New Mexico

New Mexico Passes Cannabis Legalization And Expungement Package

April 2, 2021 Drug Policy Alliance. Create! Marijuana Legalization, Mass Incarceration, New Mexico

Santa Fe, NM – With the New Mexico Legislature approving social justice-centered cannabis legalization during the special session today, Emily Kaltenbach, Senior Director for Resident States and New Mexico for the Drug Policy Alliance, released the following statement: “New Mexicans are finally able to exhale. After many years of hard work, another whirlwind legislative session, and input from stakeholders throughout the state, social justice-centered cannabis legalization is on its way to the Governor’s desk, where she has already agreed to sign. We thank the Governor and our legislative allies for not taking ‘no’ for an answer and stopping at nothing until we were able to get justice for New Mexico communities—particularly Hispanic/Latinx, Black, Native and Indigenous—that have been immensely harmed by cannabis prohibition.

Abortion Ban Repealed In New Mexico After Years Of Struggle

March 10, 2021 Kuveni Scanlan, Liberation News. Resist! Abortion, Health Care, New Mexico, Women's Rights

Radical and progressive activists recently led the way to an important victory for working-class women in New Mexico. For the past three years, several organizations in New Mexico, including the Party for Socialism and Liberation, have struggled to force the repeal of a 1969 New Mexico law which made it illegal for women to make their own decisions about their bodies. Finally reacting to significant protests, on Feb. 26, the governor signed a bill which repealed the law that made abortion illegal. This ban was, of course, unenforceable under the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. However, with the new conservative-dominated Supreme Court, the real fear that this latent law could come into effect spurred action. PSL members joined other organizations in a series of protests during the 2018 legislative session, including a rally which disrupted proceedings.

New Mexican Economists Warn: Change Course Now

January 13, 2021 Jerry Redfern, Capital and Main. Educate! climate crisis, New Mexico, Oil and Gas

Later this month, New Mexico lawmakers will have another chance to fix an economic problem that has plagued the state for decades. “For at least 40 years people in the state government and the Legislature have known that they are overly dependent on oil and gas for state revenue,” says Jim Peach, regents professor of economics at New Mexico State University. Right now, more than 40% of the state’s income relies on the boom-and-bust fortunes of oil and gas. Now, according to a trio of New Mexico’s leading economists, the time has come to change course. “Like it or not, we’re at the tail end of the fossil fuel age,” Peach says. “We really are.”

When Is An obelisk Not Just An Obelisk?

October 14, 2020 Elena Ortiz, The Red Nation. Resist! American genocide, Indigenous Resistance, Monuments, New Mexico

New Mexico - When I was a child, my dad and I would sometimes walk down to Santa Fe Plaza, especially on cool autumn afternoons. We would get Cokes from Woolworth’s. My father would visit with friends and family, selling under the portal of the Palace of the Governor’s, and we would sit in the center of the Plaza, on the stone banco around the obelisk. My dad would point out the word savage which was etched into the marble plaque, and he would laugh. “Those are your ancestors,” he would say, with no little bit of irony.

Monument To Colonialism Toppled On Indigenous Peoples’ Day

October 13, 2020 Charles Davis, Business Insider. Resist! colonization, Indigenous Peoples Day, New Mexico, Statues

New Mexico - Visitors to the historic plaza in Santa Fe, a bastion of liberalism in northern New Mexico, will find a charming square in the Spanish colonial style, surrounded by shops selling native wares — typically sold by non-native peoples — and a monument at the center of it all celebrating the slaughter of the area's original, commercially monetized inhabitants. At least until Monday, when protesters marked Indigenous Peoples' Day by tying a chain around the monument, managing to topple it amid clashes with police.

New Fossil Fuel Projects Meet Indigenous Resistance

September 19, 2020 Randall Hyman, Truthout. Resist! Fossil Fuels, Indigenous Resistance, New Mexico

New Mexico - The spicy pungency of sagebrush filled the air in Greater Chaco, New Mexico, in late July this summer as I watched towering, rain-laden clouds gather across the endless horizon — a reminder that the midsummer monsoon season would soon turn the dirt roads that snake across the Navajo Nation reservation into quagmires. Locals are accustomed to these storms, but this region is now also being pummeled by two other tempests — the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hit the Navajo Nation hard, especially due to many residents’ difficulty in accessing clean water, and also the tumult of fracking, which has now been lashing the region for 10 years.

Fracking Company Made It Rain Toxic Water Upon New Mexico

September 4, 2020 Dahr Jamail, Truthout. Educate! Corporatism, Fracking, health, New Mexico

Penny Aucoin, her husband Carl Dee George, their son Gideon and their daughter Skyler have had their lives devastated by the fracking industry. There was no oil and gas infrastructure where they lived when they moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico. But six years ago, during a massive expansion of drilling across the Permian Basin that spans West Texas and southeastern New Mexico — one of the most prolific oil and gas basins in the United States — the drilling began. It was so loud they had to provide hearing protection for Skyler. Then when the flaring commenced, dead birds began literally falling out of the sky right next to their home, and one of their chickens died.

If You’re Watching Portland, Watch This Courthouse In New Mexico, Too

July 22, 2020 Charles P. Pierce, Esquire. Educate! New Mexico, Police, Rebellion2020, right wing militia

The events in Portland understandably have raised serious concerns that the various white-nationalist militias, having infiltrated various police departments, might decide en masse to “help” the Feds “maintain order” in such a way as they are doing presently in Oregon. It is not a long step, after all, from badgeless Feds in unmarked rental vans to badgeless civilians in unmarked rental vans. As regards to this possibility, it’s important to keep an eye on one courthouse in New Mexico. Back in June, when protestors assembled to remove a statue of a Spanish conquistador, a bunch of cospaly Rambos called the New Mexico Civil Guard showed up in opposition. (Eventually, in the middle of a scuffle, a guy named Steven Baca opened fire on the demonstrators.)

Could COVID-19 Spell The End Of The Fracking Industry?

April 19, 2020 Dahr Jamail, Truthout. Educate! COVID-19, Fracking, Global Recession, New Mexico, Oil and Gas

It has always been known that the oil and gas industry only survives by way of debt financing. Fracking is capital intensive, and very few companies involved ever actually even turn a profit in excess of the cost of capital. Instead, they have always operated by dependency on cheap money from Wall Street banks to finance their drilling and operations. Fred Nathan is the executive director of Think New Mexico, an independent nonpartisan statewide think tank whose mission is “to improve the quality of life for all New Mexicans, especially those who lack a strong voice in the political process.” Nathan said that the contraction of the oil and gas industry in New Mexico is a “cause for deep concern” for the state budget, because every time the price of a barrel of oil drops $1, the state’s general fund takes a $22 million hit.

New Mexico Official Pulls Plug On New Oil, Gas Drilling On State Land Near Chaco

May 6, 2019 Robert Nott, Santafenewmexican.com Resist! Drilling, Gas, New Mexico, Oil

State Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard has put a halt to new oil and gas leasing on some 73,000 acres of state trust land near the Chaco Culture National Historic Park in Northwest New Mexico, saying the move will help protect archaeological and cultural resources of the state’s pueblos and tribes. “We are focusing on this particular area because it is so significant to all Native populations in New Mexico and has such a cultural and historical value to them,” Garcia Richard said by phone Tuesday.

Private Prison In New Mexico Demands More Prisoners

August 8, 2017 Steven Rosenfeld, www.alternet.org Educate! Mass Incarceration, New Mexico, Prison Industrial Complex, Private Prisons

By Steven Rosenfeld for AlterNet - The nation’s second-largest private prison corporation is holding New Mexico politicians hostage by threatening to close unless the state or federal authorities find 300 more prisoners to be warehoused there, according to local news reports. “The company that has operated a private prison in Estancia for nearly three decades has announced it will close the Torrance County Detention Facility and lay off more than 200 employees unless it can find 300 state or federal inmates to fill empty beds within the next 60 days,” the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper reported last week. The paper said that county officials issued a statement citing the threatened closure and emphasized that every virtually every politician in the region, from county officials to state officials to congressmen, were scurrying to save jobs—as opposed to shutting a privatized prison by an operator that has been sued many times for sexual harassment, sexual assault, deaths, use of force, physical assaults, medical care, injuries and civil rights violations. “This is a big issue for us,” Torrance County manager Belinda Garland told the Santa Fe newspaper.

Nuclear Accident In New Mexico Ranks Among Costliest In US History

August 24, 2016 Ralph Vartabedian, www.readersupportednews.org Educate! New Mexico, Nuclear Waste

By Ralph Vartabedian for Los Angeles Times - When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up in an underground nuclear dump in New Mexico two years ago, the Energy Department rushed to quell concerns in the Carlsbad desert community and quickly reported progress on resuming operations. The early federal statements gave no hint that the blast had caused massive long-term damage to the dump, a facility crucial to the nuclear weapons cleanup program that spans the nation, or that it would jeopardize the Energy Department’s credibility in dealing with the tricky problem of radioactive waste.

Trump’s Albuquerque Rally Erupts In Violence

May 26, 2016 David Martosko, www.dailymail.co.uk Resist! 2016 Elections, Donald Trump, New Mexico, Protests

By David Martosko for The Daily Mail - Donald Trump has hit out at [community members] who protested a rally in Albuquerque last night which turned violent when demonstrators trying to disrupt his speech clashed with riot police, set fire to flags and sent people running in fear over the sound of a 'gunshot'. Around 100 protesters broke through a barricade outside the building shortly after Trump took to the stage, trying to throw rocks through a window and at police, and setting fires on the street outside.

Albuquerque Agrees To Overhaul Troubled Police Force

November 11, 2014 Mark Berman, www.washingtonpost.com Resist! Law, New Mexico, police brutality

Albuquerque has agreed to overhaul its police department, following a lengthy Justice Department investigation that found systemic problems involving reckless officers and excessive uses of force. For context, let us rewind seven months. Albuquerque was the site ofchaotic, frenzied protests and calmer protests in March over police-involved shootings. This outcry was sparked after police officers shot and killed two men that month, which pushed the number of people shot and killed by Albuquerque police to nearly two dozen over a period of a little more than four years, according to records kept by the Albuquerque Journal. Not long after these protests, the Justice Department released the results of a 17-month investigation into allegations that the Albuquerque police used excessive force.

1974 New Mexico Campaign Warned Of Surveillance State

August 9, 2014 Peter Katel, www.newmexicomercury.com Educate! New Mexico, Privacy, Surveillance

Back when digital metadata – digital anything – was purely theoretical, along with smartphones, the Web, and computers smaller than refrigerators, when Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were still in college and Edward Snowden hadn’t been born, a crew of community organizers put up a bunch of billboards in Albuquerque. Each sign bore only one image: a giant eye. After the billboards went up along heavily trafficked roadways in New Mexico’s biggest city, still something of a Route 66 way-station at the time, New Mexico TV and radio stations started carrying public-service spots warning that everyone was under observation. This is hardly news today, but the billboards and broadcast warnings date from 1974. The anti-surveillance activists were community organizers based in Santa Fe – then still a lefty-bohemian hub - who got interested in the topic because they worried about government agencies and corporations systematically scooping up data on individuals. Capabilities for doing so were, by today’s lights, almost comically primitive. Way ahead of their time – too far ahead, in fact - the Santa Fe crew founded the anti-mass surveillance movement.

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