The Agony of 7/erra Amarilla

In the 16th century, Spain built a buffer province near the headwaters of the Rio Grande to shield her Mexican territories from possible French incursion. Transported to a wild, 600,000-acre land grant, Andalusian settlers turned their arid Tierra Amarilla into a grazing empire that exists today as New Mexico's Rio Arriba county. Bigger than Connecticut and almost as inaccessible as Tibet, the area sprawls southward from the Colorado Rockies to atomic-age Los Alamos. Its western reaches contain the licarilla Apache reservation, and to the east loom the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where at Easter fanatical Pen-itentes used to re-enact the Crucifixion by nailing a member of their sect to the cross. For the Spaniards who once were Rio Arriba's lords, life has become as harsh as the land, and they have sunk to an existence as pitiable as that of the Indians they dispossessed.

Blue-eyed "Anglos" now run the county and own its major farms and ranches. The land grants were wrested from the owners by taxation, fraud and theft as well as legal purchase. Descendants of the Andalusian pioneers live in squalid adobe shacks. Of the county's 23,000 people, 19,000 are Spanish Americans, and 11,000 are on welfare. Schools are bad, roads impossible except for a single badly potholed highway. Those who still own plots are discouraged from grazing their cattle in the national forests that occupy much of the county. Fenced out from their Tierra Amarilla, the Spanish Americans of Rio Arriba have turned to an odd messiah preaching an impossible dream.

Minister to Marauder. Reies Lopez Tijerina, 42, is a stocky Texan of Mexican extraction who once was an itinerant, guitar-playing Pentecostal minister. Coming to Rio Arriba in 1962, he formed an alliance to promote the establishment of a "Free City State of San Joaquin." Later he organized the Federal Alliance of Free City States, laying claim to Spanish land grants covering 35 million acres in New Mexico, 72 million in Arizona. 400 million in Texas, 698 million in California. But it was chiefly in Rio Arriba that Tijerina helped launch a campaign of terror.

Gathering together the hottest heads and most avid activists, he invaded Carson National Forest in late 1966 and "arrested" two rangers for trespassing on what he termed his sovereign state. When several members of his group last year found themselves in jail, a whooping band of raiders wounded two officers and kidnaped a deputy sheriff and a newsman. Although the state police were swiftly mobilized and augmented by a National Guard force with tanks, Tijerina's people slipped away. Arrested later, Tijerina and nine companions were charged with kidnaping and assault. He came to trial last week. As the jury selection began, Tijerina fired his attorney and decided to represent himself.

Comancheros. Even if many Spanish Americans in Rio Arriba support Tijerina with handouts of clothing, food and cash, they fear the violence he has loosed. Tijerina's young bodyguards call themselves Comancheros, after the independent and often lawless soldiers of fortune who prowled the Rio Grande in the 19th century. Anglo ranchers have been virtually under siege behind their barbed-wire borders. Shadowy terrorists cut miles of fence, poison wells, burn crops, kill cattle and even burn down ranch houses. In the mail come messages warning landowners: "Tierra o muerte" (land or death).

The state police, many of whom are Spanish Americans, are caught in the middle. They are branded turncoats by their relatives and supporters of the terrorists by the Anglos whose barns are burned. "They're always around to give speeding tickets," complains one rancher's wife, "but when trouble starts, they disappear." Some parts of the county have not seen a Governor in 300 years, but incumbent Republican David Cargo has promised to do something about their economic deprivation. So have Governors--U.S., Mexican and Spanish --before him, and the poverty-stricken Spanish American has little faith in administrators. The agony of Tierra Amarilla must bring bitter grins to the Navajo, Zuni and Apache, whose ancestors went through the same thing at the hands of the Andalusians.

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