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Land-Grant Committee Supports New Mexico Law-School Proposal

Posted on: Friday, 5 August 2005, 18:00 CDT

Aug. 5--TIERRA AMARILLA -- The University of New Mexico School of Law should create an institute to look into land-grant issues, an interim legislative committee voted Thursday.

After hearing testimony about the history of the theft of landgrant lands, the interim land-grant committee voted to endorse the idea of creating an institute at the law school to examine the issue.

House Speaker Ben Lujan, D-Nambe, said the Legislature needs to look at appropriating the money necessary to fund a detailed study of the issue "and establish that there was a collusive effort that was done."

The vote came after a presentation by David Corriera on the history of the loss of the Tierra Amarilla grant and other grant lands.

Corriera, a doctoral candidate in geography at the University of Kentucky, currently lives in El Rito and has researched several Rio Arriba grants.

In a slide presentation, Corriera said history clearly shows that corrupt lawyers and government officials, known collectively as the Santa Fe Ring, undertook an organized effort in the late 1800s to steal hundreds of thousands of acres in the Tierra Amarilla grant. The ring employed a maneuver, which was later used against other grants in the state, of having communal lands in the grant declared the property of one person and then buying that property at far below market value.

Spain and Mexico made grants of millions of acres to their citizens in the New Mexico territory to encourage settlement. The United States pledged to respect the property rights of citizens in the area when it acquired New Mexico and much of the rest of the Southwest in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War.

At the request of New Mexico's congressional delegation, the U.S. General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, undertook a study of the history of the land-grant issue in the late 1990s. The GAO released two detailed reports on the landgrant issue in recent years.

The latest GAO report, released last summer, states that beginning in 1854 the U.S. surveyor general and later the U.S. Court of Public Land Claims looked at 154 land-grant claims totaling 9.38 million acres in New Mexico. Of those, the federal government ultimately confirmed 105 grants totaling 5.96 million acres.

Although the GAO report noted the confirmation process was difficult and burdensome for land-grant heirs, it concluded the federal government afforded heirs due process. The government is not under any legal obligation to address the land-grant issue, the report states.

Nonetheless, the GAO listed several options. It said Congress could consider issuing heirs an apology, consider setting up a trust fund to compensate land-grant heirs or consider transferring federal land to heirs to compensate them for their losses.

Concerns over unfair treatment and outright theft of land-grant lands have simmered for years in New Mexico, particularly in Rio Arriba County, where armed landgrant activists stormed the county courthouse in Tierra Amarilla in 1967.

New Mexico land-grant activists strongly disagree with the GAO's conclusion that the federal government afforded land-grant heirs constitutional due process. "I honestly think that the second GAO report that came out last summer was a whitewash and shut the door on any legal work that can be done," Corriera said Thursday.

Moises Morales, a former Rio Arriba County commissioner, participated in the courthouse raid as a young man. "When they took our land grants away, they destroyed our economic development," Morales said Thursday, noting traditional land-grant communities now suffer from poverty, drug addiction and other problems.

"I blame the U.S. government," Morales said.

State Rep. Miguel Garcia, D-Albuquerque, who chairs the interim land-grant committee, said Thursday that he hasn't heard a word from members of the state's congressional delegation about how they intend to respond to the options listed by the GAO.

The interim committee intends to hold meetings around the state in coming months to develop legislation to introduce in next year's legislative session.

Garcia said he believes the proposal to create an institute to address the land-grant issue at UNM's law school would be a good step. He said it's necessary to collect legal information "that establishes a pattern of corrupt collusion to really kind of undermine land grant communities by taking control of the commons."

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Source: The Santa Fe New Mexican

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