[Ppnews] The Return of the Albuquerque Death Squads
Political Prisoner News
ppnews at freedomarchives.org
Wed Nov 23 11:02:43 EST 2011
November 23, 2011
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/23/the-return-of-the-albuquerque-death-squads/
Police War on the Poor
The Return of the Albuquerque Death Squads
by DAVID CORREIA
Albuquerque.
On November 13 of this year the Albuquerque
police oversight commission cleared one of its
own for the fatal 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, and one of 14 dead from their
injuries. The long list of young menmostly
Hispanic and many of them mentally ill or drug
usersincudes also Dominic Robert Smith shot and
killed on October 1, 2009 by an officer that,
according to Margaret Ann Saiz, Roberts 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 mans 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. Mitschelens
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 seems 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 theres 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 whats
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 leaders
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 Sheriffs 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
Sheriffs 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.
David Correia is an Assistant Professor of
American Studies at the University of New Mexico
in Albuquerque. He was inspired to write about
Police violence in Albuquerque by the work of an
anonymous graffiti artist whose art can be found
along the railroad tracks in Albuquerque. He can
be reached at dcorreia(at)unm.edu
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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