights suit against Trey Economidy and the city. In mid-January of this year, the City settled that lawsuit for $300,000. The Gomez family also sued for wrongful death and settled out of court late last year with the City for $900,000. Lawsuits and out-of-court settlements have cost the city more than $24 million since 2010, an amount nearly equal to one-fifth of Albuquerque’s annual police budget and greater than Albuquerque’s total budget for parks and recreation.

A number of victims’ families, including the parents of Kenneth Ellis and Alan Gomez, have become vocal critics of APD violence. And they have joined with a number of groups, such as the League of United Latin American Citizens, The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center and Vecinos Unidos, in calling for an independent investigation of the Albuquerque police department.

In November of 2012, The United States Department of Justice responded to these calls and announced that the Special Litigation Section of its Civil Rights Division was launching an investigation of “allegations that APD officers engage in use of excessive force, including use of unreasonable deadly force, in their encounters with civilians.” The ongoing investigation includes an evaluation of APD’s internal affairs, a unit made up of APD officers who investigate APD officers involved in allegations of wrongdoing.

The much-anticipated DOJ report is expected any day. When it arrives it will add to an existing library of reports from previous years that have documented frightening patterns of police violence in Albuquerque.

Nearly 30 years ago, in the late 1980s, Vecinos Unidos was involved in efforts to confront a troubling pattern of police violence in Albuquerque. At the time, their efforts drew attention to an internal APD report showing that its officers killed 15 people between 1987 and 1991, a number that exceeded fatal shootings over the same period in Tucson, Austin, El Paso, Colorado Springs and Tulsa combined. Then, as now, the shooting victims included unarmed suspects. Then, as now, APD called the pattern isolated but agreed to institute a number of changes in response to community outrage. Despite promises of reform, the changes failed to reduce the rate of police shootings.

In 1996 the Albuquerque City Council once again commissioned another study to examine the problem. The subsequent Walker-Luna report, as with the previous report, selected an arbitrary time frame and found that APD killed 31 people in the 10-year period ending in 1997, a number that placed Albuquerque in a category all its own. No other police department in the United States of comparable size (or smaller) killed as many people as the Albuquerque Police Department did. Among the recommendations in the 1997 report were suggestions to create a Police Oversight Commission (POC) and the office of an Independent Review Officer (IRO). The City Council adopted these and other recommendations.

These were important changes, but they have had little effect. Each “unjustified” ruling by the IRO was overruled by the Chief of Police. Each citizen complaint filed with the POC was rejected. In 2001, the APD Internal Affairs Unit investigated 52 complaints of excessive force but upheld only one complaint.

And the shootings continued. Officers killed 23 people in the six years between 1998 and 2004, a number that marked an increase in the rate at which Albuquerque police officers were killing people. Officials were quick to point out, however, that APD “only” shot three people in 2004, offering the number as evidence that new policies and procedures were starting to take effect. However Jay Rowland, the city’s Independent Review Officer asked APD to release data on the number of times officers used force in the line of duty. The resulting report, the third since the late-1980s, revealed that officers used force 551 times in 2004. They tackled somebody to the ground nearly 200 times; they used mace or pepper spray nearly 150 times; they Tasered 85 suspects; they punched or kicked 63 people; they delivered 22 baton blows; they sicced dogs on 12 suspects; and they killed three people.

The City of Albuquerque produced a fourth report on the problem of police violence in 2011. This time city officials asked the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, DC-based, nonprofit police research organization, to study and explain the disturbing pattern of police violence in Albuquerque. As has become standard operating procedure with every report on Albuquerque police violence, the authors selected an arbitrary time frame and found a pattern of police violence. In the years between 2006 and 2010, Albuquerque police officers killed 18 people, nearly 60 percent of whom suffered from mental illness, in 37 separate shooting incidents. The report made recommendations. The police promised reforms. The rate of killings continued.

What explains the failure of every reform effort to resolve the problem of APD violence? It might start with the way in which each report has always presented police violence as an isolated problem of the present, unconnected to an ongoing history of police violence. No report has made any effort to link current problems to historic patterns of violence at APD. Instead each report has selected an arbitrary time period and found a new and alarming trend of police shootings. The effect of selecting an arbitrary time frame for all studies of APD violence has been twofold. First, while it has not concealed the troubling nature of police violence, it has given the impression that the violence has always been an isolated problem unique to a particular time period. Something strange has gone awry with APD in the here-and-now, these studies have suggested—something unrelated to the past. And because the problem has been represented as something new, it has never been depicted as a problem systemic to APD policing.

Second, this imaginary isolated problem of APD violence suggests that the problem can be blamed on police officers who are “bad apples,” and thus is a problem that can be fixed with new reforms. It must be bad training, poor leadership or low morale. And so each report is followed by the same reforms that followed previous reports: APD needs new leadership, or its officers need better qualifications, more pay or better training. Yet each period of police violence under study is followed by another period of police violence equally as violent as the last. And the reforms of one period have become the problems of another.

And perhaps most concerning, each report looks to APD for a solution to the problem of police violence in Albuquerque. Instead of improved mental health services in Albuquerque, the reports propose an increase in the armed police presence on the streets. Instead of robust support for veterans, the homeless and the mentally ill, the City devotes scarce resources to an increasingly militarized police force. These reports suggest the solution to the problem of police violence is a well-trained SWAT, not fully funded social services.

And so the pattern continues. The last nine weeks of 2013 ended with five shootings and four fatalities in a series of dramatic and violent confrontations that included one unarmed victim who remains hospitalized. Meanwhile Albuquerque awaits the conclusion of the Justice Department’s investigation of APD and the release of yet another report on police violence that will likely offer familiar reforms for an old problem.

[First appeared in The Weekly Alibi]

The Environmental Disaster You’ve Never Heard Of: Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base Jet Fuel Spill

Wed, 27 Nov 2013 20:29:10 -0700

By DAVID CORREIA

The fighter jets and military planes that blast into the skies each day above Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base (KAFB) consume millions of gallons of jet fuel each year. In order to serve this fleet, the Air Force stores enormous amounts of fuel and distributes it throughout the base via a network of tanks, pipes and pumps. In the early 1950s, the base replaced leaking tanks and aging pipelines with a new fuels facility it promised would modernize and make more safe the handling and distribution of jet fuel. The facility received its first trainload of jet fuel and aviation gas in 1953. Almost immediately, and for the next 45 years, it has leaked jet fuel into the surrounding soil.

The “leak” continued, undetected, until 1992 when workers observed a huge surface plume in the soil surrounding the fuel facility. The Air Force largely ignored requests by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate the plume’s source and extent and instead, in 1994, gave itself a waiver from conducting military-mandated tests of the facility pipeline. Under pressure from the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), the Air Force finally conducted pressure tests of the pipelines in 1999. They failed spectacularly. The added pressure blew massive holes in the pipeline. The test appeared to prove the pipes were leaking. In a comic/tragic, nothing-to-see-here moment in May 2000, Mark Holmes, a civilian project manager for Kirtland’s environmental unit, told the Albuquerque Journal that everything was fine: The 100,000 gallons of missing fuel could be explained by a simple accounting error. NMED staffer Dennis McQuillan, however, told the Journal that if it were a 100,000 gallon spill, it “would be a big spill, one of the biggest” in state history.

They were both wrong. In 2006 an Air Force contractor drilled an exploratory well in southeast Albuquerque’s Bullhead Park, just outside the base's northern boundary. He found four feet of jet fuel floating on top of the aquifer. Additional monitoring wells found a plume of jet fuel slithering northeast from the original spill location and well beyond the northern boundary of the base. Kirtland estimated the plume at between one and two million gallons, but NMED raised that estimate to eight million gallons. Two years later, with more monitoring and evidence of the true scale of the spill, NMED revised the estimate dramatically to 24 million gallons, an amount 240 times larger than the 2000 estimate.

For comparison's sake, the KAFB spill is larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, which dumped more than 12 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound, killing an estimated quarter-million seabirds, 3,000 otters, hundreds of harbor seals and bald eagles and nearly two dozen killer whales. The KAFB jet fuel spill—the Air Force calls it a “leak”—is the largest toxic contamination of an aquifer in US history, and it could be twice the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster.

And that’s bad enough, but it’s the good news compared to what follows.

Unlike the crude oil in the Exxon Valdez disaster, jet fuel and aviation gas contain a variety of toxic chemical compounds, including benzene, toluene and various aliphatic hydrocarbons, and these are all found in the plume—in varying concentrations—at every depth. Among the toxic chemicals contaminating the aquifer, one poses the most serious threat to both human health and the challenge of remediation: ethylene dibromide or EDB.

The EPA banned the commercial and industrial use of ethylene dibromide more than 40 years ago. Prior to its ban, the US produced 300 million pounds of EDB annually, with most used as an additive in leaded gasoline. Every gallon of aviation gas included enough EDB to contaminate millions of gallons of drinking water. In addition, 20 million pounds of EDB was used each year as an agricultural fumigant. Nearly 40 crops were routinely sprayed with EDB. Farmworkers—often with little or no protective equipment—fumigated fruit and citrus trees. They sprayed it on stored grain and the milling equipment that made the bread that stocked grocery store shelves. They saturated soil with EDB after harvests.

When EDB is released into soils, it almost always makes its way into groundwater. It is highly soluble and stable and persists in soils and underground water. It’s hard to find and even harder (and more expensive) to get out. By the early 1970s, concerns about EDB’s risk to human health surfaced after laboratory tests of rodents identified it as a potent carcinogen and mutagen.

In 1973 the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued regulations that led to the reduced use of leaded gasoline—and thus EDB—but the agency continued to allow agricultural use of EDB. The National Cancer Institute first issued a notice on EDB in 1975, reporting that it induced cancer in laboratory animals. Following that warning, EPA conducted a six-year review, culminating in September 1983 when it suspended all agricultural uses of EDB pending further scientific study. Laboratory tests quickly confirmed previous reports that EDB caused cancer and reproductive disorders in laboratory animals. Meanwhile high concentrations of EDB were found in drinking water in California, Florida, Hawaii and Georgia. The EPA issued an emergency ban on all agricultural use of EDB in February 1984.

In the wake of the ban, more studies examined EDB's effect on animals. In some laboratory animals, EDB is a reproductive toxin. It inhibits the ability of rats, rams and bulls to produce sperm, and it interrupts the fertility of fowl. It binds itself to DNA and rewrites genetic information causing mutation. It is a potent carcinogen in rats and mice. When exposed to skin, it produces widespread lesions and tumors; when given orally, tumors develop in the stomach and lungs. Inhalation results in tumors in the nasal cavity and circulatory system.

Untold thousands of laboratory animals were killed by exposure to EDB; this, in order to show that EDB is fatal in high doses while low-level longterm exposure causes renal and liver failure, cancer and mutation. Its effect on humans is more difficult to determine. The HERP index, a measure that translates cancer risks in rats to humans, ranks EDB as the most dangerous rodent carcinogen to human health. Toxicologists differ on whether the data on human mortality to EDB is statistically significant.

A 1990 study by the California Department of Health Services found that citrus workers “had essentially a 100 percent chance of contracting cancer.” A 1984 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported on deaths of two agricultural workers: One worker died of liver failure 12 hours after collapsing while cleaning inside an empty tank, found later to contain EDB residues; another worker died of renal failure 64 hours after trying to rescue the first worker. A 1980 mortality study of 161 workers employed at two EDB manufacturing plants—including one owned by Dow Chemical—identified a pattern of malignancies and exposure fatalities among workers, but also concluded mortality was lower than expected given human risk assumed by animal studies. In other words, EDB causes fatal renal and liver failure in high doses, and it's a human carcinogen in low-level, longterm exposure, but not at a rate greater than statistically expected.

However, these studies were enough to convince the EPA to act. The Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 required that the EPA determine safe levels of various chemical contaminants in drinking water. The agency determined the maximum safe level of EDB in drinking water—the level at which no adverse effects would likely occur—is zero. In other words, the EPA considers no amount of EDB in drinking water safe for human health. Despite EPA standards, NMED permits EDB in drinking water at levels at or below 50 parts per trillion (ppt). The most recent data from KAFB’s plume-monitoring wells find EDB concentrations in shallow wells on the base at concentrations of 240,000 ppt, a concentration nearly 5,000 times greater than the 50 ppt standard. Monitoring wells on and off base have found EDB in shallow, intermediate and deep wells at all depths in concentrations significantly higher than NMED’s standard.

The presence of EDB in the plume at such alarming concentrations reveals two inconvenient facts for the Air Force. First, it has made it more difficult for Kirtland to minimize the significance of the spill. At a public meeting last week, KAFB Colonel Jeff Lanning admitted that “fuel has been leaking for a long time,” and since the Air Force discontinued use of leaded aviation gas in 1975, the presence of EDB suggests the spill began “possibly as early as the 1950s.” Current estimates suggest a plume of EDB-contaminated groundwater 1,000 feet wide and more than a mile long is moving northeast from the base; according to a 2009 KAFB memo, it's advancing as much as 385 feet per year. Most of that plume—80 percent of which is now beyond the boundary of the base—is headed directly for the Ridgecrest neighborhood. The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority operates a series of wells in the Ridgecrest area that pump so much water for the city that they produce a cone of depression that acts like a straw, sucking the plume ever closer.

Second, the chemical properties of EDB make it as elusive as it is dangerous. Its solubility means that it dissolves easily in water and thus separates from aviation gas and quickly contaminates aqueous systems like underground aquifers. Its chemical stability means that it doesn’t easily biodegrade. Figuring out how much aviation gas KAFB spilled and how much EDB is in the aquifer is therefore important information. But the Air Force doesn’t really seem to care. When asked at a community meeting how much jet fuel spilled, Lanning dismissed the question. “When my kid spills Kool-Aid on the carpet, I’m less concerned about how much he spilled than I am about how to get it cleaned up.” Lanning’s glib dismissal of the size of the plume might reflect less a folksy charm and more a calculated public relations stance. If KAFB can take the focus off the spill's size, it can be represented as a simple remediation project rather than an environmental disaster. And so the Air Force distributes maps of the plume at public meetings—maps that confidently depict EDB far from municipal well fields. But decades after the spill, the Air Force has yet to model the hydraulic properties of the aquifer. And so these maps—overconfidently representing a reality we can't know—are more reassuring fiction than sound hydrological science. If in the decades EDB lurked in the aquifer, it migrated into existing drinking water wells, we wouldn’t know. There is no medical test to determine human exposure and none of the drinking water wells have the technical capacity to meaningfully measure levels of EDB.

None of this seems to concern NMED. The same staffer who called the possible 100,000 gallon spill in 2000 “one of the biggest spills” ever now calls the 24 million gallon spill just another plume. “There are plumes in Roswell, Las Cruces, all over the state. It takes years to clean these things up, but we have clean, closed sites [in New Mexico].” NMED Environmental Health Division Director Tom Blaine echoed McQuillan’s certainty, assuring attendees of a public meeting that KAFB will absolutely “remediate the site. This isn’t our first rodeo.” But there’s little strategy or past action to justify this confidence. There is no plan in place to remove EDB from the aquifer. And in the 60 years since it first spilled jet fuel into Albuquerque’s aquifer, KAFB has yet to remove and treat a single gallon of contaminated groundwater. Meanwhile, as Dave McCoy, executive director of the environmental watchdog group Citizen Action New Mexico told me, the plume keeps moving and “it’s headed directly for you.”

[First appeared in The Weekly Alibi]

Smokey the Bear Says: Only You Can Stop the Forest Service

Fri, 13 Sep 2013 08:08:33 -0600

By DAVID CORREIA

Federal land management has been a disaster in New Mexico. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the United States Forest Service (USFS), which together administer 30 million acres (nearly a third of all land in New Mexico) present themselves as stewards of New Mexico’s forests, deserts, ranges and bosques. They aren’t. If you like what BLM does, you probably own an oil company. Last year the BLM approved nearly 1,100 drilling permits in New Mexico, nearly 20 percent more than the previous year and nearly as much as Utah and Colorado combined. While BLM permits more drilling, communities everywhere scramble to protect themselves from it. Despite towns going dry in Texas from water-hogging fracking operators and the widespread chemical poisoning of aquifers in Pennsylvania, the BLM recently revealed plans for more hydraulic fracturing, a method in which operators inject a toxic chemical slurry into the ground at high-pressure in order to fracture underground shale and extract the oil and gas trapped in the rock.
 It gets worse. Before the rigs can extract oil, they first take up the slurry of chemicals used during the drilling process. This toxic concoction of chemicals and heavy metals finds its way into unlined open pits. The last time anyone bothered checking, in 2003, nearly 7,000 of these pits were leaching contaminants into New Mexico’s groundwater. Governor Susana Martinez recently gutted a new pit rule that would have banned the use of open pits. If fracking doesn’t foul our groundwater, the pits surely will.

While BLM is expanding, flush with oil and gas revenue, the USFS is dying on the vine, strangled by a declining budget. And that’s not entirely a bad thing. Like BLM in New Mexico, captive to corporate interests, the districts of the Santa Fe and Carson National Forests once operated like timber company field offices. Timber sales funded growing staffs, which made it possible to offer more and larger timber sales.
 The Forest Service and its mission to manage timber for industry was born with a sweep of Teddy Roosevelt’s pen on Feb. 1, 1905; it died in New Mexico on March 16, 1993, the day the US Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Mexican spotted owl as a threatened species. That listing was the thunderclap announcing a gathering storm of environmental organizations that swept in after the ruling to sue the Forest Service into submission. The lawsuits disciplined the agency and transformed it from an appendage of industry to an arm of the environmental movement.

Environmental histories of New Mexico celebrate March 16, 1993 as the day the Forest Service died for our (timber) sins and was resurrected as an ecologically oriented agency. Walk into any district office in northern New Mexico. Where you once found rangers furiously preparing timber sales, you now find them polishing their environmental impact statements. Where you once found rangers huddling with timber executives, you now find them handing out trail maps to hikers.
And this is a good thing, right? They’ve been made to see the light, right? And, lo, the angel of ecology came upon the Forest Service, and the glory of Nature (and the threat of a lawsuit) shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. Right? Not quite. There is another view of the Forest Service that doesn’t see the agency’s legally mandated commitment to ecology as a revelation but rather as the renewal of a long history of mismanagement and paternalism in northern New Mexico.

That history began in 1944, a year in which the Forest Service found itself gripped by the imaginary fear of a looming timber famine. If there really was a timber famine, it was only because industry had exhausted timber in the east and midwest and found itself suddenly without forests to clear-cut. The threat of a timber famine in the middle of a war effort produced precisely the panic the timber industry intended. Lobbyists for the timber industry, eyeing the vast public lands of the west, wrote what became the 1944 Sustained Yield Forest Management Act, a law that promised to give commercial timber operators control of forests on public lands.

Sustained yield invaded New Mexico in 1944 like Stephen Kearny’s Army of the West invaded in 1846: An occupying army that was “just here to help out.” What the Forest Service found in New Mexico in the early 20th century was an economy organized around small-scale sheep farming, supplemented by household production, in an arrangement requiring close cooperation within and among villages. But the Forest Service taught its rangers to understand forestry solely through the prism of commercial timber, and so the strange world that rangers found in New Mexico made no sense at all. What do you make of a people who leave timber on the stump? What do you make of a people who remain unmoved by the profit potential of a ponderosa pine forest?

Consider a passage from a 1935 Forest Service report: “[New Mexicans] are sedentary in character living in the present and with no thought for the future. They accept conditions as they are and make the best of them with no idea of conserving the natural resources much less enhancement of them. They would remain in place to the point of extinction by starvation and disease before they would migrate.”
 This is revealing language. To the Forest Service, the point of a forest is timber. Trees are only stumps-in-waiting. In sustained yield forestry, rangers found a way to “enhance” New Mexico. They slashed permits for livestock, explaining that local villagers’ animals were overgrazing ranges. Locals protested. I interviewed an older man in El Rito years ago about these cuts. He was a boy at the time, and he watched his grandfather argue with a local ranger. His grandfather told the ranger he needed the workhorses but didn’t have the money to feed them through winter. They’d starve, he said. So the ranger walked into the corral and shot the horses.

The claim of overgrazing, however, was just a pretense. In internal Forest Service memos, they described the cuts as necessary, not to protect ranges but to force locals into wage labor in the timber industry. It was a plan to turn peasants into proletarians.

The cuts culminated in the creation of the Vallecitos Federal Sustained Yield Unit (VFSYU), a special timber unit on the Carson’s El Rito District. During its heyday in the 1970s, the district office served as little more than a day labor operation for timber firms. To protect profitability, the district kept wage rates low; to keep locals trapped in low-wage jobs, the district cut more livestock permits. Rangers turned the forest into a factory. When workers went on strike in the 1950s, the Forest Service sided with the timber operator. The sawmill mysteriously burned down. Clear-cutting became common.

There is so much turnover in the Forest Service, and so little interest in the past among current rangers, that this history is unknown to them. The stories of those years fill their archives, but they never read it. And so what was once a ruse to rob permittees of a living—the myth of overgrazed ranges—is now the gospel truth to which all Forest Service employees pledge allegiance. The district maintains to this day that ranges have always been, and continue to be, overgrazed. They swear it is true—it’s written in their Environmental Impact Statements—and yet the El Rito staff has never included a rangeland ecologist, has never done field studies, has never taken samples, has never maintained a monitoring program? For nearly a generation, the Forest Service has placed the interests of the timber industry above any ecological or social concern. Year after year local residents pleaded with the Forest Service to slow the pace of timber cutting, an ever-growing yield that always meant lower wages for workers, increased erosion and habitat destruction for the forest, but guaranteed profit for industry.

The commercial focus ended on March 16, 1993, but it is not a date celebrated in northern New Mexico. The environmental lawsuits that followed the listing of the Mexican spotted owl made no distinction between commercial and community-based forestry. Environmental organizations decided that they alone spoke for nature, and apparently nature likes middle-class, white people from the city who hike and camp and don’t own chainsaws. The lawsuits protected forests from corporate greed, but they also condemned the small-scale and sustainable timber and cooperative firewood industry that thinned overgrown forests and employed hundreds of northern New Mexicans.

But maybe you don’t care about traditional forest-dependent communities in New Mexico. Maybe you just like to hike or camp. You love nature, and you see the lawsuits as a victory and the Forest Service as an agency organized around your interests—devoted to protecting wild places. Think again. Your interests are not aligned with the Forest Service but rather find common cause with the land grant communities of northern New Mexico. And here’s why:

The Forest Service does not have the staff to manage a forest overrun by all-terrain vehicles. There is a new plan to manage off-road use of the forest, but no staff to enforce it. The budget has collapsed and left the agency unable to maintain roads, trails and campgrounds. Budget cuts have meant staff cuts and so the enormous task of thinning a thick and dying forest in the middle of a historic drought is beyond the ability of the Forest Service to plan and administer. Despite it all they still manage to cut what few livestock permits remain, forever blaming forest-dependent communities for their own century of mismanagement.
 In the mid-1980s, a coalition of loggers, community activists and even a few environmentalists came together to form the VFSYU Association in an effort to force changes to Forest Service management. They recognized the problem with the Forest Service was not its institutional form but the imperatives that gave the institution momentum. It was charged with managing timber at all costs, and it did that job very well. But what if its job was to support local communities and ecologies? What new policies and practices would that imperative create?

The VFSYU Association suggested that instead of large yields for commercial operators, we should offer smaller yields to local loggers. We should end the exemption from state and local property taxes and use that money for schools, playgrounds and trails. Wildlife and fisheries management should benefit local communities. Jobs as hunting guides and the money from hunting permits should stay in the local community. We should train interested students in northern New Mexico in silviculture and rangeland ecology. And we should hire them to work in Forest Service offices.

We should invest in the infrastructure of a local economy: Small sawmills could offer good jobs and handle the small-diameter trees that overpopulate the forest. No more driving to the Los Alamos bomb factory to find a job. We should monitor the grasslands and forest ecology. In short, we should create management priorities that sustain a healthy forest and a local and sustainable forest economy.
 While the Forest Service ignored these suggestions, we should not. The stakes are too high. Our forests are managed by an agency that was created to do one thing—manage timber—and today that is the one thing it can’t do. And the things it should do—support a local forest economy and protect forest ecologies in a changing climate—it won’t.

So let’s get rid of the Forest Service and support traditional forest-dependent communities in building a real alternative. There are efforts in the New Mexico legislature to reimagine public lands management. Demand that these efforts continue. Ignore the efforts of people like the Koch brothers, who seek to turn public lands over to the oil and gas industry. Support efforts that seek alternatives responsive not just to environmentalists in Santa Fe, but to the people who live and work in the forests of northern New Mexico.

[This essay appeared previously in the Weekly Alibi

The Bureau of Land Management: A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of ExxonMobil

Thu, 22 Aug 2013 09:46:48 -0600

By DAVID CORREIA

The massive Permian Basin in west Texas and eastern New Mexico, at more than 75,000 square miles, is among the world’s largest deposits of sedimentary rock from the Permian geologic period. It is also a major oil and gas field that has produced nearly 30 billion barrels of oil and 75 trillion cubic feet of gas since 1921.

And it’s just getting started. Oil and gas production numbers have nearly doubled in the past ten years, and each year the basin sets new records for drilling permits issued and total oil recovered. Today Permian Basin oil production accounts for nearly 15 percent of total annual U.S. oil production.

Despite this sustained spike, there’s no end in sight. Production numbers continue to rise each year right along with recoverable reserve estimates. Geologists now think that current recoverable reserves in the basin exceed the total production numbers of the last 100 years. The growth in recoverable reserves is a function of what the oil and gas industry euphemistically calls its new “enhanced-recovery practices.” In other words: fracking. As prices have risen and new drilling practices have been developed, gas once trapped in sedimentary rock is now recoverable. What was once a commodity-in-waiting, forever stranded from the capitalist market by geochemistry and technology, is now the most profitable game in town.

And the industry is going all in. The Railroad Commission of Texas, the state agency that regulates (accommodates might be a better word) the oil and gas industry, lists 22,000 of the nearly 135,000 total wells in the Permian Basin as currently engaged in fracking practices with 80,000 more in active production after relying on fracking to open up reserves.

A Texas-sized bonanza! Extracting oil and gas from the Permian Basin, indeed, is now like wringing a sponge, only the sponge never seems to go dry. Residents of Barnhart, for example, a tiny Texas town southwest of San Angelo along the northern edge of the arid Edwards Plateau, have witnessed the fracking boom from their own front porches. Views once full of mesquite and acacia trees are now dominated by oil derricks and the infrastructure of fracking: massive water and fracking fluid tanks, huge pumps and trucks filling the roads and ferrying materials and chemicals. But it’s not just the views that have changed. Over the past year, residents have begun to notice weak water pressure, increased sand accumulation in toilets and sinks and, most recently, wells going dry everywhere. In an arid climate and in the middle of a historic drought, they’re trading water for oil.

And it’s not just in Barnhart. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, whose website is now littered with links on drought and fracking emissions concerns, estimates that dozens of Texas towns may soon suffer the same fate.

So add the total exhaustion of groundwater to the growing list of likely environmental consequences of fracking and realize that even if the toxic fracking fluid slurry somehow doesn’t poison your groundwater, the growing number of rigs and pumps will surely use it all up.

Will the realities of a changing climate finally throw a monkey wrench into the works and help grind to a halt the spreading environmental ruin of fracking? Not if the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has anything to do with it.

The BLM, an agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior, administers nearly 250 million acres of federally owned land. It issues permits for everything from birding and boating to hang gliding and mountain biking. But by far its most important activity is the permitting of oil and gas extraction for its more than 700 million acres of subsurface mining reserves. And it’s largely that activity—the permitting of mineral extraction—that allows the BLM to translate its $1 billion budget into annual revenues greater than $6 billion.

Just two years ago the BLM launched a review of existing policies regarding the permitting of fracking and tar sands exploration in three western states, noting at the time that the “nascent character of technology” meant that fracking was not “economically viable” and thus perhaps should not be permitted on certain federal lands. Since that time, towns in Texas have begun to go dry from the growth and extension of fracking methods while toxic slurry has begun to poison wells in Pennsylvania. The growing anxiety around fracking has led at least one New Mexico county to ban the extraction of hydrocarbons entirely, while the arrival of fracking in the UK has led to an explosion in direct action, with masked activists in West Sussex blockading Cuadrilla, an energy firm run by former BP executives, from accessing oil and gas fields.

Despite these growing concerns about the environmental costs of fracking, the BLM changed its tune in May of this year. Innovations in science and technology, and industry interest in expanding fracking on federal lands, make formerly unrecoverable reserves on federal and Indian land now recoverable. So the BLM, always a friend to industry, stands poised to make available hundreds of millions of acres for new fracking operations.

In a draft of a new rule governing hydraulic fracturing on all federal and Indian lands published in the Federal Register (43 CFR Part 3160), the BLM acknowledges that “the rapid expansion of [fracking] has caused public concern,” and concludes that the increased adoption of hydraulic fracturing demands a careful scrutiny by the federal government regarding whether or not it should be allowed on public lands. But this language is nothing more than a smokescreen to disguise the real purpose of the new rule. After all, 90 percent of all wells drilled on federal and Indian land, and administered by the BLM, already use fracking methods. And so the new rule sets out to find a “consistent, predictable regulatory framework” for future fracking. In other words, the BLM is not out to force changes to existing practices, not interested in banning the use of toxic chemicals, and, most importantly, not even inclined to admit there’s a problem at all. The proposed rule is not about protecting the groundwater we drink, it is about protecting the investment-backed expectations of oil and gas firms and their continued and unfettered access to federal and Indian land.

In the rule the BLM takes pains to define fracking as inherently safe: fracking, is according to the rule, “a common and accepted practice, and has been in oil and gas production for decades.” Moreover, as with nearly all federal regulations regarding resource extraction, it is written in the interests of industry (if not actually written by industry lawyers and lobbyist). Indeed the new rule is, admits its authors, “generally consistent with the American Petroleum Institute’s (API) guidelines.” The API is an oil and gas trade association with an average annual lobbying budget of nearly $10 million. It has spent millions of dollars spreading lies in support of the Keystone XL pipeline and, apparently, its employees moonlight as rule writers for the BLM.

Despite the fact that the BLM last updated its regulations regarding fracking in the late 1980s—before hydraulic fracturing existed as a commercially viable practice—it today “seeks to create less of an administrative burden” for industry with its new rule. And so there’s little in the rule that actually transforms fracking practices in any meaningful way, nothing that limits the overuse of local water reserves, no ban on toxic chemicals, no independent monitoring or third-party oversight, and of course it goes without saying that no mention is made of the implications of the new rule for climate change. Indeed, the BLM is careful to ignore altogether the terminal absurdity of increasing the rate of hydrocarbon extraction on hundreds of millions of acres of federal land. Global greenhouse gas emissions have nearly doubled since 1990, and the U.S. has been the largest contributor to this increase. The proposed BLM rule, if made permanent, guarantees that the bonanza of fracking will mean a dramatic increase in the rate of greenhouse gas emissions. Don’t bother looking for any discussion of these issues in the proposed rule.

But it is only a proposed rule. What are the chances that an overwhelming public outcry in opposition to this industry-written rule could scuttle the plan? It’s unlikely. The BLM refuses to admit that fracking poisons groundwater, and thus is content to consider as equally legitimate comments for and against fracking.

A clue regarding what the final rule will look like is found under a section in the proposed rule that discusses comments the BLM has already been received. In it the BLM crudely summarizes negative comments in the most general and toothless way, and is careful to ignore any references to scientific studies of the proven environmental problems inherent to fracking. Instead negative comments are reframed as in fact actually supportive—negative commentors, according to the BLM, are actually supportive of BLM regulations as the best way to “protect groundwater.” In contrast the BLM gives the comments of industry-paid lobbyists the imprimatur of science: “BLM regulation of hydraulic fracturing is unnecessary and… no scientific basis exists that hydraulic fracturing causes groundwater contamination and… it is a low-risk operation.”
So the BLM just bides its time, waiting for the comment period to end, so it can get back to its real work—developing new industry-friendly regulation that won’t “[introduce] unnecessary new procedures or delays in the process of developing oil and gas resources on public and Indian lands.”

BLM’s motto has long been “These lands are your lands,” but this surely needs revision now. Perhaps, “No Trespassing: these poisoned, waterless wastelands belong to ExxonMobil” might better reflect the real mission of the agency.

This article first appeared in CounterPunch

The Toxic Tales of Susana Martinez: How mining giant Freeport-McMoRan is rewriting environmental laws in New Mexico

Mon, 5 Aug 2013 08:38:41 -0600

By DAVID CORREIA

The massive Chino Mine, an open-pit copper mine east of Silver City in southern New Mexico, is so large that it can be seen from space. It grew particularly big in the 1950s and '60s, as more than 1,200 workers labored each year to remove as much as 140 million pounds of copper; it grew so big in fact that it slowly swallowed the town of Santa Rita. Most of the residents were relocated into former military barracks in the nearby town of Bayard. Some were happy to be living farther from the daily explosions—three mini-earthquakes each day—that blasted free millions of tons of rock and shook their homes day and night. In 2008 mining giant Freeport-McMoRan, the largest copper mining company in the world, bought the mine from its former owner, Phelps Dodge. After a hiatus following a drop in copper prices, Freeport ramped up operations in 2010. Today, if you stop at the overlook on Highway 152 east of Bayard, you’ll see huge 240-ton diesel trucks prowling along the terraced tracks that ring the mine, hauling away material dumped by massive electric shovels. But bring your binoculars; at nearly two miles across the mine is so wide that the 40-foot tall trucks are barely visible to the naked eye.

Phoenix-based Freeport-McMoRan owns three mines in New Mexico—Cobre, Tyrone and Chino—along with others in Arizona, Colorado and even further afield in Chile, Peru, Spain, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and, most notoriously, on the Indonesian side of the island of Papua New Guinea. There, at the Grasberg Mine, more than 20,000 workers toil for wages barely over $1 per day (U.S. currency); in 2011 the mine helped Freeport post record profits of more than $5 billion on more than $20 billion in revenue.

Labor strife defines everyday life for workers at the Grasberg Mine, but it’s Freeport’s shocking environmental record that is most egregious. After blasting entire hillsides of copper-laden rock, huge pulverizers grind the material into the consistency of sugar. The milled material is then mixed with a chemical slurry. Agitators inject oxygen and mix the concoction until a thick froth develops. This froth, called concentrate, contains the copper ore, which is skimmed off and sent to a smelter. Milling produces more waste than copper, however, and this leftover fluid, or tailings, constitutes a noxious stew. Freeport refuses to release accurate information on any of its mining operations, but environmental organizations estimate that Grasberg produces between 230,000 and 700,000 tons of tailings each day. Freeport dumps the tailings into the Ajkwa and Otomona rivers. Glacial runoff at high altitude feeds the Ajkwa and Otomona as the rivers travel through an ecosystem astonishing in its biodiversity. Scientists still find new species of insects and mammals in the cloud forests, rainforests, alpine forests, tidal swamps and mangrove forests. But nothing much lives in either river any longer. As the tailings makes its 80-mile journey to the coast, it leaves a toxic sediment of chemicals and heavy metals, including mercury, along the river bottom. This slurry skirts the western edge of the nearly 10,000 square-mile Lorentz National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is among the most ecologically diverse ecosystems in the world (Freeport euphemistically calls it the “controlled riverine tailings transport” system). The tailings eventually accumulate in what Freeport calls the “modified deposition area,” or more accurately, in the place where the spreading ruin of its toxic plume chokes coastal mangrove estuary habitat along the Arafura Sea.
Indonesia is the only country in the world that lets Freeport turn waterways into waste pits. This arrangement comes after decades of payoffs to successive military juntas that—despite enormous pressure from human rights groups and environmental watchdogs—lets Freeport regulate itself. And so the company calls this management nightmare the “best option available” and publishes maps with arrows captioned “No Tailings Impact” that point to estuaries ruined by tailings.
Freeport is accustomed to doing things its own way, workers rights and nature be damned, and this is the attitude Freeport brought with it when it arrived in New Mexico in 2008. Despite rising copper prices and record corporate profits, Freeport claimed that existing regulations in New Mexico were too costly and onerous, particularly those that governed the handling of toxic mine tailings. It made these claims despite the fact that Freeport received variances from the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) for its Tyrone Mine southwest of Silver City that allowed it to ignore water quality standards and freely pollute groundwater, just like at the Grasberg Mine in Papua, Indonesia. But Freeport hates all environmental regulation, even those as toothless as the copper pit rule in New Mexico.
And so Freeport sought to write a new copper pit rule. Its timing was perfect. Susana Martinez arrived in the Governor’s mansion in Santa Fe at the same time Freeport-McMoRan restarted the Chino Mine. She established the Copper Rule Advisory Committee, stacked it with industry representatives, including from Freeport, and charged it with rewriting mining regulation. But representatives of environmental organizations also had a seat at the table and so the rule didn’t give Freeport the carte blanche it sought. So NMED General Counsel Ryan Flynn, a Martinez appointee and former lawyer at the Santa Fe firm Modrall Sperling (Freeport’s attorneys in New Mexico), set the draft rule aside and adopted language written entirely by Freeport-McMoRan instead.

This industry-written rule defines copper pit mining as an activity entirely exempt from the water quality standards established by the New Mexico Water Quality Act. Freeport can pollute as it wishes within what the rule calls areas of “hydrologic containment” and “open pit surface water drainage.” A lawyer involved in the copper pit rule described it to me as an “unprecedented attack” on nature and the authority of the state to regulate extractive industries in New Mexico.

And this was not the first time Martinez weakened environmental regulation. Shortly after she came into office, she fired the entire Environmental Improvement Board (EIB), the body that creates the policies that guide environmental rule-making in New Mexico. Under Governor Richardson, the EIB established sweeping climate change mitigation rules that promised to curtail greenhouse gas emissions among New Mexico’s biggest polluters. Martinez replaced them with new members committed to overturning those policies. Two of her appointees had demonstrated their anti-environmental bona fides when, prior to their appointment, they testified against the proposed climate change mitigation rules. Another, Elizabeth Ryan, worked for a law firm that represented energy industry clients. After her appointment the firm bragged to its clients that one of its lawyers now served on the EIB. The new board quickly repealed the climate change rule.

Martinez then turned her attention to three waste pit rules. Her first act was to scuttle a new dairy pit rule that would have required synthetic liners in all manure lagoons in New Mexico.

The oil and gas waste pit rule was next. In 2005 the Oil Conservation Division finally admitted that thousands of oil and gas pits—the ponds that hold the chemical waste slurry of oil and gas extraction—were leaking into groundwater. It proposed a new rule that, among other improvements, banned open-pit storage entirely. Martinez refused to publish the rule and early last month, after ignoring the pleas of environmental organizations and a history of groundwater contamination by industry, ordered that the state publish an oil pit rule weaker than the original standard. In a press release, Eric Jantz, an attorney with the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, condemned the rule that now allows oil firms to construct “multi-acre artificial lakes filled with toxic fracking fluids. They have no size limit. These lakes are new to New Mexico, and they may remain in place until drilling or fracking operations are completed – typically ranging from 5-15 years.”

The copper pit rule rounded out the coordinated attack on the environment. Freeport-McMoRan can now operate the Chino Mine as it operates the Grasberg Mine in Papua, unburdened by even the most minimal environmental standards.

The copper rule rewrite and Martinez’s attack on environmental regulation is laced with as many ironies as southern New Mexico groundwater is with toxic tailings. At the same time that the New Mexico Environment Department was repealing environmental regulations that protected groundwater from Freeport-McMoRan, the Attorney General of the state of New Mexico was suing Freeport-McMoRan for polluting groundwater. That lawsuit ended in February of 2011 when Freeport-McMoRan agreed to a consent decree with the state of New Mexico regarding historic groundwater contamination stemming from operations at the Tyrone, Cobre and Chino mines. According to the complaint, which described the need for remediation as “Superfund-like,” massive slag heaps and huge tailings ponds at the Chino Mine are laced with sulfuric acid and dissolved metals such as arsenic and mercury and leach into groundwater. Just as in Grasberg, the Chino Mine relies on natural streambeds to transport tailings, and this practice guarantees that toxic slurry will eventually percolate into groundwater. Historic contamination is more difficult to determine, but the complaint notes that recent events have had significant impacts on surface and groundwater quality. Nearly 200,000 gallons of toxic tailings were accidently released into Hanover Creek in 1996. Three years later a pipeline breach dumped 8 million gallons more. Despite the consent decree, however, the new copper pit rule promises to make monitoring of future groundwater contamination more difficult.

I drove west last week along Highway 152 toward Silver City hoping to get a look at the Chino Mine. Just west of Truth or Consequences the road erupts out of the Love Ranch Basin west of the Caballo Reservoir and into the Black Range of the Rio Grande uplift. It snakes up and over the Mimbres Mountains along 50 miles of hairpin turns through ponderosa pine forest, much of which was charred by the 2012 Whitewater Baldy Fire. The western edge of the Chino Mine comes into focus just as the road finally straightens out and drops into a wide valley just east of the Continental Divide. It had just rained and the mine, really a series of mountain peaks that surround a deep valley that looks like it’s been slowly turned inside-out after more than 100 years of industrial mining, appears to be melting. Terraced slopes that look painted in vertical streaks of red and copper and yellow bleed into one another as water travels down along deep rills and gullies toward the base of the mine where the runoff pools into mini-lagoons in shades of deep red and dark yellow. I pulled over at the lookout along the northern edge of the mine in order to take pictures, but the incomprehensible vastness of the mine escapes capture by photography.

The week before, I called Eric Kinneberg, Freeport’s director of media relations, hoping to get access to the mine. He told me that they never let media poke around their mines. “It’s too disruptive,” he said. While Governor Susana Martinez flung open the doors of the New Mexico Environment Department to Freeport-McMoRan, the mining giant is reluctant to return the favor. There are no tours of the facility, particularly for curious reporters. So I lingered at the lookout because it’s a long way back to Albuquerque, and it’s as close as I’ll get to the mine. Freeport’s policy of no access extends to nearly every aspect of its operation. It refuses to release data on its mining practices—no one knows how many workers Freeport employs at Chino or how much copper it mills.

But now, thanks to Susana Martinez and her new copper pit rule, we know one thing for certain: Freeport will dump millions of tons of toxic tailings into Whitewater Creek, and those tailings will eventually make it into groundwater. And it will do this because it has a permit, not despite it.

This essay first appeared in the Albuquerque Weekly Alibi.

Who is Reies López Tijerina? REAPPRAISING A NEW MEXICAN FOLK HERO

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 09:47:35 -0600

By DAVID CORREIA
Smoke from the Thompson Ridge Fire burning in the Jemez drifted north on Wednesday, June 5, and settled thick over Española, mixing with dark rain clouds to the north. I was driving from Albuquerque to Alcalde to hear Reies López Tijerina speak at an event commemorating the 46th anniversary of the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid, but when I made it out of the smoke and into the rain in Alcalde, I found that 86-year-old Tijerina had--for the first time in many years--skipped his usual June 5 pilgrimage to New Mexico. Despite his absence the commemoration went on and, as it always does, provided an opportunity for land grant activists to honor Tijerina’s celebrated role in New Mexico’s land grant history. Speaker after speaker gave speeches that mixed stories of Tijerina’s important legacy with familiar laments of treaties broken and land grants stolen.

The view of the Thompson Ridge Fire from above Española, June 5, 2013. Photo by David Correia

Though no one said it, not much has changed in 46 years. Then as now New Mexico was on fire. Forest fires raged in the canyons below Los Alamos in the spring of 1967, and new fires seemed to erupt every few days on the Carson National Forest. So much burned in fact that officials sighed with relief. “The worst was over,” reported one sheriff, “because there was so little left to burn."
But it was arson, not drought, that filled New Mexico’s skies with smoke in the spring of 1967. These were fires of discontent and officials suspected land grant group La Alianza Federal de Mercedes was to blame. The charismatic leader of the Alianza, Reies López Tijerina, formed the group as a way to reclaim Spanish and Mexican land grants in New Mexico. According to the Alianza, the large private ranches and huge federal forests of northern New Mexico were the illegal spoils of a colonial invasion. Aided by officials, 19th century speculatorshad robbed scores of land grant communities of their land. Their poverty was a monument to this colonial greed.
On June 5, 1967, Tijerina and 18 aliancistas armed with pistols and shotguns stormed the Rio Arriba County Courthouse looking for district attorney Alfonso Sanchez. Just days earlier Sanchez had ordered the arrest of eleven Alianza leaders after the group threatened to take over the nearly 600,000-acre Tierra Amarilla land grant in northern New Mexico. The raiders planned to liberate them and place Sanchez under citizen's arrest, but neither Sanchez nor the arrested aliancistas were in Tierra Amarilla that morning. After shooting a cop and the jailer, Tijerina and the other raiders fled into the surrounding mountains. Hundreds of state police officers searched New Mexico's land grant villages, while National Guard tanks prowled the dirt roads of the Carson National Forest looking for the raiders.

Reies López Tijerina after his arrest following the courthouse raid. Photo courtesy of Peter Nabokov

The courthouse raid made Tijerina a national figure. He spoke at Black Panther demonstrations, advised Elijah Muhammad, rallied with farmworkers in Texas and marched at the side of Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy in Washington, D.C. His rhetoric electrified civil rights activists as much as it alarmed authorities. J. Edgar Hoover personally supervised a wide-ranging investigation of Tijerina. The New Mexico State Police employed agents provocateurs against Alianza. Tijerina was eventually jailed for his land grant activism.
This has been the official, heroic version of Tijerina, one in which he alone resurrected a moribund land grant movement at great personal cost. But this beatification of Tijerina has placed the land grant movement forever in his shadow, both blessed and burdened by its association with this courageous but contradictory leader.
It is blessed because Tijerina, always dogged and determined, galvanized thousands in a struggle for the return of land grant land. But it has also become burdened by his legacy. As I listened to the speeches at this year’s commemoration, I realized that his absence provides an opportunity to reconsider his legacy and maybe even imagine a land grant movement out from under Tijerina's shadow.
Any honest appraisal of Tijerina’s legacy would have to come terms with the fact that the man who became synonymous with land grants built the Alianza on the backs of women, who did much of the work but received none of the recognition. It would have to admit that Tijerina’s celebration of Spanish empire deferred a more honest and searching examination of Spanish and Mexican land grant violence directed at Indian nations. It would have to admit that his idiosyncratic, religiously based notion of social justice has grown increasingly anti-Semitic over the years. And, finally, it would acknowledge that his view of himself and his role in the land grant movement has grown so large that it crowds out any history that doesn’t place him at its center.
There is no doubt Tijerina is a significant figure in New Mexico’s dramatic land grant history, but his absence from this year’s anniversary is a reminder that there were other heroes in this history.
And it’s no accident that the place to look for this history is precisely where Tijerina first looked for answers. When Tijerina arrived in New Mexico in the late 1950s, the organized and militant heirs of the Tierra Amarilla land grant were among his first teachers. Fernanda Martinez educated Tijerina on the history of the land grant struggle and Gregorita Aguilar tutored him on the provocative methods he would later take up. Tijerina’s dramatic Courthouse Raid appears tame compared to the spectacular tactics these heirs have used for generations. When fences first arrived in Tierra Amarilla in 1915, the heirs formed a clandestine group called La Mano Negra to defend their common rights. They cut fences, burned barns and threatened private ranchers. They frightened elites and terrified political officials for decades.
In the late 1930s, the heirs organized a group called La Corporacion de Abiquiu and spent 30 years suing private ranchers in quiet title and ejectment lawsuits. Theirs was a sophisticated legal struggle that understood--in ways Tijerina never did--that the land grants were not “stolen” but rather were trapped in a legal system incapable of understanding common property.

In the mid 1980s, the struggle over Tierra Amarilla reignited when Amador Flores claimed 600 acres of land claimed by an Arizona development company. Here his twenty-year-old son Raul Flores stands guard with his 12-guage shotgun at the entrance of the Flores camp in Tierra Amarilla during a 14-month standoff with police. May 7, 1988.
Photo by Larry Beckner/The New Mexican©

In the 1970s land grant activists built a free medical clinic, opened a legal aid office and scuttled an airport that boosters hoped would turn Tierra Amarilla into the next Taos and condemn locals, as one activist put it, to a life of "cleaning up the shit of tourists and hunters who have no respect for our culture and get mad when we speak Spanish."
Tijerina was no doubt an important leader, and the Courthouse Raid was no question a transformative moment, but it has been a mistake to make Tijerina the patron saint of land grant struggle. To do so has meant ignoring the possibilities of a land grant movement honest about its role in Indian removal, committed to gender equality and willing to sacrifice charismatic laments of lands lost for clear-eyed and historically based proposals for a socially just land grant future.
There are people who have done these things and it is they who should now define both the history of New Mexico’s land grants and its way forward, not Reies López Tijerina.
This essay first appeared in the Albuquerque Weekly Alibi

Welcome to Mora County: Where Being An Oil Company is a Crime

Tue, 7 May 2013 20:18:54 -0600

The capitalist press was thrilled last week to report the approach of a magical threshold. The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared past 15,000 and newspapers across the country saw it as a sign of resiliency and recovery. “It’s a giddy time to be an investor,” sang The New York Times. Meanwhile, at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, researchers were charting the approach of a far different, though linked, milestone. According to recent data, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will peak this month above 400 parts per million (ppm). Scientists see it as an alarming trend. “At this pace,” said climate scientist Ralph Keeling “we’ll hit 450 ppm within a few decades.” If Keeling is right, in the decades to come we’ll be as far above livable levels of atmospheric CO2 than we were once below it.
Spiking levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are, of course, a consequence of the burning of fossil fuels. So it’s no surprise that as global CO2 emissions storm past frightening thresholds, so too do the profits of the world’s largest oil companies. The combined windfall of BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell reached a new record of nearly $140 billion in profits in 2011. In the first half of 2012, they earned an average of nearly $350 million each day. Are these profits bankrolling investments in clean energy alternatives? Not a chance. The Big 5 plowed nearly a third of 2012 profits into stock buy-back plans that further enriched shareholders. Much of the rest was spent on new fossil-fuel infrastructure, ballooning executive salaries and lobbying efforts that continue to pay off in weakened environmental regulations.
And so as their Dow Jones value heats up, so does the atmosphere. Global emissions of CO2 exceeded 35 billion tons in 2012, a record increase over 2011’s record increase.
Despite the frightening prospects of a warming climate to human and non-human life on the planet, the Obama administration, like every U.S. administration before it, favors economic growth at all cost. In September of last year scientists studying Arctic sea ice announced that the Arctic had largely melted. It had shrunk to its smallest extent ever as satellite imagery revealed that frozen sea ice was now found in an area less than 2.2 million square miles, less than half what it was four decades ago. Some climate scientists now predict a completely ice-free Arctic Ocean in the summer within two decades. Obama’s response? With Arctic Ocean-area oil and gas reserves estimated in the neighborhood of 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, his administration ordered the United States Geological Survey to study the economic opportunities an ice-free Arctic offers for U.S firms.
So much for encouraging clean energy. And as if Arctic oil exploration were not disturbing enough given current trends, noted climate scientist James Hansen appears even more concerned with the Canadian tar sands. He recently called the possibility of the Keystone XL Pipeline, a system that will bring Canadian tar sands oil to U.S. refineries, the “fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” As with the Arctic, Obama is enthusiastic and seems poised to light that fuse. In March of last year, he directed his “administration to cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic hurdles, and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done.”
Despite the fact that the U.S. federal government, or any other national government in the world today for that matter, refuses to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in any significant way, there appears still the possibility that government may yet do something meaningful. But it might not be the government you expect.
Enter tiny Mora County in northern New Mexico, which last week made it a crime to be an oil company.
The language of the “Mora County Community Water Rights and Local Self-Government Ordinance” begins by recognizing Mora County as “a multi-cultural community with indigenous roots.” It then acknowledges its obligation to protect “the Earth, water, and air as a source of life for all living.” For this reason, the County Commission refused to sacrifice “the present and the future” to oil company profits and the “at-risk exploitation and pollution of the Earth, water and air” that follows from those profits.
“It shall be unlawful,” continues the ordinance, the only one of its kind in the U.S., “for any corporation to engage in the extraction of oil, natural gas, or other hydrocarbons within Mora County.”
It’s a remarkable document for all kinds of reasons and particularly so because if any place could rationalize the devil’s bargain of oil and gas extraction, it would be Mora County. Nearly 20 percent of its less than 5,000 residents live below the poverty line. Jobs are scarce. And at a density of less than three people per square mile, it’s just the kind of poor, sparsely populated, rural place oil and gas firms like best.
But despite all this the County refuses to place the control of nature “in the hands of a corporate few,” a possibility that the ordinance defines as nothing more than “abuse and usurpation.”
The ordinance, it seems, has been long in the making. Commissioner John Olivas co- drafted an ordinance that was presented to the commission in September of 2011. Though it was not adopted at the time, the commission did pass a moratorium on oil and gas exploration in order to examine the question in more detail. During the moratorium the County conducted a series of working sessions in order to consider the possibility of a new oil and gas ordinance ban. Those efforts culminated last week when the commission voted to approve a total ban.
In the ordinance the County located its authority to make such a ban in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the U.S.—Mexican War, the Declaration of Independence, and the New Mexico Constitution. In addition the Mora County Comprehensive Land Use Plan identifies the requirement to protect the “Earth, water and air” as the most basic responsibility of government. In the language of the plan “the connection between our land, our water and our people has sustained our culture since the first settlements in Mora County, and our future depends on keeping these connections strong. Water is a vital link, which, if severed from the land, will also fragment our people from their land. The allocation of our limited water resources must recognize traditional subsistence agricultural and grazing activities as a priority over other types of more profitable land uses. Water is not just a commodity to be bought and sold, or exploited for short-term gains. Water is the lifeblood of Mora County’s traditions, culture and land use. A sustainable future for Mora County requires protection of the most valuable resource for our communities—the Water!”
The Mora County Commission issued a news release upon passing the ordinance calling on the New Mexico state legislature to follow suit in passing a bill that would ban oil and gas drilling and related activities statewide. But in a state largely captured by oil and gas interests, the possibilities of a statewide ban appear unlikely. In the 2013 legislative session, for example, Senator Carlos Cisneros (D-Taos) introduced Senate Bill 463 that would have done the opposite of the Mora ordinance and prohibited any municipalities or counties from regulating the “exploration, development, production and transportation of oil and gas and any associated remediation and reclamation activities related thereto.”
But while federal and state governments continue to abrogate their obligation to protect the environment, Mora County is not alone in its efforts to offer an alternative. Other local governments in New Mexico have begun to chip away at the power of oil and gas, an industry that has for so long dominated New Mexico politics. San Miguel County just south of Mora enacted its own one-year moratorium on oil and gas exploration, and its largest city, Las Vegas, banned fracking within city limits.
And with Shell holding leases on around 100,000 acres in the eastern part of the county, the ordinance seems likely to wind up in court. “I’d rather fight industry in court,” Olivas told the press “than clean up after them when they leave our community,”
Amid the necessary legalese and technical terminology of the ordinance, there can also be found an arresting section (Section 3.6) titled “La Querencia de la Tierra,” a phrase the ordinance defines as “the loving respect which Mora County residents have towards the land and Earth, which is rooted in our indigenous worldview—the Earth is living and holy, is the habitat that sustains us, and is composed of all natural & living systems, flora and fauna – interrelated, interdependent and complementary – which share our common destiny: The right to live free from contamination.”
This article first appeared in CounterPunch

Aaron Swartz and the Case Against Intellectual Property

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:07:50 -0700

By DAVID CORREIA
Aaron Swartz committed suicide nearly a month ago, almost two years to the day after he was arrested by federal authorities for “illegally” downloading millions of scholarly articles from the academic database JSTOR. Despite JSTOR’s request that no charges be brought against Swartz, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz of Massachusetts charged Swartz with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. If convicted he would have faced up to 35 years in prison. He was 26 years old when he hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment.

Aaron Swartz in 2009 at a Wikipedia meeting in Boston. Photo by Sage Ross. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Obituaries remembered him as having lived a remarkable life for someone so young. He was the founder of Infogami, an ambitious effort that was part of the Open Library project. He was an original contributor (at 15-years old) to Creative Commons, a flexible copyright format designed as an alternative to private property. More recently, he was an influential force behind efforts to scuttle the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill that Swartz and others recognized as written by media conglomerates in order to shut down open-source, peer-to-peer file sharing websites—sites that industry sees as a threat to commercial control of creative content online.
As these efforts make clear, Swartz’s political activism did not take the form of retaliatory distributed denial-of-service hacktivist revenge attacks characteristic of Anonymous, nor were they vague statements in support of internet freedom. Rather, Swartz was a vocal and influential critic of the narrow, commercial notion of intellectual copyright that threatened the form and function of digital social interaction online.
His download of five million JSTOR articles is a case in point.
According to prosecutors, Swartz, at the time a fellow at Harvard University’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption, entered an unlocked network closet in an MIT basement in December of 2010. There he connected an old laptop with a huge external hard-drive to cables that linked the computer to MIT’s network. Before leaving he hid the computer under a cardboard box. Over the course of the next few weeks, the computer slowly downloaded millions of articles from the online academic storage service JSTOR, a digital file sharing service founded by a consortium of universities for the more efficient distribution of academic content. Today, more than 7,000 institutions in more than 150 countries subscribe to JSTOR in order to access scholarly articles.
Lawrence Lessig, a mentor to Swartz and a prominent Harvard Law professor, lashed out at the aggressive prosecution. “From the beginning,” he wrote, “the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The ‘property’ Aaron had ‘stolen,’ we were told, was worth ‘millions of dollars’ — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar.”
While Lessig is correct that Swartz had no intent, nor means, to profit from downloading articles from JSTOR, he couldn’t have been more wrong when he suggested that there was no money to be made by controlling access to academic scholarship.
Swartz targeted JSTOR precisely because of the way JSTOR reinforces dubious intellectual property claims by commercial publishers of academic journals who claim the exclusive rights to what should be open-access material. JSTOR, in other words, controls and limits the distribution of scholarship conducted by public employees, or produced by scholars with public funds, to only those with paid subscription access. It limits much of that access by terms-of-service agreements that amount to the privatization of an intellectual commons. And the money it collects from subscriptions is distributed to the commercial publishers of public knowledge—not the authors, researchers, or institutions that produce it.
It’s a strange state of affairs. Scholars usually work for public universities, or conduct research under publicly funded grants and fellowships or, if they work at private institutions, teach students who attend their private colleges via publicly supported grants and loans. These scholars conduct research and write articles and do all the work to produce scholarly journals. And instead of that work being freely available, it becomes the exclusive property of a handful of huge transnational corporations.
This is a recent and troubling pattern. In less than one generation universities worldwide divested themselves almost completely of their obligation to support academic publishing and distribution. Today, few universities publish and distribute scholarly material in journal form but still demand that their faculty publish such material. Scholars therefore have little choice but to publish with commercial outlets.
Knowing that, these publishers do little to support this work. Scholars don’t just publish their work in commercial outlets, they do all the work to bring it to print. They do the vetting, the editing, and the production. The commercial publishers pay for none of this work. They just cash the checks when universities buy it back from them.
Elsevier, for example, claims the exclusive copyright on more than a quarter million articles written each year by scholars in the 2,000 journals it owns. It sells access to those journals via ScienceDirect, a database that serves as its electronic platform. In 2010, Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36 percent on revenues of $3.2 billion. Its profits from the sale of access to scholarly journal articles accounts for 28 percent of the revenues of the Reed Elsevier group (₤1.5 of 5.4 billion in 2006).
Interested in accessing the work of scholars who publish path-breaking work in the prestigious journal Biochimica et Biophysica Acta? If so, your library will have to pay Elsevier a $20,930 annual subscription fee. Between Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley, 42 percent of all academic articles are owned privately.
So much for Lessig’s suggestion that there’s no money in academic publishing. And this was exactly Swartz’s complaint. The public funds the production of scholarly work, scholars produce this intellectual work, and then a few private companies cash in on it. But it wouldn’t take much to break the back of commercial control of this intellectual and creative commons. The expertise, infrastructure, and resources to do so already exist. But instead of serving as a powerful platform for the collective production and open-access distribution of scholarly work, JSTOR blindly accepts the ridiculous copyright claims of firms like Elsevier and therefore reinforces, rather than disrupts, the continued commodification of scholarly production. According to The Atlantic, JSTOR “turns away 150 million attempts to read journal articles” due to lack of subscription.
Swartz sought to do what thousands of academics do already on a daily basis: freely distribute scholarly material in patterns that violate exclusive commercial copyright as both a form of protest and a commitment to the open-access and wide distribution of scholarly material.
While JSTOR did not want to pursue charges against Swartz, MIT’s role has been more troubling. An internal review is underway, and many anticipate it could reveal that MIT played a critical role in the investigation that led to charges against Swartz. MIT has long been an institution committed to intellectual freedom and open-access—at least its faculty have been. The administration is another story.
This eroding commitment to intellectual freedom is not solely a problem at MIT. Recent events at the University of New Mexico suggest that a reactionary politics of copyright has also seized certain University of New Mexico administrators. On November 27, 2012, and again last month just days after the furor erupted following Swartz’s death, UNM’s Vice President for Student Affairs, Eliseo Torres, and its Chief Information Officer, Gilbert Gonzalez, distributed a threatening memorandum to all faculty, staff, and students at the university.
The memo reads as follows:

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Swartz never advocated the copyright infringement of material produced for commercial exchange, what he did was question the logic of exclusive copyright claims to particular kinds of intellectual and creative works that circulate online.
It’s a distinction the University of New Mexico also makes, but in a much different way. Like thousands of other institutions, UNM relies on a commercial file-sharing platform called eReserves as a way for its faculty to easily distribute scholarly material to students in digital formats. The University apparently believes that the use of eReserves does not constitute copyright infringement because the files are password-protected and circulate among University students who, presumably, have legal access to these files by virtue of their status as students.
This is true only in theory. In practice, faculty sometimes wish to share a book for which the library has no copy, or need to post sections of a book that the bookstore was late in ordering. While the librarians involved with eReserves are very cautious of copyright infringement issues, eReserves exists in a kind of copyright grey area. There are times and situations in which the University arguably (according to existing copyright law) infringes the copyright laws that it seeks to defend. But it only does so when honoring copyright contradicts the mission of the University. Copyright, in other words, constitutes a set of negotiated social (and increasingly technical) arrangements regarding the ways and patterns that intellectual material circulates. Copyright does not exist apart from the conditions that create it. And the promise and possibilities of digital formats to intellectual production has meant that the patterns of circulation often violate the letter of copyright law while honoring the spirit.
The University often errs on the side of whatever advances its educational mission. This attention to context in the application of copyright law evaporates, it appears, when powerful corporate interests weigh-in; the University then capitulates to corporate claims to copyright and threatens its students for violating the letter of the law.
But for many activists the strict private property copyright claims of industry trade groups like the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America are as equally dubious as those of Elsevier. For open-access advocates, the aggressive enforcement efforts by media trade groups to claim exclusive copyright, which are enthusiastically taken up by law enforcement agencies and then blindly accepted by even non-commercial networks such as the University of New Mexico, amount to a vast digital enclosure.
Consider the fact that the businesses represented by the RIAA and MPAA owe their very ability to distribute digital content over the internet (and increasingly their ability to produce it in the first place) to the collective, non-commercial work of computer programmers like Aaron Swartz who, over two generations, have built a vast peer-to-peer, file sharing network as a way to connect people and ideas in new and exciting ways—ways that had everything to do with often utopian social ideals and almost nothing to do with making a buck.
The University of New Mexico got it ridiculously wrong when it said, “much P2P activity constitutes copyright infringement.” No, a more compelling argument can be made that the internet, both practically and legally, cannot serve as a means to circulate material under an exclusive copyright claim.
First, it is impossible in practical terms. The intellectual property claims of the entertainment industry appear laughable given the ease with which copyrighted material circulates online in ways that exceed its control. As much money can be made violating copyright as defending it. Hence, the proliferation of advertising-based P2P file sharing programs, low-cost secure cloud storage sites, and for-fee ISP anonymizers. Can’t make money selling content? Make money distributing someone else’s.
More importantly, however, the business model defended by the RIAA and MPAA amounts to a form of digital squatting. They had nothing whatsoever to do with the design and construction of the digital infrastructure through which their products circulate. They’re the bully who commandeers the playhouse after the neighborhood kids spend all summer building it. And now that bully wants to charge the kids a fee for each social interaction they have within that clubhouse (or they borrow the Facebook model and capture, aggregate, and eventually monetize the “friendship” that goes on in the clubhouse).
It sounds absurd when put this way, but (and this is the really astounding part) nearly everyone thinks this is all just fine.
Except for people like Aaron Swartz, who imagine a different world.
This article first appeared in La Jicarita

Climate Change Catastrophism: The New Environmental Determinism

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 20:12:48 -0700

By DAVID CORREIA

Environmental determinism is the theory that the physical environment, including the climate, sets hard limits on human society. Scholars and authors who subscribe to this theory, most notoriously Jeffrey Sachs and Jared Diamond (more on them later), argue that we can look to patterns of environmental change or geographical difference as a way to understand trajectories of human and social development and, by so doing, explain why some societies flourish while others languish in poverty or even collapse.

Tread carefully around such arguments.

It’s a compelling and seemingly intuitive argument but, like Social Darwinism for example, it is not the science it makes itself out to be. As geographer Dick Peet has described it, environmental determinism is not rigorous scholarship but rather the “ideology of an imperial capitalism.”

Environmental determinism plagued academic disciplines such as anthropology, economics and geography in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where, according to the late geographer Neil Smith, it “had an obvious appeal as a kind of royal shortcut to human science.” Its adherents found success as the willing tools of empire as they happily explained away the poverty and misery of imperialism (and its privileges) as a function of natural processes. Cold northern climates produce hardy and thrifty people who therefore flourish. Meanwhile, the unrelenting heat along the equator produces lazy people condemned to forever languish in patterns of poverty as predictable as the trade winds.

The theory lost its luster in the early to mid-twentieth century as decolonization scholars launched attack after attack. The intellectual backlash focused on geography, the discipline most closely associated with environmental determinism. Ivy league institutions in particular, embarrassed by such obvious associations with imperialism (they prefer their associations to be less transparent), dropped geography departments en masse. Chastened, the discipline back peddled, ashamed by geography’s enthusiastic service to imperialism.

The embarrassment meant that environmental determinism was largely ignored rather than buried, and as a result it has mounted a surprising comeback in recent years. Blame Sachs and Diamond for this. Sachs, while an economist at Harvard, repackaged old-fashioned environmental determinism as the “ecology of underdevelopment.” As he wrote in a 1999 article in The Economist, “If it were true that the poor were just like the rich but with less money,” he wrote, “the global situation would be vastly easier than it is. As it happens, the poor live in different ecological zones, face different health conditions and must overcome agronomic limitations that are very different from those of rich countries. Those differences, indeed, are often a fundamental cause of persisting poverty.”

Here Sachs, a key advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, makes the crackpot but quintessential environmental determinist argument. The redistribution of wealth won’t resolve global inequality. Why? Because the geographical and unequal distribution of affluence and poverty is not a result of unequal power relations but rather is a function of complex geographic and climatic dynamics that have nothing whatsoever to do with histories of colonial conquest and capitalist expansion. The argument, of course, relies on a premise that ignores histories of conquest—what Marx, in reference to colonialism, called primitive accumulation.

"In times long gone-by,” wrote Marx in Capital, Volume I, in a brilliant parody of determinist apologia, “there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living…. Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labor, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work."
For Marx, the unequal distribution of wealth was historically created in ruthless patterns of capitalist accumulation. In addition, as the quote above so sarcastically implies, the social relations that sustain this inequality require elaborate ideologies capable of explaining away plunder as the work of nature. Enter environmental determinism.

And so we get people like Sachs, who sees “the poor” as an ecological category living far off in a strange land instead of, as Marx sees it, as a social relation. In Sachs’ world, the poor were always bound to be poor while the rich were bound to be rich.

Sachs was able to make this argument because Jared Diamond had more recently parlayed it into a Pulitzer prize in his 1997 book Guns, Germs and Steel. Here he argued that we need not look to histories of colonialism to understand “the Fates of Societies,” (his subtitle for the book), but rather we must focus on physical geography and climate if we hope to understand why the world is divided into rich and poor. In his hands Europe’s ability to subjugate and colonize Africa was merely an accident “of geography and biogeography—in particular to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. This is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate” (p. 401).

In a funny way, Diamond is right. Though his glib reduction of the history of violent colonialism to mere “real estate” is meant to draw the reader’s attention away from history and toward nature, to the close reader the reference does the opposite. Real estate, as most of us know well, is a thing of value only because it exists as private property. And property, of course, is about the power to exclude, forever enforcing the unequal distribution of resources as a way to preserve class difference.

In a scathing review in the journal Antipode in 2003, a host of prominent human geographers pilloried Diamond’s work. Andrew Sluyter called it “junk science.” Paul Robbins, more kind than Sluyter, chided Diamond for harnessing “a thoughtful and fascinating body of evidence to an explanatory dead horse.”

But Robbins was just being clever. He knew full well that you can’t beat a dead horse. Academics attacked arguments such as those by Sachs and Diamond because the cruel logic of environmental determinism is, unfortunately, anything but dead. And, in a troubling development, it has found purchase recently among climate change scientists.

Environmental determinism, it seems, has found a new home. No longer housed in geography departments, it has taken up residence in geology, environmental science and earth science departments.

This new “scientific” version of climate determinism took center stage at last month’s annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. There researchers from West Virginia University described the results of recent tree ring data from Asia in which, they argued, a particularly wet period in the thirteenth century corresponded to the rise of Ghengis Khan and the spread of the Mongols. According to researchers, wet conditions would have been particularly advantageous to nomadic Mongol herders.

Well maybe, but more likely the rise of the Mongols had something to do with the enormous size of Khan’s army. And apparently the past is littered by the wreckage of history’s climate victims. A host of recent studies have linked civilization collapse in Asia, South America and Africa to climate change. Just as in the past, we’d best tread carefully around such arguments.

For starters there may be a more useful correspondence to consider: the prevalence of claims by climate scientists of a link between climate and the collapse of past civilizations corresponds to the return of environmental determinist explanation in the mid-1990s. In 1995, around the same time that Diamond found success peddling his determinist snake oil, researchers reported in the prestigious journal Nature that population growth and drought was a likely cause of the demise of the Maya civilization. This work kicked off a cottage industry among climate scientists who suddenly found correspondences everywhere they looked: Mesopotamia, west Asia, Egypt, the Maghreb.

The recent raft of historical climate collapse stories are troubling for a number of reasons. First, what many of these studies refer to as “collapse” is in fact a slow population decline over a period of, often, hundreds of years. The “collapse” of the Maya occurred, for example, between 750 AD and 900 AD: hundreds of years of decline (what scientists mean by “decline”, by the way, is rarely defined in the scientific literature) that overlaps with a period of climate change. “Climate change,” like “collapse” also is frequently ill-defined; often these “abrupt” shifts in temperature and precipitation are, in fact, changes that occur over hundreds of years and millions of square miles. In the case of the Maya, the period of dramatic climate change occurred during a two-hundred year period between 800 AD and 1,000 AD—a period that marked the driest in the middle Holocene.

In addition, it should be noted that the increase in historical climate collapse research corresponds to the popularization of the wide acceptance of contemporary anthropogenic climate change research. Whether researchers are explicit or not, the rationale for historical work on the link between climate and collapse, particularly among funding agencies and the general public, has everything to do with the current climate crisis. These are the what’s-in-store-for-us stories that many peddle in the hopes that it may galvanize a broad-based movement to interrupt current patterns of global greenhouse gas emissions.

There are two problems with this thinking. First, we may want to ask what kind of contemporary climate politics the rhetoric of collapse engenders. There is, no doubt, a real urgency to the problem posed by climate change. The climate is indeed changing and transforming in ways not conducive to humans and other beings. The idea of a climate catastrophism, however, so prevalent in the rhetoric of historical climate change research, displaces and defers this urgency. If our fate is apocalypse, after all, what good is grassroots organizing? Moreover, the false panic of apocalyptic rhetoric provides the rationale to ignore the current suffering of the marginalized and the disenfranchised. When we strip away the apocalyptic rhetoric, we can see that we are not all in this together. But apocalyptic rhetoric forecloses the possibility of radical democratic politics. It makes politics, in fact, impossible. In its place we are forced to entrust our futures to a non-democratic techno-managerial elite, to the apparatuses of state bureaucracies, to the military, and even to the corporations who profit from climate catastrophism.

As a result of this state of affairs, catastrophism research proliferates and finds purchase among a powerful minority who fear the potential of radical and democratic climate change struggles—particularly the possibility that it could challenge existing patterns of class and race privilege. And they can’t have that.

This article appeared previously in CounterPunch, Climate & Capitalism, and La Jicarita

New Copper Pit Rule in New Mexico: Toxic Pollution for Groundwater, Windfall Profits for Industry

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 11:12:09 -0700

By DAVID CORREIA
Mining is big business in New Mexico. Coal, molybdenum, silver, potash, aggregates like gravel dirt, and industrial minerals such as gypsum, brick clay and silica are removed in the millions of tons each year.
The bonanza of mineral extraction in New Mexico follows one of two procedures, either through pulverizing rocks with heavy machinery and then leaching out valuable minerals by using chemicals, or through hydraulic methods such as placer mining, in which metals in alluvial deposits are literally washed out.
The environmental cost of either method can be enormous. In industrial scale operations, both methods produce huge amounts of often toxic waste materials. Contamination from mining chemicals and waste materials such as lead and cadmium is particularly acute at the site of extraction, where wastes leach into soils and groundwater.
The New Mexico Water Quality Act (§§ 74-6-1 et seq., NMSA 1978) requires that regulatory agencies, such as the Water Quality Control Commission (WQCC) of the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), prevent and/or abate possible water pollution. In order to meet this obligation, WQCC and NMED have established standards and thresholds for what they consider acceptable levels of contaminants. They then require that polluting industries propose mitigation procedures so as to limit the impact of those activities on groundwater quality. In practice this means that every permit is different—each one a lengthy negotiation over thresholds and standards and schedules of inspection involving hydrogeologists, lawyers, state regulators and industry representatives.
These negotiations begin with the premise that with careful monitoring the economic benefits of such activities can outweigh any negative environmental effects. It’s a devil’s bargain.
In 1979 the Church Rock uranium mill tailings pond (fully permitted by the Environment Department) breached its dam and dumped 1,100 tons of radioactive waste (more than 90 million gallons of toxic effluent) into the Rio Puerco. Significant amounts of uranium, thorium, radium, and polonium found their way into the Rio Puerco along with metals such as cadmium, aluminum, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, selenium, sodium, vanadium, and zinc in a lethal stew that turned the Rio Puerco into one of the most contaminated rivers on earth.
This may explain why the word “protection” is not in the name of the New Mexico Environment Department. Despite the heroic efforts of many hard-working and well-meaning regulators, the WQCC and NMED are in the business of licensing polluters, not protecting the environment.
We may want to ask what exactly it is that we get in return? Jobs? Hardly. The huge transnational mineral conglomerates that legally poison New Mexico’s rivers and groundwater and share in the windfall profits mineral extraction provides employ less than 6,000 people, few of whom are New Mexico residents. Tax revenue? Not really. The revenues that flow into state coffers barely cover the cost of “regulating” the industry.
So why then are we willing to let mining conglomerates like the notorious copper and gold giant Freeport McMoRan (see my recent essay on the arrival of Freeport-McMoRan in New Mexico) poison groundwater and foul streams?

The answer may have something to do with the power and influence of those mining conglomerates. In 2010, the total production values of all mineral extraction in New Mexico exceeded $1.7 billion. Flush with cash, oil and gas lobbyists and mining firms poured millions into Martinez’s campaign for Governor. After her victory, executives and lawyers for Freeport-McMoRan were nominated to key posts in the New Mexico Environment Department and served on the task force that drafted new language for the copper pit rule.
Dairy operators were particularly generous to candidate Martinez. Governor Martinez returned the favor. Following her election, Martinez refused to publish the new and more stringent dairy pollution standards. It was a rule established under her predecessor and only after the dairy industry had appealed to the Richardson administration to restructure the way the dairy industry was regulated. It seems they were tired of negotiating permit after permit. They preferred instead that the state not only establish pollution thresholds above which the industry could not pollute, but also establish the procedures and methods through which the dairy industry would meet those standards. Thousands of manure lagoons in New Mexico poison groundwater and the new rule required, among other improvements, synthetic liners to those impoundments. Martinez however refused to publish the new rule. Instead the NMED negotiated a new standard that watered down the rule.
Copper was next. Martinez established an advisory committee to the New Mexico Environment Department and charged it with drafting language for a new copper pit rule. She stacked the committee with industry representatives, including Freeport-McMoRan, but also included some industry critics. The result was a set of standards far from perfect but much better than existing practices. But NMED’s general counsel, Ryan Flynn, a Martinez appointee and close friend of the mining industry, ignored the committee and instead adopted wording written by Freeport-McMoRan lawyers.

The Santa Rita Mine in southern New Mexico, formerly owned by Phelps-Dodge, is now owned by the notorious transnational copper conglomerate Freeport-McMoRan. Photo by Eric Guinther. Used by permission.

In a remarkable and unprecedented shift in policy, the New Mexico Environment Department now recommends that mining operators in the state of New Mexico freely pollute groundwater at the site of production. Under the proposed new rule, Freeport-McMoRan and other copper mining operators would not be required to protect groundwater at all within areas of “hydrologic containment” and “open pit surface water drainage.” In other words, the rule defines mining as an activity completely exempt from the water quality standards established by the New Mexico Water Quality Act. Unbelievably, the NMED, the agency charged with regulating polluting industries in New Mexico, now wants its mining permits to become, by law, permits to pollute.
On Friday, December 14, the New Mexico Environmental Law Center (NMELC), on behalf of Gila Resources Information Project, Turner Ranch Properties and Amigos Bravos, filed a Motion to Dismiss the New Mexico Environment Department’s proposed new copper rule. According to NMELC’s lead attorney on the suit, Bruce Frederick, the new rule represents “an unprecedented” attack on water quality standards in New Mexico. Instead of protecting groundwater quality, the new rule sacrifices it. Instead of establishing standards based on the best available science, the new rule seeks to do the bidding of industry.
The motion is particularly critical of language in the proposed rule that gives mining industry carte blanche to pollute. “During operation of an open pit, [water quality] standards do not apply in the [Sacrifice Zone].”
The NMELC anticipates a hearing on the motion by mid-February and asks the WQCC to either adopt the language of the advisory committee or send the recommendation back to the NMED for revision.
Frederick is not optimistic about NMED leadership. If the Freeport-McMoRan-written rule becomes administrative law, other industries will surely seek similar arrangements. And what those lobbyists will find is an Environment Department reorganized over the past two years as a vehicle designed to advance industry interests over any concern for environmental protection. Since Susana Martinez came into office, outraged regulators have resigned from the agency en masse. In their place she has appointed political lackeys and industry lapdogs. “Anybody who cares about the environment,” according to one former NMED lawyer, “is no longer in a position of authority…. There’s no separation between industry and government.”

Bloody Mining Giant Freeport-McMoran Comes to New Mexico

Tue, 4 Dec 2012 09:17:48 -0700

By DAVID CORREIA
Each day at its massive Grasberg mine on the Indonesian province of Papua on the island of New Guinea, Phoenix-based Freeport-McMoRan, the world’s largest gold, copper and molybdenum mining company, removes 3 million pounds of copper and 5,000 ounces of gold from what has become, after decades of strip mining, an eleven-square mile crater carved out of remote rainforest that is visible from space. Each day as it removes gold and copper it dumps more than one hundred thousand tons of toxic tailings into surrounding rivers.
The Grasberg mining complex is exceptional in all kinds of ways. It holds the world's largest recoverable copper reserves; it constitutes the largest gold reserve in the world; it is the world’s most profitable mine; and it employs 23,000 workers who are paid U.S. $1.50 an hour. That pattern, more than forty years in the making, has created intense animosities among Papuan miners and rebel separatists. To protect its interests and extractive capacity, Freeport has poured millions of dollars each year since the late 1960s—$20 million between 1998 and 2004 alone—into local police and military coffers. Lately it has needed all the protection it can get. Over the past year rebels linked to the Free Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, or OPM) have increasingly targeted Freeport managers and facilities as part of a decades-long struggle for an independent Papua.
And as any Papuan will tell you, independence is impossible as long as Freeport’s toxic tailings wash into the now fish-free Aikwa River and contaminated runoff floods the Wanagon River headwaters. According to historian Denise Leith, Freeport was the first foreign company to sign a contract after Suharto came to power in the late 1960s. In return Freeport became the de facto developer and its executives the new ruling class of remote Papua, far beyond the reach of its distant Javanese rulers in Jakarta. Freeport gave millions annually to the Suharto regime, which in turn ruthlessly defended Freeport’s interests in Papua.
Suharto is long gone but the struggle for Papua continues and 2012 has been a particularly bloody year in the conflict. A series of OPM attacks against Freeport and Indonesian security forces resulted in more than six deaths. The string of attacks came on the heels of particularly contentious labor struggles at Grasberg where workers demanded steep wage hikes (steep only because anything above the current wage of US $1.50 seems steep when expressed as a percentage). When labor negotiations stalled last year, thousands of miners went out on strike. The peaceful strike quickly turned violent when Freeport brought in bus loads of scabs and strikers were forced to defend themselves against an army of more than 500 Freeport-funded police officers who swept through the protest firing shotguns, killing one union striker and wounding six others.
Despite Freeport’s violent suppression of local labor, its complicity in propping up the brutal Suharto regime, its total destruction of Papua’s highland rivers and lowland mangrove swamps, and the slow, spreading ruin of its enormous mining operation in the rainforest, it is the separatist OPM and, as the Asia Times calls it, its “bow and arrow” insurgency that the US Department of Homeland Security considers a terrorist threat.
None of this is under the radar. But the month after Occupy Phoenix activists marched on Freeport’s Phoenix headquarters in October of last year to protest the police killing at the Grasberg mine, President Obama reaffirmed U.S. support for the Indonesian police state in Papua during a visit to Jakarta in which he committed U.S. marines to the region, a move that the Thai newspaper The Nation concluded had everything to do with heightened concerns over security at the increasingly volatile Grasberg mine. The global economy hums along on an insatiable and growing appetite for copper (copper cable is the preferred electrical conductor for industrial-scale power generation and transmission and for most telecommunications). Demand for copper now exceeds 16 million tons per year, an amount nearly 25% greater than just a decade ago, and Grasberg alone accounts for nearly 5% of global copper production.
While Papuan miners defended a picket line against Freeport’s bought-and-sold police force, 1,200 miners at Freeport’s Cerro Verde Mine in Peru walked off the job. Freeport bought Cerro Verde in 2007 and along with gold, silver, uranium and molybdenum, it produces 2% of the world’s annual copper production, more than 200 million pounds of copper each year from a massive open pit mine and huge leaching facility. As firms worldwide report record profits amid surging metal prices (Freeport McMoRan reported 2011 revenues of nearly $21 billion with profits in excess of $5 billion, a 5.2% increase in profits over 2010) miners not only in Peru and Indonesia but more recently in Chile, Bolivia, Mauritania, South Africa and Zambia have struck in record numbers.
Despite its abysmal social and environmental record, Freeport is expanding operations in the U.S. and in New Mexico may have finally found its new Suharto.
Since her election in 2010, Republican Governor Susana Martinez, a Tea Party favorite, has rewritten, withdrawn or vetoed all environmental regulations related to industrial dairy and oil and gas operations. She began her assault on the environment when she refused to publish a new and stringent dairy pit rule. In 2010 the New Mexico Water Quality Commission agreed to regulate dairy industry manure lagoons, after finally admitting that they contaminate ground water. The new rule included a host of standards including a requirement for synthetic liners.
She then turned her attention to the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division’s 2008 oil and gas waste pit rule. In 2003 the Division conducted a wide-ranging study of the nearly 100,000 oil and gas waste pits in New Mexico—the open pits into which oil and gas firms dump their toxic stew of chemical and salt-saturated drilling fluids and oil slurry. The study forced the Division to admit that nearly 10,000 of these pits leached contaminants into the soil, fouling ground water and wildlife habitat. The 2008 rule required that operators dispose of wastes only in permitted waste facilities. Open pits were banned in favor of closed tanks or pits fitted with liners double the thickness of previous (though unrequired) standards.
But Governor Martinez gleefully gutted the rule, though a lawsuit against the change is pending.
And it gets worse. Just a month before Martinez was elected, Freeport-McMoRan purchased the Chino, or Santa Rita, Mine, an open-pit copper mine east of Silver City in southwestern New Mexico. Once the world’s largest copper mine, Phelps-Dodge mothballed the Santa Rita mine in 2008. According to Freeport, however, the plan to restart the smelter and mine would not be profitable unless the Environment Department lowered existing environmental regulations.
Martinez did them one better. After her 2010 election, she appointed a Freeport-McMoRan lawyer as General Counsel to the New Mexico Environment Department and then, to complete her plan to sacrifice environmental protection for corporate profits, she directed the Environment Department to rewrite copper mining regulations based on language provided to the state by Freeport-McMoRan’s attorneys at the Santa Fe firm Modrall Sperling.
In the wake of the 2012 Presidential elections, a number of Republican pundits included Martinez on a short-list of possible front-runners for the 2016 Republican nomination. It’s folly of course. The scrutiny of a national election would not reinforce the feel-good, up-by-the-bootstraps, sprinkled-with-Spanish story Martinez peddled in her short speech at the Republican National Convention last summer in Tampa, but rather would reveal a politician who has turned the day-to-day function of state government over to executives of a business investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for actions in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a company condemned by Amnesty International for a pattern of violence against Indonesian workers, a firm that has destroyed rainforest in Asia, fouled groundwater in North America, poisoned agricultural land in Africa.
But owns a reliable politician in New Mexico.

On the Fictions of Elk Management in New Mexico

Thu, 8 Nov 2012 11:27:15 -0700

By DAVID CORREIA
Wildlife resists enclosure. Wild animals are elusive, resistant to domestication and oblivious to political categories and boundaries. Despite this the State remains remarkably persistent in its pursuit of control. It tasks its managers to make wildlife legible to the State and Capital as objects of management. So khaki-clothed managers conduct counts, make maps, and distribute hunting permits in a fictional drama of control and authority; and then private interests erect fences and sell hunting rights. But wildlife are not willing participants in this staged drama and remain instead the State’s failed subjects, at best fugitive forms of property-in-waiting, forever browsing on the fringes of capitalist commodification.
But if we know anything about Capitalism and the capitalist State, we know it to be ruthlessly effective at enclosing the commons. According to Marx, Capitalism finds its origins in what he called “primitive accumulation,” the enclosure and expropriation of formerly common resources such as forests and the extension of this process worldwide in waves of colonial expansion.
These were the watershed moments in the development of the conditions that made capitalist accumulation possible. In the hands of the British Marxist historian E.P. Thompson, for example, it is a compelling story of the struggle over the very basis of social reproduction—and one that seemed always to end with enclosure and privatization. Hedges everywhere!
These ruthless patterns of enclosure define not just Capitalism’s past but also its present. There is, in other words, an inexorable, just-a-matter-of-time quality to the capitalist transformation of nature into a commodity, with new examples always ready to renew the thesis.
Natural gas, for example, has long been a commodity-in-waiting, geochemically stranded from the marketplace. Turning methane gas into its commodity form, dry natural gas, has required enormous innovations in science (standardization, liquification, gasification) and new exploration and distribution technologies (LNG [liquified natural gas] infrastructure expansion, hydraulic fracturing). What once was a nuisance is now among the most profitable commodities on earth, with reserves that boggle the mind and warm an oil man’s heart.
So what accounts for this capacity? It seems almost as though Capitalism is not only capable of enclosing the commons and commodifying nature but, more frighteningly, forever capable of inventing new natures. Wetland banking and climate markets to name just two examples.
So where are we? After centuries of capitalist commodification, is the nature we know nothing more than raw material for capitalist accumulation? If elk are any indication the answer remains as elusive as the elk.
One reason for this uncertainty may be because, as a story of Capitalism’s origins, enclosure and expropriation is often told without consideration for the agency of the non-human. Whatever nature is imagined to be or to comprise—however nature’s boundaries are drawn—it is rare when it is figured as an active agent. Nature, particularly the bourgeois version, begins and ends as inert matter; as nothing more than an object of human control or the stage upon which social struggle plays out. In other words, our histories of State and Capitalist efforts to control nature can only ever be partial if our emphasis is only on the impacts of these efforts on the human world.
This appears, at first blush, as even true with Marx. While wildlife trample the pages of Das Kapital they do so only briefly. In his account of enclosure and expropriation, deer make a brief and furtive appearance, darting into the text as a modifier of otherwise inert nature. He writes of “deer preserves” and “deer-parks,” but not deer. His concern is of deer-as-resource to a rural peasantry slowly being robbed of its access to nature and, as a result, its growing proletarianization.
So too does nature more generally appear to figure only as a source of use values for human beings. In his “Critique of the Gotha Program,” for example, Marx lectures a faction of the German social democratic movement on revolutionary tactics by first chastising them for getting wrong their claims of labor as the source of all wealth: “Labor is not the source of all wealth,” he corrects them. “Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.”
In these stories of resource expropriation and enclosure, nature appears as fully subjected to human agency. But is nature to Marx nothing more than an object of human interest, defined by its utility to human subjects? Not quite. Marx understood nature as something much different from the bourgeois version he was criticizing. According to Marx, the nature we know is a nature conditioned by the endless accumulation of capital. This has been a process, he argues, that has created a clear break between what bourgeois commentators distinguish as human nature on one side and, on the other, nonhuman nature. In this formulation, the nature of deer-parks and soil fertility that preoccupied Marx was the very nature of capitalist political economy. Capital, Marx explains, projects a nature in its own image. This idea of nature as capitalistically produced—the materiality of nature coming to stand in for something that appears to have real status—is the leitmotif of bourgeois nature.
But there is a nonhuman nature that resists capitalist commodification and this brings me back to wildlife, and elk in particular. Elk, in turns out, reveal the limits of capitalist enclosure and the power of the State and the incomplete project of turning nature into the image of Capital. Despite centuries of intensive efforts to domesticate, or at least “manage” elk, it remains a fugitive figure from capitalist enclosure, resistant to the full weight of scientific and technological innovation and managerial attention. Indeed there may be no better example of the contested, partial and incomplete nature of Capitalism (and capitalist nature) than the elk.
Elk management in New Mexico reveals a kind of dual fictional nature at the heart of human and nonhuman relations. The first is the fiction that elk are in any way meaningfully “managed” by the State. The history of efforts to enclose and privatize elk gives the lie to the dubious claim that any wild animal or animal population falls under the practical purview of State authority. In theory, the State “knows” the elk. In practice, it turns out that the elk the State “knows” is a complete fiction, and wildlife managers cannot say anything meaningful about, for example, elk populations (hunting is allowed here, not there), or predict anything useful about elk migration (elk numbers are large here, not there).
But despite this fiction, the State takes real action on its claims of authority over the elk and those actions are indeed meaningful for human and nonhuman populations. Efforts to draw elk into the orbit of State authority may be fictional in nature and administrative in application, but they give rise to practices that transform nature-society relations and, equally as important, literally remake the elk.

Fiction #1:

Game Management Unit (GMU) boundaries for New Mexico. Source: NMDFG

Despite the fugitive nature of elk, it is represented by the State as a fully legible and managed species. The fiction that the State knows where elk are and how many elk populate New Mexico gives the State the authority to impose a series of management priorities on elk that transform it into private property. Elk, in other words, as game animal. The Department of Game and Fish accomplishes this by claiming authority over all elk in New Mexico through an extensive network of game management units (GMUs). The State establishes arbitrary GMU boundaries and then expresses its claims of management over elk though these geographic units. By basing elk management on GMUs, managers need not claim knowledge of elk within a particular unit, nor does it have to claim any particular knowledge over particular individuals, (i.e., whether they migrate in and out of various units), but rather only that elk, wherever they are, have been made subjects of State authority. It’s about controlling territory, not elk. This process follows a particular and prescribed set of acts. The NMDGF “manages” these units by conducting regular counts within the boundaries of GMUs, determines what it considers an ideal herd population within those arbitrary boundaries, and then establishes annual hunting permits though a lottery system.
Most importantly (and the real point of making the elk a subject of the State), it then imposes these limits differently on public versus private property. On private lands, the Department issues authorization certificates to private landowners as a way to extend to large property owners a right to claim a portion of New Mexico’s elk herd as private property. The State, in other words, construes elk in general as a form of private property, establishes the conditions by which elk become private property, and then distributes those rights along class lines. The privatization of wildlife has been at the heart of various and historic enclosure efforts and is a process marked by capital-intensive efforts to control wildlife for private accumulation.
This process necessarily begins with the State's fictional claim to elk management, but it is not a process that goes unchallenged. Efforts to "manage" the elk are rightly seen by many as really just a way to privatize nature and reserve nature's productive capacity for private interests.
Resistance against the privatization of wildlife, therefore, is fierce among not only hunters but any group that relies on common resources, such as the forest. As La Jicarita reported previously, the Forest Service is currently being sued by grazing permittees on the Carson National Forest for allowing unsustainable levels of elk on grazing pastures. “Defendant United States Forest Service,” the complaint reads, “has allowed the population of wild horses and elk to increase to the point where they have caused and continue to cause degradation to vegetative cover in the pasture land that Plaintiffs rely on to graze their cattle. In fact, the wild horses and the elk have become a nuisance and have contributed to the destabilization of the Hispanic grazing tradition and culture that Region 3 Policy requires Defendant to protect.”
The lawsuit reveals a central paradox in State efforts to manage wildlife. NMDGF efforts to “manage” elk herds in New Mexico are put into practice through its authority over arbitrary Game Management Units. By claiming authority over wildlife within these boundaries, the State in effect claims authority over all forms of resource access within these boundaries, and thus the people who make claims to those resources. While it may be true that the elk remain fugitive from State authority, the same cannot be said for other forest users. Though the grazing permittees on the Carson National Forest have legal claims to forest resources on the Carson, for example, elk management serves as an indirect form of resource dispossession. It’s the small-scale ranchers, in other words, along with the elk, who confront new waves of enclosures.
Fiction #2:
Though described above as nothing more than a vehicle for the expansion of State control over the commons and those who rely on the commons, elk management gives rise to a series of practices that matter not only to humans but to the elk as well. In October of 2005 the Department of Game and Fish announced that two elk killed in the southern Sacramento Mountains of southeast New Mexico tested positive for chronic wasting disease (CWD), a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) that affects mainly cervids (members of the deer family such as elk, moose and deer). Despite how common CWD has become, there exist so far only theories to explain the disease and its origins. The most common is that TSE is a disease of the central nervous system that follows from the introduction of an abnormal form of an unusual protein known as a prion. When abnormal prions infect cervids, they quickly spread from the central nervous system by converting normal proteins into abnormal prion proteins. The result is a progressive wasting away. The animal literally rots on the hoof until it dies.
It seems that prions accumulate and persist in soils and then spread to animals, particularly those in captive herds. How these prions get established to begin with, however, is not yet clear.
The disease was first identified in the late 1960s and while it affects wild cervid populations, it appears closely associated with captured animals and the establishment of private game parks. In other words, State efforts to establish claims of authority over wild animals, which are understood as a necessary condition for defensible private claims to wild animals, have resulted in the proliferation of capital-intensive private hunting reserves, but this seemingly inexorable process of privatization and enclosure has been interrupted by the emergence of a frightening challenge to enclosure: chronic wasting disease. In Montana, for example, the rapid growth of private elk parks in the 1990s collapsed in the early 2000s when CWD swept through hunting preserves. By 2001, no private game parks remained.
With cervids at least, Capitalism, it seems, operates as a vector for disease rather than a means of capital accumulation. According to geographer Paul Robbins, “It is now well established that CWD has a much higher rate of transmission among captive herds, and is most quickly transmitted through the interstate transfer of game farm animals. In other words, prions move most rapidly through capitalized ecosystems.”

While no additional animals have been found infected with CWD in New Mexico since the two cases in 2005, the proliferation of private game hunting in New Mexico suggests that new cases of CWD are likely.
The efforts of the State to control elk are an unmitigated disaster. It has served to further erode access to public resources among small-scale livestock growers whose claims predate the NMDGF and it has put in motion patterns of disease transmission among elk that, in other states, have proved disastrous. And this will remain true as long as the State’s claim as a capable manager of wildlife goes unchallenged.

Climate Change: It’s Worse Than You Think

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 23:17:50 -0600

By DAVID CORREIA
On June 9, 2005, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson issued Climate Change and Greenhouse Gas Reduction Executive Order 05-033. The order directed state personnel to assess the impacts climate change could have on New Mexico. The subsequent report, published six months later by an interagency taskforce, concluded that “projected climate changes by mid-to late 21st century include: air temperatures warmer by 6-12 degrees Fahrenheit on average, but more in winter, at night, and at high elevations; more episodes of extreme heat, fewer episodes of extreme cold, and a longer frost-free season; more intense storm events and flash floods; and winter precipitation falling more often as rain, less often as snow.”
Not surprisingly these effects, according to the report, “will disproportionally affect communities of color and low-income communities, thereby raising issues of environmental justice.”
According to a new report by Demos, a non-profit think tank and left-wing advocacy institute based in NYC, and written by Robert Repetto, currently a Senior Fellow in the United Nations Foundation’s climate and energy program, former Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and vice president of the World Resources Institute, a non-profit policy research center in Washington, D.C., “New Mexico’s current political leadership is undoing state and regional policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions even as the risks posed by global warming to the state’s economy and population become more evident.”
Echoing the EJ issues of earlier reports, Repetto notes, “The impacts of climate change on public health will result in thriving illnesses and disease, plummeting physical well-being, and soaring health care costs.”
Richardson also commissioned a report on the effects of climate change on the state’s water resources. Since the election of Susana Martinez, however, information on the effects of climate change is more difficult to find. The link to “Climate Change Information” was removed from one government site. While information on climate change is available, it’s cloistered over on an obscure “New Mexico Drought” website and buried in a link under “archives.”

Information by the Martinez administration on the potential impacts of climate change on New Mexico is hard to come by indeed.
But no worries. Martinez made sure to keep the “Drought for Kids” link where youngsters can play the Aquifer Game with Rio, the Water Detective, a cute conservation-minded chipmunk. And if that doesn’t solve resolve our climate predicament, they can just “Write a Poem about Water!”
Meanwhile Greenland melted last week.

Satellite image of the extent of surface melt over Greenland’s ice sheet. The image to the left is from July 8. The image to the right is from July 12. NASA recorded measurements from three different satellites that showed that about 40 percent of the ice sheet had undergone thawing at or near the surface on July 8. By July 12, the melting had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed. Source: NASA

The NASA report comes on the heels of a recent report from the Neils Bohr institute at the University of Copenhagen in which climate scientists concluded, contrary to previous opinion, that temperature increase is related closely with the rise in the atmospheric CO2.
"The ice cores show a nearly synchronous relationship between the temperature in Antarctica and the atmospheric content of CO2, and this suggests that it is the processes in the deep-sea around Antarctica that play an important role in the CO2 increase," explained an author of the report.
Despite the alarm of scientists, a recent University of Michigan report finds that Generation X could care less. Only around five percent of all those surveyed last year were concerned about climate change. More than sixty-five percent said they weren’t even sure global warming was real. Ten percent knew for sure: it was a hoax.
What’s going on here? Given the science, where does this political intransigence come from and what explains the broad climate skepticism?
The radical political journalist Alexander Cockburn died last week. He was 71. In a career that included stints at the Village Voice, the Nation, CounterPunch (which he founded and ran with longtime collaborator Jeffrey St. Clair), and even the Wall Street Journal, Cockburn never shied away from a fight. He skewered friends and enemies alike if he thought they were on the wrong side of an issue. And one issue he thought we were all on the wrong side of was climate change. He was one of the few, if not the only, climate change skeptics on the radical left.
Cockburn, a better political journalist than scientist, believed that anthropogenic climate change was hogwash. Concern among leftists for climate change was nothing more than political rhetoric that reflected a profound lack of vision. “This turn to climate catastrophism” as he called it, “is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice.”
Cockburn may be wrong about the science, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong about the politics. His criticisms of climate politics provide one possible explanation for our current predicament.
He persuasively argued that the mainstream left had become so toothless, so completely lacking of vision and principle, and its politics so marginalized and irrelevant, that it has been unable to marshal a meaningful political argument. Unable to win a fight on the merits, and without the guts to wage a real political struggle, it has resorted to scare tactics. Hence, “the sky is falling” apocalypticism of much climate change politics on the left.
While I disagree with Cockburn on the science, I agree with him over what he calls climate change catastrophism. Because Cockburn didn’t believe climate change was real, the politics of climate change, too, wasn’t real. But even for those of us who don’t reject the science, it’s obvious that the political problem, as the mainstream left defines it, never quite makes sense when understood in the context of the science of climate change.
Case in point: Al Gore. In An Inconvenient Truth, a 2006 documentary about Gore’s climate change PowerPoint presentation, the former Vice President explains the science and the pending disaster of global climate change. According to his story, and most climate change stories, the increase in the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases is a function of industrialization. Massive industrial polluters turned the atmosphere into a giant dump to which they gave themselves free access. So how do we solve this desperate problem? Just buy fluorescent light bulbs, Gore tells his audience. Buy more efficient appliances. Buy green products.
There are two unavoidable problems with arguments such as Gore’s. First, the problem is identified as an effect of capitalist relations and conditions of production. We have developed a political economy in which capitalist firms have access to nature in patterns that exhaust the very thing upon which production, and life itself, is based—nature. His argument is that we’re slowly destroying the atmosphere and nearing a kind of tipping point beyond which we won’t be able to sustain life on this planet. But then, instead of confronting this problem by refusing to let industry exhaust nature in its pursuit of profits, Gore wants us to buy a Prius, or screw in high efficient light bulbs, or plant a garden. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the mainstream left has recognized a frightening problem but doesn’t have the guts to make the difficult political stand. They’re like that middle-school friend who abandoned you when the bully showed up on the playground. Their stories are about death and human misery and their solutions are about protecting class privilege. Even when they focus their attention on the polluters, such as Kyoto, it’s only to protect their right to pollute, not to stop it. They’re capitalism’s sycophants. They’re worse than the polluters.
Second, because the solutions for climate change described by prophets of doom like Gore are really an effort to protect capitalism’s share of surplus value, it’s obvious to anybody paying attention that what he’s advocating is a kind of climate bailout. And the average consumer will pay the price. This is the crux of Cockburn’s criticism. He sees an authoritarian streak in the mainstream left—a “we know better what you need than you know” arrogance that no longer finds political purchase without the battering ram of scare tactics.
The result of all this is a profound resistance to the politics of fear that has manifested itself as apathy by Generation X, anger by conservatives furious that their tactics have been coopted, and paralysis by policy makers who lack a constituency to take on polluters.

courting climate justice in new mexico

Sun, 8 Jul 2012 13:20:25 -0600

By DAVID CORREIA

In November of 2010, the New Mexico Environmental Improvement Board announced that “[c]limate change caused by anthropogenic emissions of GHGs [Greenhouse Gas] will have a particularly severe impact o[n] the American Southwest, including New Mexico. The warming trends in this region are double the annual global average.”

The statement was a no-brainer coming as it did on the heels of more than a decade of severe drought in the U.S. southwest, a drought that stressed piñon/juniper forests to the breaking point, weakening piñon trees in particular so much that they became little more than brunch for the bark beetle and kindling for the massive forest fires of the past few years. In some parts of northern New Mexico, drought and bark beetle infestations killed more than 95 percent of piñon trees. Fire got whatever was left.

Thankfully, the statement by the EIB was not just window dressing. Instead it signaled a sea change in New Mexico’s approach to climate change. The board voted to limit carbon emissions in New Mexico by joining an existing regional or national emissions reduction program, such as the market–based cap and trade program begun in 2008 by the Western Climate Initiative (WCI).

The WCI began in February 2007 when five western Governors (AZ, CA, NM, OR, and WA) agreed to collaborate on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The most significant outcome of those efforts was the market-based cap and trade program first described by WCI in September 2008.

Cap and trade, or emissions trading, is a market-based approach to carbon reduction in which carbon emissions are capped and firms are given tradable rights to pollute within that cap—rights they can use to pollute or sell. The idea is that the ability to sell rights to pollute will provide an incentive for firms to invest in clean technologies and therefore, eventually, pollute less. In theory the approach allows a firm to pollute as much as it wants as long as it can purchase the right to do so from another firm that pollutes less than it otherwise would. When it works the plan slowly reduces overall emissions over time, due to increased efficiency, to a level set by a regulatory agency.

In December of 2010, by a vote of 4 to 1, the New Mexico EIB approved a second rule—one proposed by a group called New Energy Economy—that required electric generating facilities with emissions greater than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) to reduce those emissions by a specified percentage every year for eight years (this was the cap) or to offset those emissions by paying other firms to reduce their emissions (here’s the trade).
Predictably, Southwestern Public Service Company appealed the decision. Regrettably, Susana Martinez was elected Governor of New Mexico.

On January 4, 2011, Martinez fired all the members of the Environmental Improvement Board who approved the first two climate change rules. "Unfortunately,” she wrote in a press release announcing the putsch, “the majority of EIB members have made it clear that they are more interested in advancing political ideology than implementing commonsense policies that balance economic growth with responsible stewardship in New Mexico."

She quickly appointed Jeff Bryce, a vice president of an engineering design firm with an extensive work history in the petroleum industry; Gregory Fulfer, a rancher from Jal; James Casciano, a manager at Intel in Rio Rancho; Deborah Peacock, an intellectual property rights attorney from Albuquerque; and two others.

The new board quickly repealed both EIB climate change recovery rules.

Enter Akilah Sanders-Reed, a 17-year old skiing enthusiast and East Mountain resident. In May of last year, she joined with WildEarth Guardians and filed a lawsuit against Martinez and the State of New Mexico (No. D-101-CV-2011-1514) in which she asked the court to compel the state to prevent further increases in CO2 emissions and reduce existing greenhouse gas emissions.

Sanders-Reed’s complaint is based on the Public Trust Doctrine, the legal idea that certain natural resources, like air and water, are essential to human health and therefore must be protected and preserved for public use. Under this doctrine, the government serves in a fiduciary role and is obligated to protect nature for the common benefit of all.

Martinez disagreed and filed a motion to dismiss the case in July of 2011. In January her attorneys argued that no public trust doctrine is recognized in New Mexico and therefore the case should not proceed. First District Court Judge Sarah Singleton disagreed with Martinez, concluding that the atmosphere could be considered part of the public trust. She gave both parties leave to amend their arguments.

After a five-month pause, the case reconvened in Singleton’s court last week. On June 29th, Singleton considered Sanders-Reed’s amended complaint. In it her attorneys argued that “despite studies undertaken by agencies such as the Office of the State Engineer and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation acknowledging the impacts of climate change in New Mexico resulting from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, Governor Martinez has repeatedly stated her belief that science has not established a link between climate change and human activities. This erroneous belief has led the Governor and the State to repeal the preliminary measures put in place by the previous administration to address the human causes of climate change in New Mexico.”

The amended complaint also asked the court to compel the Governor to “produce a plan for redressing and preventing further substantial impairment to the atmosphere and mitigating the effects of climate change on the State’s trust resources. Because of the urgency of the crisis and the need for quick and decisive action, Plaintiffs also respectfully request that the Court impose a timeline for the preparation of the assessment and plan.”

The argument was persuasive enough that Singleton rejected the Governor’s motion to dismiss and allowed the case to continue. Sanders-Reed’s lawsuit is part of a broader legal strategy to force state governments to address climate change. To date young plaintiffs like Ms. Sanders-Reed have asked courts in 49 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government to force state governments to develop climate recovery plans and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 6 percent—a reduction based on the path-breaking work of Dr. James Hansen, a NASA climatologist and renowned climate change scientist.

WildEarth Guardians called the suit “one of the most remarkable legal actions that has the potential to halt human-induced climate change.” I hope they’re right. But there’s little evidence that governments, any governments, are willing to do anything substantive about climate change.

Teenagers like Sanders-Reed know this better than anyone. Youth climate activists, frustrated by another round of toothless plans offered up by bought-and-sold bureaucrats, walked out of the recent Rio+20 meeting in Brazil. For many young activists, governments have been talking about climate change longer than they’ve been alive. Entire lifetimes have been spent waiting for political progress on climate change. The frustration dominated reports from Rio. "World leaders have delivered something that fails to move the world forward from the first Rio summit, showing up with empty promises and empty pockets at Rio+20," said young California activist Mariana Calderon. "This text is a polluters plan,” she complained, “and unless leaders start listening to the people, history will remember it as a failure for the people and the planet."

Much of the frustration among activists young and old is based on the suspicion that national and international efforts to mitigate climate change, particularly plans promulgated in places like Rio and Kyoto, are nothing more than thinly veiled attempts by government functionaries to turn the frightening implications of climate change into business opportunities for their friends and flunkies. These meetings have become nothing more than junkets for what has become a climate political classes—a permanent class of bureaucrats who jet around the world attending conferences about climate change and whose interests are not necessarily (or at all) tied to resolving the serious implications of global climate change. God forbid they lose their frequent flyer miles.

This pessimism began with the 1997 Kyoto Protocols, the plan upon which all other cap and trade programs are based. Kyoto, unfortunately, does not courageously confront the challenges of climate change but pathetically panders to the interests of business and industry. Read the text of Kyoto here and then check out Annie Leonard’s brilliant analysis of Cap and Trade here.

The problem with Kyoto is not the theory so much as the practice (though the theory’s pretty bad too). A common criticism among environmental scientists is that Kyoto incentivizes all sorts of strange activities. It gives credit for planting forests to sequester carbon, but does so in a way that allows for the destruction of wetlands—an outcome that can produce CO2 releases in excess of what a forest might sequester.

Stranger still, Kyoto includes a variety of technology transfer agreements, multi-tiered standards, and various ways for firms and industries to get under caps not through reducing emissions by through investment and trading; what looks like reductions on paper often means an actual increase to GHG emissions in practice.

For example, the plan creates a two-tiered system of countries—those from the developed world in one category and developing countries in another. An industry in the developed world can get under a hard cap by investing in clean technology projects in the developing world. The idea is that wealthy countries have the technology, the capital, and the wherewithal to reduce GHG emissions and the trick is to just somehow get that expertise into developing countries; great in theory but a disaster for GHG emissions in practice. If an electricity producer in Ghana, say, proposes to build a dirty coal plant, a utility company in France, for example, can step in and invest in the project so that, voila!, the Ghanians build a coal-fired power plant that previously didn’t exist. And this is considered progress under Kyoto.

How did we get this business-friendly plan? Weren’t there alternatives? Yes, even in Kyoto, the cap and trade plan that delegates finally selected was only one of many. There were six plans considered in Kyoto:

1. Phase out subsidies for oil and support new environmental movements
2. Develop low/non carbon technologies on a regional basis
3. Tax the use of the global atmospheric dump
4. Assign nontradable restricted property rights to the carbon dump for each country. Countries would decide how to get under the cap.
5. Auction atmospheric units to private owners
1. Create a global trust to sell rights to polluters

In Kyoto activists believed that the science of climate change would provide all the motivation necessary to compel governments to pursue vigorous climate mitigation plans. But then industry interests bankrolled reactionary attacks against the science of climate change—and climate change scientists, too.

Does the Sanders-Reed’s suit, and the scores of others like it, mark a new period in climate change politics? One that ends the reign of business-friendly climate schemes and announces the beginning of an honest, and legally mandated, effort to reduce GHG emissions?

Up to now, it has seemed a fool’s errand to pursue plans to compel the capitalist state to transform a political and economic system wholly constructed on the burning of fossil fuels. It has seemed unlikely, to say the least, that the law could compel the capitalist state to force itself to, well, not be itself.

But the WildEarth Guardians/Sanders-Reed lawsuit offers an exciting possibility. Instead of hoping science and logic will win the day, the Sanders-Reed lawsuit takes a more pragmatic approach. According to WildEarth Guardian’s attorney, Samantha Ruscavage-Barz, once the transcript of Judge Singleton’s ruling on June 29th is released, the plaintiffs will pursue a motion for summary judgment. In it they will ask the court to order New Mexico to “(1) produce an assessment of the degree of impairment to the atmosphere from current greenhouse gas levels and the concomitant climate change impacts in New Mexico based on current climate change science; and (2) to produce a plan for redressing and preventing further substantial impairment to the atmosphere and mitigating the effects of climate change on the State’s trust resources.” Finally they will ask the Court to “impose a timeline for the preparation of the assessment and plan.”

If science won’t sway them, let the courts make them. But the plan has its weaknesses. The WildEarth Guardians will not ask the Court to order the state to measurably reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A number of similar lawsuits in other states have been thrown out of court because judges have refused to order states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6 percent annually. The Courts universally refuse to serve as a monitoring or regulatory agency.

The same is true in New Mexico. Judge Singleton told both parties she would not impose standards on the state. Creating and administering a plan is the job of the Environmental Improvement Board. So if the result of the lawsuit is a return to cap and trade, it will be a hollow victory. But the Sanders-Reed lawsuit is, no doubt, an important beginning in a new struggle over climate change in New Mexico.

LIFE AND VIOLENT DEATH IN ALBUQUERQUE: POLICE VIOLENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 10:31:14 -0600

By DAVID CORREIA

EDITOR'S NOTE: The story below, uploaded on March 23, 2012, came one day before new developments in the story of police violence in Albuquerque. Yesterday Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry distanced himself from the Albuquerque Police Department after a report in the Albuquerque Journal revealed an APD cash reward program to officers involved in fatal shootings. "The administration has nothing to do with how the union conducts their business," said Berry in a statement regarding the $200—$500 payments made by the union to cops involved in both fatal and non-fatal shootings, "but I was shocked yesterday when made aware of this practice. I cannot stand aside and condone this practice. It needs to end now.” Even APD Chief Ray Shultz, an apologist for police violence, found the program troubling. Despite criticism from many, including Mike Gomez, a father of a recent APD victim, that the payments amount to a bounty for killer cops, Union leaders defended the program. Union President Joey Sigala told KRQE news that the payments “help [officers] get their bearings back….They really need to get away [after a fatal shooting].” After nearly two dozen police shootings and 18 deaths in the last two and a half years, the union program has distributed more than $10,000 to APD officers.

On Monday an Albuquerque Police Department officer named Martin Smith shot and killed 31-year-old Daniel Walter Tillison after Tillison rammed his car into Smith’s cruiser. Tillison, according to police, was selling stolen stereo equipment out of his car near the corner of Marquette Avenue and Texas Street. Tillison tried to escape in his car when Smith confronted him. APD Chief Ray Schultz told the press that “(Tillison) then produced a dark item in his hand and pointed it in the direction of the officer,” Smith killed Tillison with one shot. The “dark item” was a cellphone. Officers found no weapons in the car.

Two days later a chase that began in Albuquerque ended in violence near Laguna Pueblo when an APD SWAT officer Russell Carter shot and killed Gary Atencio, a man suspected of earlier shooting at his estranged wife. This is Carter’s third fatal shooting in a 15-year APD career. In February of 2005 Carter was one of seven officers involved in a 12-hour standoff when Torrance County Sheriff’s deputies tried to serve an eviction notice on 58-year old John Loche. Loche, however, refused to leave and instead barricaded himself in his McIntosh, N.M. trailer. The standoff and gun battle that ensued left two officers wounded and Loche dead of multiple gunshots. In June 2007, Carter and another APD SWAT officer shot and killed 42-year-old Jay Martin Murphy after Murphy barricaded himself inside his Albuquerque home with his teenage daughter. According to police Murphy had been lobbing glass bottles at officers from his car and then, wielding a knife, barricaded himself in his house. According to the warrant Murphy stood on his porch from where he continued to throw bottles and various objects at police. The victim’s son, Jay Murphy Jr., 19, exited the house when his father entered and "advised the officer his dad was `harmless' and tried to calm the situation down." Instead an APD SWAT unit stormed the house and killed Murphy. Yesterday Shultz called Carter “a hero” for his role in killing Atencio and in the two previous fatal shootings.

Two shootings in three days and another bloody week in Albuquerque comes to a violent close. The three police shootings in 2012 continue APDs frightening pattern of deadly force as first option. In the past 30 months, APD officers have killed 18 people and wounded 7 others.
What’s going on in Albuquerque? In November I wrote an essay on APD violence for CounterPunch (www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/23/the-return-of-the-albuquerque-death-squads/] that I provocatively titled, “The Return of the Albuquerque Death Squads.” In it I argued that the recent spate of deadly police shootings in Albuquerque is a function of both a frightening blood lust among some APD officers and an example of the violent results of institutionalized racism and structural inequality.

I told the story of the September 2010 shooting of Chandler Barr after he threatened an APD officer with a butter knife. I recounted the day an unarmed Dominic Robert Smith was shot and killed in October of 2009. Smith had a history of mental illness and on that day he was on the streets of Albuquerque acting strangely, alternately waving his arms and shoving pills in his mouth, when an Albuquerque Police officer, using a hunting rifle, shot him in the chest. I recalled how Trey Economidy, an APD officer who shot Jacob Mitschelen in the back in February of 2011 killing him instantly, posted his job description on Facebook as “human waste disposal.” And I mentioned the controversy around Detective Jim Dwyer’s MySpace page, which listed his occupation as “oxygen thief removal technician” and included alarming posts like “Some people are only alive because killing them is illegal.” I suggested that these people and patterns tell us that APD is a department populated by thugs that operates more as a death squad than a police department.

The response I got to the essay was not what I expected. While there were a few angry reactions, including a few forwarded emails from outraged police officers, what I mostly received were comments that suggested I actually had not gone far enough in my analysis of police violence.
One young woman sent me this email:

“My dad was a police officer on the Navajo nation and occasionally he would attend trainings with APD. At one training he was having a conversation with an Albuquerque police officer and the officer asked my dad “So what’s your throw down weapon?” My dad wasn’t familiar with the term so he asked him what a “throw down weapon” was. The officer replied that it was a weapon you throw down at a scene where you have shot an unarmed individual.”

I received another email from a reader who reminded me that the shooting of Chandler Barr in 2009 was even more disturbing than I had depicted. He wrote this in his email:

“When APD bicycle cop Leah Kelly left a position of cover, her car, to shoot Chandler, she was smoking a cigar. She has an endless record of citizen complaints, and a history of procedural violations. After killing Barr she was rewarded with a transfer to CIT (Crisis Intervention Team) unit. I’m not sure what the members of the Crisis Intervention Team do for APD other than perhaps, given its composition, intervene and create crisis.”

Another reader suggested that I was onto something in my essay when I recounted the history of police violence in Albuquerque and New Mexico against young Chicano and Native political activists. He sent me a detailed history of APD violence that includes the following:

“Between 1987 and 1996, APD officers killed 31 people. In the wake of these killings, intense community pressure led the Albuquerque City Council to commission the 1997 Walker-Luna Report that confirmed the findings of a 1991 APD study. The 31 people killed in the previous ten years meant that APD killed people at a rate higher than every other similarly sized city in the U.S. The report led the City Council to create the Police Oversight Commission (POC) and its investigative arm the Independent Review Officer (IRO) in 1998, based on the recommendations of the report.
In the six years after these reforms were put in place APD officers shot 41 people, killing 23. Tasers were introduced to the APD in 1999. Police officials suggested that the use of Tasers would provide non-fatal options to officers and thus reduce the pattern of fatal shootings. Police killings increased in the years following the proliferation of Taser use by APD, including a number of deaths by Taser.”

This frightening pattern of APD violence has been matched by an equally bizarre blue wall of silence. Bizarre because all of the statistics I’ve offered above come from APD Internal Affairs reports. And yet in 2001, when APD Internal Affairs Unit (IA) investigated 52 complaints of excessive force it upheld only one complaint. Perhaps the fact that APD recognizes the pattern but can’t recognize it as a problem is not bizarre at all but rather an illustration of a terrifying truth: APD knows exactly what it’s doing and, as history tells us, plans to continue doing it. The emails I received offer compelling evidence that I got at least one thing very wrong in “The Return of the Albuquerque Death Squads.” It was incorrect to suggest that the death squads returned because from the evidence offered above it’s clear that they never left.

That this violence is nothing new tells us something important about the APD. Violent is what they are and violence is what they do. And the violence is directed at the poor and the mentally ill. And that its victims are overwhelmingly Chicano or Native tells us that this police violence is a tool of racialized socio-spatial control of poor people. The police, as German social critique Walter Benjamin wrote in the 1940s, use violence as a law-preserving tactic. What kind of law is it, exactly, that this violence preserves? That this violence is racialized and directed at the poor suggests something fundamental, and profoundly disturbing, about the law.

The shootings this week have led to renewed calls for reform and pressure on Mayor Berry to do something about his violent police department. But the possibility for real change seems unlikely. The periodic reform efforts directed at the problem of police violence have failed time and time again. This suggests that the focus on police violence as a problem—whether it’s a problem defined as a few bad actors who need to be purged or a problem of a poorly trained and thus poorly managed force—is perhaps the wrong place to look for solutions. Rather perhaps police violence is less a problem than it is an effect. An effect of the demonization of the poor; an effect of institutionalized racism; an effect, more broadly, of capitalist social relations.

The struggle against racialized police violence directed at the poor in Albuquerque must confront this issue as part of wider patterns of environmental racism in Albuquerque, a place, like so many other places, where poor residents suffer the health problems from the disproportionate effects of noxious land uses. Residents in the South Valley, for example, struggle daily against the toxic effects of a legacy of ground water contamination from the release of chemicals, petroleum and chlorinated solvents from commercial, industrial, military and municipal facilities.

Improper fertilizer use on an industrial farm in the South Valley in the 1950s and 60s created what is today one of the largest toxic underground plumes in New Mexico with a nitrate concentration 30 times greater than allowed by National Drinking Water standards. The plume, larger than 500 acres in size, has been slowly migrating east toward residential areas.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad saturated local soils with creosote in an area of the South Valley where groundwater levels are found only 20 feet below the surface.

The patterns of pollution that South Valley residents in communities like Mountain View confront, however, are not just historical. Underground pipelines crisscross the valley and deliver millions of gallons of fuel and gasoline to five major bulk terminals located just south of Rio Bravo. These massive steel tank farms serve as the distribution point for most of the fuel for gas stations throughout Albuquerque and the Sunport. The constant truck traffic into and out of Mountain View contributes to air quality problems linked to elevated levels of childhood asthma.

The spills and leaks from this industrial infrastructure are a constant part of life for Mountain View residents. The Bernalillo County Mountain View Sector plan includes a section describing Mountain View’s toxic history. The Valero Logistics bulk terminal has spilled tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel in the Valley. In 2001, tanks spilled 20,000 gallons of diesel fuel and perhaps as much as 40,000 gallons of gasoline was spilled in 2003.

Of the 40 registered petroleum storage tanks in the South Valley, the New Mexico Environment Department admitted in 2005 that state inspectors found at least 20 of them leaking petroleum into the aquifer in Mountain View. Over the past 20 years, 206,000 gallons of chemicals from several companies (that we know of) have spilled into local surface and groundwater in the South Valley, with most of this concentrated along the Broadway corridor south of Rio Bravo.

Mountain View residents have long organized around issues of environmental injustice and many of the same activists who have been at the forefront of struggles around environmental racism have also been involved in campaigns against police violence. They see these issues as linked because, when understood in an historical and spatial context, it is clear that the poor in Albuquerque live in sacrifice zones and the police enforce these patterns of social and spatial exclusion. The poor live in polluted neighborhoods and to APD this means that they too are pollution. This is the logic of Economidy’s description for his job with APD—Human Waste Disposal.

What activists in the environmental justice movement have done, both locally and nationally, is to historicize and politicize the spatial patterns of unequal pollution. It is impossible to locate racist intent in an isolated fuel spill or to find an example of institutionalized racism in a single zoning decision, much in the same way that it is plausible for Chief Shultz or Mayor Berry to deny anything wrong with violent police acts. Against this logic EJ activists have become quite skilled at demonstrating how environmental racism is not about discrete acts but about the social production of spaces of poverty as polluted spaces. Environmental racism is understood as a structural issue visible in the histories of redlining in minority communities, exclusionary zoning that reinforced the spatiality of segregation and speculative real estate markets. Therefore it is not enough to clean up a Superfund site or stop a polluter—these are important struggles, but it is not where environmental justice begins and ends. Rather the racist system that makes these patterns possible is the object of struggle.

First published in La Jicarita

The Return of the Albuquerque Death Squads

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 10:18:12 -0600

By DAVID CORREIA

On November 13 of this year the Albuquerque police oversight commission cleared one of its own in the shooting in September of 2010 of 19-year old Chandler Barr. The officer, a bicycle cop on her first day on the job, shot the mentally ill Barr twice in the chest after he threatened her with a butter knife. Barr is one of 20 young men shot by Albuquerque police in the last two years. Barr is lucky. Fourteen have died from their injuries. The long list of young men—mostly Hispanic and many of them mentally ill or drug users—includes also Dominic Robert Smith shot and killed on October 1, 2009 by an officer that, according to Margaret Ann Saiz, Robert’s mother, “said that my soon looked like he was mentally retarded.” Smith was behaving erratically and shoving pills in his mouth when an Albuquerque Police officer, using his favorite hunting rifle, fired a round into the unarmed man’s chest.

In May of this year Mark Gomez found his brother Alan high on drugs and “acting crazy.” Not knowing how to intervene and scared that his brother would hurt himself, he called 911. Alan Gomez became another statistic when an APD officer shot him in the back. Gomez was armed at the time with a plastic spoon.

On February 9, 2011, APD officer Trey Economidy pulled over Jacob Mitschelen on a traffic violation. Economidy claimed Mitschelen ran from the scene with a weapon in his hand. Mitschelen’s mother asked “They had him down with the first shot, why did they have to go up and pump two more shots in him?”

One answer to the question, both the specific question regarding any one of the 14 deaths and the more general question about the spike in Police shootings, may be that APD officers are violent by nature, self-selected to the force because of the opportunity to kill with impunity. The numbers seem to suggest as much. Police killings in Albuquerque are three-times what is found in comparably sized cities and is similar to New York, which has 14-times the population and a police force 34-times larger than APD.

And there’s ample evidence of a frightening blood lust among some APD officers. Trey Economidy, the police shooter in the Mitschelen death, posted his job description on Facebook as “human waste disposal.” He was suspended for four days. Detective Jim Dwyer listed his occupation as “oxygen thief removal technician” on his MySpace page, a page that included alarming posts like “Some people are only alive because killing them is illegal.” Police Chief Ray Schultz called some of his posts “concerning” and “very clearly inappropriate,” but refused to discipline Dwyer.

There exists, however, another possibility. The refusal by APD leadership to discipline officers (none of the officers involved in any of the shootings has been removed from the force), and the refusal of Mayor Richard Berry to seek an independent, outside investigation by the Department of Justice (The Albuquerque City Council voted in August to request the investigation but Berry remains intransigent in his support for the troops), suggests that what’s developing in Albuquerque is a frightening return to the extrajudicial police shootings that turned 1970s Albuquerque into a killing field. Endemic violence in New Mexico against Native Americans and racialized policing patterns focused on young, Chicano men began to shift in the early 1970s in reaction to the rise of Red Power and Chicano Movement groups into efforts to target and kill Chicano and Indigenous activists by the dozens.

In 1969 a Vista volunteer named Bobby Garcia disappeared and was later found in an arroyo with a bullet in the back of his head. The killing marked the moment when activists throughout the state began to see a pattern in the violence. A series of police shootings and the deaths of almost a dozen Chicano activists from Taos to Albuquerque, some unarmed and shot in the back, produced rumors of death squads operating within the Albuquerque Police Department and the New Mexico State Police.

And the evidence began piling up along with the bodies. On February 28, 1972 Rito Canales and Antonio Cordova were killed in a barrage of gunfire while the two were reportedly trying to steal dynamite from a roadside construction bunker. Both men were members of a group known as the Black Berets, a multi-ethnic, community-based social movement organization modeled on the Black Panthers and inspired by Che Guevara. Canales and Cordova were outspoken and prominent community activists, particularly on issues of police brutality, New Mexico prison conditions and the institutional racism facing Chicano communities in New Mexico. Their organization operated a free community health clinic (named in honor of Bobby Garcia), established cultural schools for Chicano preschoolers, organized film nights and offered tutoring sessions for local teenagers, among other things. Members traveled to Cuba on Venceremos Brigades, brought Vietnamese students to Albuquerque to talk about the war in Vietnam, and provided childcare for local union members during strikes.

Their killing came the day before both were scheduled to hold a news conference on an investigation into prison violence and police brutality. Police had been harassing the Black Berets for years before the Canales and Cordova shootings. As one former Black Beret leader recalls it “[The police] would pull out their guns while their vehicle was driving and say ‘Bang, Bang’.” The Berets, it seems, uncovered evidence of a secret interagency group called the Metro Squad, made up of officers from APD and the New Mexico State Police along with Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Deputies and involvement from federal agents. The Metro Squad worked with the John Birch Society, the Minutemen, and other reactionary groups who opposed civil rights.

The killings of Chicano activists should also be understood as part of a much larger pattern of violence that included, and made possible, police violence.

John Harvey and Herrman Benally were murdered on April 21, 1974. After being stripped of their clothes, they were beaten with rocks, castrated with burning sticks and set on fire. The men were found in a ditch along a dusty stretch of highway outside the Navajo nation in Northwest New Mexico. Less than a week later, a third Navajo man was found in a ditch. Like Harvey and Benally, David Ignacio was beaten savagely. His attackers left him to die from suffocation after caving in his chest with rocks.

The April deaths came during a bloody spring as ten violent deaths rocked the Navajo nation and turned the initial horror into an almost weekly event. In the days following the discovery of Ignacio, 60 people called the funeral home wondering if he were a missing relative. When three white Farmington, New Mexico high school students confessed to the murders, stories of constant racial violence in the area came to light. The murders, it turns out, were a consequence of a blood sport among Farmington high school students who for years had made robbing, beating, and mutilating inebriated men outside the scores of liquor stores that ringed the Navajo nation into a weekly Saturday night event. Some white students at Farmington, it seems, displayed the cut-off fingers of their Navajo victims in their lockers. Until the tortures and murders were revealed the cause of death for the dozens of Navajo men found dead in the ditches along lonely highways was said to be “exposure” from passing out following drinking bouts. Meanwhile the police, some remarked at the time, continued to recruit at the local high school for new cadets.

In Albuquerque the Berets went public with their claims of police brutality at a rally that turned into a pitched street battle with police and Anglo provocateurs. In Farmington, young Navajo activists of the Coalition for Navajo Liberation marched in the streets against violence until the Sheriff’s posse showed up. The ensuing melee sent dozens of marchers to the hospital and the rest to jail.

The violence and police killings of the 1970s have returned. But there are differences between the violence of the 1970s and the eruption of this new pattern of police violence. The killings in the 1970s should be placed in the context of liberation movement activism around civil rights issues by groups like the Black Berets and the Coalition for Navajo Liberation. The killings today find another context, namely three decades of a bulldozing neoliberal restructuring that has ground its way through poor communities amid the parallel expansion of a violent and dehumanizing drug economy.

There are however similarities. Police violence against civil rights activists in the 1970s was a function of the way in which race and class became a proxy for subversion by the agents of social control such as the police. In the strange logic of the Albuquerque Police Department, poor, urban Chicanos became targets of police violence because of the social chaos that racism and poverty had created. Likewise today, APD is at war with the poor because it has come to equate any expression of poverty or drug addiction not as an effect of structural inequality, but rather as another opportunity to dispose of what its officers call “human waste.” Like elsewhere being poor, suffering from a mentally illness or battling a drug addiction is a crime. Dwyer was wrong, detectives like Enconomidy and Dwyer have thrived at APD because for the Albuquerque Police Department, killing is not an illegal act.

First published at Counterpunch