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.
In any case, the Paradas had put down six generations of deep family roots on Lomalinda since then. Paradas had built every house and barn and shed, strung every mile of fence, drilled every well. Six generation of Paradas had bled, sweat, laughed, and cried on every acre, through fires and floods, droughts and blizzards.
And now foreigners, illegal alien Mexicans mostly, were trying to use those ancient so-called Spanish Land Grants to seize the Lomalinda Ranch! They might as well offer to pay for the land with Confederate money, she thought. The Confederate flag had once briefly flown over New Mexico, and as far as Dolores Parada was concerned, the Confederates had just as much of a right to claim it as these newcomer Mexicans. Exactly none!
The Paradas had not for one minute ever considered themselves to be Mexicans. They were proud United States citizens, New Mexicans, and before that, they were Spanish, but never, ever were they Mexicans! The first Paradas had come to Santa Fe in 1693 with Don Diego de Vargas, thirteen years after the bloody Pueblo Indian Revolt had driven the Spanish out of northern New Mexico. They had come “with a cross in one hand and a sword in the other,” in the name of the King of Spain, when there was not even a country called Mexico, but only a colony called New Spain.
Now they were being threatened, warned daily to pack up and leave, by a gang of red communists and upstart Mexican illegal aliens! The world had indeed turned upside down.
But today, this Friday morning, something else was happening, something new. Just after dawn, two more school buses had turned off the state road into the squatter camp, followed by several pickup trucks that seemed to be carrying extra Milicia troops. Her son Max had stayed by the house, instead of going out on his rounds, after noting their early arrival. Perhaps most worrying, many of the Lomalinda ranch workers were absent this morning, or had quietly scattered to distant sections.
After their breakfast of huevos con chorizo, Dolores had walked up the thirty eight winding hardwood steps up to the third floor, to keep an eye on the encampment. Now, at nine AM, there was a flurry of fresh activity in the squatter camp. The flags and signs made from painted bed linens, which had been attached to wooden poles and planted in the ground for weeks, were being uprooted. It seemed like hundreds of the squatters were forming up on the Lomalinda driveway road in a deep line, flags and signs in front, as if in preparation for a march on the house.
***
A simple code word in Basilio Ramos’s earpiece informed him that the settlers were moving. The New Mexico Air National Guard pilots were already in their cockpit seats, wearing their standard issue green flight suits and helmets, watching him. He nodded and gave them a sign, twirling his right index finger in a circle. The turbines wound up with a shrill whine, the jet engines blowing out waves of kerosene exhaust. Their four black rotor blades began to turn.
A tiny stalk microphone extended from his left side earpiece, leading by a wire to the radio on his web belt. He pushed the button on his radio, and twice he spoke the code word flecha, or arrow. After a pause, he said, “Hazlo.” Do it.
In his earpiece he heard his distant sniper click the transmit button two times, confirming the order. Ramos had complete faith that Chino and Genizaro would do their duty, according to that far more secret part of the attack plan, about which the rest of the Batallón had no need to know.
The Falcons were pleased to rise from the ground and stretch, their white teeth grinning from behind camouflage face paint, cheerfully joshing one another as they strapped on their helmets. They climbed aboard the helicopters and sat packed tightly together on the aluminum pipe frame seats, and buckled in. The rotors picked up speed and whipped the air above them, a blur. Ramos sat on the gunner’s seat on the right side, across from the crew chief and behind the pilot’s seat. The crew chief passed him a gray aviator’s helmet; it was wired into the Blackhawk’s intercom system. He slipped it on and adjusted the microphone. The machines shook furiously, the pilots pulled pitch and the blades bit, the Blackhawks dipped their noses, rolled forward and they were off.
There was something uniquely stirring, glorious even, about lifting away from the brown earth in a rush of wind and jet turbine noise for an air assault, preparing to drop like hell’s hammers onto an unsuspecting enemy.
Basilio Ramos hated the Yanquis with a burning passion, but oh, how he loved t
heir Blackhawk helicopters!
***
“They’re moving Max, they’re coming now, over.” Dolores spoke these simple words into her new walkie-talkie. Max said that the radio was “digitally encrypted,” so the squatters and the Milicia wouldn’t be able to hear what they were saying. Max knew all about these things, and Dolores took his word that this was true.
“Okay Mom, we’re locking the new gate. I’ve been trying to call the sheriff again, but I’m still just getting the run-around.”
“I don’t see any sheriffs down by the encampment Max, just squatters and Milicia. No deputies, no state police, nothing. Be careful, over.”
Her son Maximilio had installed a new galvanized steel gate across the driveway, over the last open cattle guard 200 yards down from the front of the house. The shiny silver gate and the barbed-wire cattle fence around the house had been specially topped with a roll of “razor wire.” If the squatters wanted to seize their home, they’d have to cut through or climb over that last chest-high barbed-wire cattle fence. In that case, Max had said, the squatters would have crossed the Rubicon, crossed the line in the sand. Trespassing and camping on so-called “idle lands” was one thing. Climbing the final locked gate to invade a family’s home…that was an entirely different matter.
Max had strapped on a heavy revolver after breakfast this morning, and had taken his Winchester saddle rifle. He had also loaded another 3030 Winchester for her, “just in case,” but they seriously doubted whether the squatters would dare to cross that last fence. The rifle now lay on the sitting room reading table, just a few steps behind her. Dolores Parada had handled firearms for most of her life, but had not done any shooting for at least two decades. It didn’t matter: some things you never forget.
Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista Page 28