Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (36 page)

The body armor, including hard ceramic SAPI plates in the front pouches, had been taken from the National Guard armory after Wednesday’s sniper attack on their convoy.  The rectangular armor plates covered most of the vital organs, and would stop a rifle bullet fired point blank.  Each troop held a black M-16, their rifle butts resting on the earth, their long dark barrels aimed skyward above their helmets like the spines of a cactus.  Each troop was made even fiercer looking with diagonal stripes of black, brown and green camouflage grease paint across his face.

The Falcons were waiting for the radio message that would signal them to begin their air assault on the Hacienda Lomalinda, twelve miles away to the east.  It was nine o’clock in the morning, and the 200 civilian
pobladores,
the ranch squatters, would be moving out now.  They were unaware that their movement would commence the attack plan.  These settlers would be leaving their encampment by the state road, marching toward the main house of the Hacienda Lomalinda.  Two of Ramos’s Zeta Squad, Chino and Genizaro, had already infiltrated the ranch on foot in the dark of night.  The hidden snipers waited only for the column of squatters to move to within sight of the main ranch house to initiate the action.

A hundred yards away, twenty more Falcons sat in the shade, under the wing of a white twin-engine transport plane.  “Coronado Air Sports” had been covered with white paint on the boxy fuselage, but the old name was still somewhat legible.  Just behind and below the high wing on the left side of the fuselage was a gaping square opening, the cargo door his troops would use.  Ramos thought the huge tail at the back of the plane seemed to be mismatched, taken by mistake from a much larger aircraft. 

The Canadian-built DeHavilland Twin Otter had carried countless thousands of sport parachutists up into these same clear blue skies in happier years, up to twenty-five jumpers at a time sitting on its bare aluminum cargo deck.  Today it would land on the targeted ranch’s grass airstrip at the same moment the helicopters touched down by the main house.  The platoon embarked on the big plane would dash out to secure significant out buildings, and the homes of key ranch employees.  Still other Falcons waited in trucks, concealed at various points outside of the ranch, ready to race to critical targets on the 14,000-acre property.

Lomalinda wasn’t the largest ranch in New Mexico, in fact it was only a splinter compared to the major ranches.  But Lomalinda was almost entirely prime land, amply watered by a tributary of the Pecos River, which ran through its 22 square miles of rolling hills, forests and pastures. Comandante Ramos had made several reconnaissance flights over the property in the battalion’s Supercub, and he knew the
Hacienda Lomalinda
was a jewel, a long emerald oasis following the stream’s watercourse.

The operation would have been easier if they could have planned to simply burn the main house, as they had done on many of the other ranches the Falcons had liberated.  However, Vicegobernador Magón had given Ramos specific orders to preserve the
casa solariega
, the ancestral house. This meant that if the owners (and possibly some of their more loyal ranch workers) decided to fight to the end from within the heavily built three story stone and timber manor house, the Falcons would have to go in and root them out in close quarter combat, at far greater risk.

Nevertheless, the Vicegobernador had given explicit orders: preserve the hacienda’s main house at all costs. Félix Magón had seen pictures of the beautiful Lomalinda residence, when Ramos briefed him on the pending reprisal mission.  It was almost a rustic mansion, really.  It didn’t surprise Ramos when he heard through Santa Fe back channels, that Magón had decided to present Lomalinda to his daughter and future son-in-law as a wedding gift.  (The Comandante of the Falcon Battalion knew that he was in no position to object, considering the manner in which he had obtained his own luxury villa.)

Comandante Ramos knew his assault teams would be quietly questioning the rationale for storming the strongly built mansion with its stone first floor walls, instead of simply launching pyrotechnics into it through the windows, as was their standard operating procedure.  They would not challenge his orders verbally, but he detected an air of doubt.

He considered giving the troops one last pep talk, before he received the radio signal from the sniper team already in place on Lomalinda.  He would remind them that among the dead at Monday’s bus massacre were young
Voluntarios
, teenagers who had been shot in the back while running away. He would tell them again that the ranch was part of a Spanish Land Grant, but that it had been stolen by the gringos, even though the infamous Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had promised to respect the communal land grants forever.

But really, he reflected, the Falcons didn’t need much extra motivation.  They already believed that they were going to have the opportunity to shoot some rich gringo cowboys with their new M-16 rifles with the devastating bullets, and that was more than enough reason for them to get their blood up.  (They had not been informed that the occupiers of the ranch were in fact of Spanish ancestry.  There was nothing to gain by relating the convoluted history of the ranch’s ownership to the Falcons.)

Ramos sighed, remembering other mornings like this one. He had led more than a dozen land reform actions in Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador and other countries over the past decade. The only difference today was that Nuevo Mexico was still technically part of the United States.  But if the Yanqui bosses in Washington would not stand up and fight for their Southwestern territory, then they deserved to lose it, and they would lose it.

He remained silent and still, his arms folded across his chest, standing between the two helicopters, watched by his troops.  While waiting for the word to come over his radio, he stared out at the dry grass blowing in waves across the high plains, so much like the Pampas of his first
patria
, Argentina. 

***

Dolores Parada was standing
behind a tripod-mounted telescope, which was aimed down the mile-long road that was the Lomalinda Ranch driveway.  She was a sprightly woman in her early seventies, with long gray hair falling in a single thick braid to the small of her back.  She wore a floor length wrap-around skirt, banded in green and yellow horizontal stripes, and a white cotton blouse. 

Lomalinda, the “beautiful hill,” was crowned by the Parada’s century-old family home, built of local stone on the first floor, then solid timber on the second, crowned with a smaller central third floor that had been added in the 1920s.  The third floor was now her own personal apartment containing her bedroom, closets, reading room, and private bathroom.  It was her refuge.

The third floor also served as Dolores Parada’s observatory, with telescopes behind four dormer windows pointing to the cardinal points of the compass.  The four telescopes gave the 72-year-old matriarch of the hacienda eagle eyes.  The lenses were each adjusted for her vision, and the tripods for her height, just an inch over five feet tall. Two telescopes were in her sitting room, and two in her bedroom.  In normal times, they were useful for tracking wildfires or spotting cattle herds or lost horses, and checking that work groups were moving to their assigned tasks.  These were not normal times, and the south-facing telescope in her sitting room was fixed upon the squatter camp, which spread along the state road all around the main gate.

Five weeks ago in early May, the first contingent of squatters had arrived.  They were dropped off from Albuquerque school buses, and were protected by the new “Milicia” in their rag-tag uniforms and brown berets. Amazingly, the Monterey County Sheriff’s Department had bluntly informed the Paradas that they would take no action against these trespassers, while “the case” wound its way through the courts.  According to both the Sheriff’s Department and the Parada’s own family lawyer, the squatters had the law on their side, in occupying several hundred acres of the Lomalinda Ranch under the so-called “Idle Lands Act.”  According to this cockamamie new “law,” any privately owned ranch land not under cultivation or being grazed could be “settled” by landless
pobladores
, squatters, if the property had ever been part of a Spanish Land Grant!

The new sheriff even warned the Paradas that if they took any actions to expel the squatters and defend their property rights,
they
would be arrested!  Not the squatters, but the Paradas, the rightful property owners!

Property rights sure didn’t mean what they used to anymore, Dolores reflected bitterly.  The United States Supreme Court had seen to that… stretching and twisting the definitions of public use and eminent domain like silly putty.  Now just about any government body—local, state or federal—could seize any land they coveted.  They could keep it for any kind of so-called public use, or even sell it to cronies in blatantly corrupt private deals. Legalized theft is what it was.

Dolores often wondered if old Sheriff Brickwood would have responded in the same cavalier manner to the blatantly unconstitutional property laws passed by the new
Asamblea Legislativa
in Santa Fe. The question had been mooted last year when Dan Brickwood had been fired, after refusing to take the Spanish language test required of all government employees in “Nuevo Mexico.”  Now Dan Brickwood wasn’t around anymore.  He’d taken his family and moved out of New Mexico lock, stock and barrel, moved up to what he called “the free state of Wyoming.”

So for several weeks the family had patiently waited out the squatters, hoping that they were just making some kind of political statement, and would give up once the temperatures climbed into the nineties and hundreds with the approach of high summer.  Through her eighty-power telescope, it was clear that the squatters were city folks, mainly students and hippies she thought, judging by their grubby and disheveled looks.  She hoped that they would soon grow weary of “roughing it,” and head back to Albuquerque and Santa Fe, or whereve they came from.  But instead of leaving, almost every day there were more colorful tents to be seen through the telescope. Worse, sham “survey stakes” with red rags blowing from their tops began to sprout on the bottomland below the state road.

Next, the squatters had run their own hoses to ranch irrigation pipes, diverting water to their encampment.  The Paradas were having none of this, and cut off the water, leaving some of their own bean fields to whither and die as a result.  The squatters retaliated by bringing out their own gasoline-powered drilling rig, trying to put in their own water wells. Plywood shacks began to sprout among the tents.  The camp was beginning to take on an air of permanence.

Then, two weeks ago, trucks had brought out large diesel generators, the tent city began to be lit at night and the nonstop music and threats had begun.  This was harassment and psychological warfare pure and simple, but again the Sheriff’s Department refused to intervene.  “Free speech,” they called it!

Driving directly from the house to the state road meant running a gantlet of jeers and obscene gestures, and lately, rocks launched from slingshots.  The Paradas and their employees quit using their driveway after screaming gangs of tattooed and face-pierced thugs had broken their car windows.  They had been forced to use remote unpaved secondary routes to reach the state road, to avoid the increasingly hostile army of squatters.  At least the mob was staying in that one area along the state road, an insignificant percentage of the 14,000-acre Lomalinda Ranch. Insignificant, except that the occupied land choked off both sides of their only paved access to the state road.

Then early on Monday morning, a bus carrying Milicia troops and squatters had been ambushed only a few miles east of the encampment, and the daily confrontations became uglier and more threatening.  New loudspeakers, bigger and more powerful, were brought into the squatter camp.  They began issuing curses and threats for the Paradas—whom the agitators called “traitors” and “
gusanos
,” or worms!  They were abused as
pochos
and
tio tacos
, “brown Anglos,” sold-out
vendidos
who did not love their own
raza
or race. They were warned repeatedly to leave immediately, “for their own safety.”  The Lomalinda Ranch belonged to “all of the people of
Aztlan
,” the speakers claimed.  It was like living in some communist nightmare.  Things like this happened in Venezuela or Brazil or Zimbabwe, not in the United States of America!  

But it was not just a bad dream.  Each day more of the bed sheet signs were visible from the house.  Through her telescope, Dolores could clearly read them.  “Land for the Landless,” they said in Spanish.  “Land or Death,” others threatened ominously.  “A Place to Live is a Human Right!” What had that socialist clap-trap to do with the Parada’s family ranch?

The sign that angered her the most said, “Return What Was Stolen!” As if the Paradas had stolen Lomalinda!  It was true that at one time the ranch had been part of a so-called Spanish Land Grant, dating back to before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.  And without a doubt, thousands of Old New Mexicans had been swindled and deprived of the use of their ancestral lands after the treaty.  Entire National Forests were expropriated by the federal government from the land grants, and millions of more acres had been “legally stolen” by the Santa Fe Ring and other shady conspirators.

However, the land grants affecting Lomalinda were only
Ejidos
, which merely granted communal grazing rights to the inhabitants of distant pueblos, pueblos that no longer even existed.  The
Ejido
land grants were nothing like proper land deeds: the land belonged to the king of Spain. Anyway, the property had been bought and sold several times before it was purchased by Emiliano Parada in 1879.  This had been settled once and for all in 1892 by the Court of Private Land Claims, giving the Paradas clear title to Lomalinda forever.