High, Strange Albuquerque: How communities can change

New Mexico has reached the apex and nadir in the national surveys on the most violent state in the U.S., along with the worst educational system in the U.S.  Exactly how did New Mexico get on this trajectory?  Could this be a cautionary tale for everybody else?  I begin by looking at the largest city in the state – Albuquerque.

First, there’s that quirky name, coined after the Portuguese viceroy and conqueror of India, “Alphonse de Albuquerque” (1453-1515 A.D.). Made a “Duke” before his death, the city is referred to in recent years as The Duke City, after its founder and his last gig.  Next, there is the city and surrounding region.

The Duke City, nestled in the Rio Grande River Basin Region, has had a long, tumultuous history dating back further than the conquest and massacre by the fierce Spanish Conquistador, Juan Oñate. His small, but well-equipped army with weapons and horses, never seen before by the Indigenous Peoples of the New World, crisscrossed the Land of Enchantment, appropriating both women and cultural traditions, like the red and green chilies grown by the Indigenous People.  But more scorching than even the red chilies are the numerous volcanoes in the region.

Birthed between the fires and the volcanic lava and the tectonic plate movement of the earth, “The Majestic Rockies” erupted from the earth’s womb by the collisions between the crust and the fault line, resulting in stupendous, massive granite and rock structures stretching to the clouds.  The Rockies serve as the dramatic back-drop to the city; embracing both the city and the region.

Albuquerque sits as a jewel in the crown of the Southwest.  The City’s Museum of Natural History’s dioramas feature fossilized remains of dinosaurs, as silent sentinels, warning us of the evolutionary path on this planet; and humans standing upright – only a “blip” on the fragile, linear timeline of history, may well follow in the enormous footprints of these monsters.

These great thunder beasts roamed what had been a tropical landscape – filled with verdant, lush plant life and boundless inland seas a hundred million years ago.  Indigenous people, for centuries, have created from the remaining seashells and coral ceremonial necklaces of great beauty and meticulous detail, sometimes carved with obsidian tools from the cooled-down black lava.

The Rio Grande River Basin, honed and tempered in a crucible of fiery cataclysmic upheavals, cradles the City while volcanoes lining the westernmost slope rise – like guardians – ever vigilant over the City.

Sitting at the base of the Rockies, the Duke City abuts the Sandia Mountains (part of the Rockies) – what the Spanish call the “watermelon-colored” mountains at sunset.  The City sprawls across the Rio Grande River Basin extending its influence of civilization, tradition, and culture as far west as the Petroglyphs National Monument and the now extinct volcanoes.

Albuquerque is a hardscrabble city of mostly blue-collar workers scattered between the academic professionals, federal government employees, the lab scientists, the Kirtland Air Force Base personnel, medical providers, and clinicians – some of whom are the best in the United States.  The Duke City boasts of the University of New Mexico and its favored sons and daughters, the UNM Lobos.  UNM reigns over a substantial swathe of land that curls around the downtown area and spills over to the outer edge of the City.

The citizens of the Duke City have deeply entrenched family roots, some of which can be linked back to the Spanish Diaspora, when Spanish-Jews left Spain at the behest of Queen Isabella’s purge of all Jewish subjects, to forge a new life in the Nuevo Mundo-New World.  Families have genealogies that can be traced back to the fifteenth century.  Consequently, tradition and culture are coded into the DNA of many of Albuquerque’s and New Mexican families.

Unfortunately, drug abuse is also “hard-wired” into the minds of más gente – more people.  Generation after generation of New Mexicans begin drug use as pre-adolescents.  Parent or relative (padres o parientes) teach youngsters how to use rigs and shoot-up heroin.  Drug abuse is ingrained in many of the familias with their connections to prison gangs.  Prison grandmas or abuelas; mothers or madres; and even their daughters or hijas serve time together in detention centers and prisons across the state.  The same is true of the men.  Families cycle and recycle through the prison system, where the root cause of all the suffering, alienation, and subsequent criminal activities can be inexorably linked to drug abuse.  It’s tragic.  Generations lost because of drugas abuse.

If New Mexico, with the largest purveyor of illicit drugs – Albuquerque, is the Narcolita State, with tens of millions of dollars of black tar and China white heroin, cocaine, ice, ecstasy, molly, and illegal weed flowing through the diaphanous borders shared with Mexico, then, Albuquerque is the Capital of Opioid addiction and overdoses.  Some say the city with the No. 1 highest death rate from opioid overdoses is the La Reina of Opioid Addiction in the U.S.  Front pages of the Albuquerque Journal scream with news of the youngest fatality.  The middle schools in this crisis mode see a trickle-downeffect, as kids observe their older siblings (gang members), parents (gang members), and even grandparents (gang members) or uncles (gang members) snort meth or shoot-up heroin.

KOAT Channel 7 (ABC) has a report site (www.koat.com/news/newmexico-ranks-worst-in-the-us-for-poverty/28121474?view-print), that I as a prisoner was last able to review in 2015, and it gave me the following chilling stats (comments inside brackets are my own):

• Ranked 44^th in Income Inequality (drives up the crime rate; results in higher incarceration rates).
• Ranked 34^th in Unemployment (ditto).
• Ranked 48^th in High School Graduates from – 2012-2013 (ditto).
• Ranked 49^th in Higher Education Attainment (ditto).
• Ranked 50^th in Teen Birth Rate (ditto).
• Ranked 29^th in Affordable Housing (ditto).
• Ranked 45^th in Assets and Savings (ditto).
• Ranked 45^th in Disconnected Youth who are neither employed nor in school (ditto).
• Ranked 50^th in Overall Poverty

No need to review the current (2022) statistics, as problems are the same or worse.

The survey did not address the drug problem pervasive among middle-school through high school students.  On August 19, 2016, the Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Michael Botticelli, addressed a forum in Albuquerque about the State’s second highest overdose-rate of opiates in the United States (N.M. is now in first place).

The City ignores the infestation of prostitutes, pimps, and narcotraficantes on its hot, humid and sun-blasted downtown streets, and in its “seedy,” crumbling motels hunched along Central Avenue, like a row of beaten prisoners pressed against each other.

Street peddlers sell “black tar” heroin, “China White,” “Ecstasy or Molly,” “Special K” or Ketamine (animal tranquilizer), meth, ice, or crack – along with females of every age, size, color, and ethnicity along the historic Route 66.  Diversity is in abundance for the right price and local gangs control most of the action.

“Burqué,” a slang gang term for the City, has approximately 700,000 or more residents in the City and surrounding ‘burbs.  Residents of gated country clubs, with armed neighborhood patrols, rub elbows at luxury shopping areas with other residents – who also have exclusive memberships – in some of the most brutal and bloodiest gangs in the North American continent.  Gangs, such as “M.S. 13” are teeming with new cadets comprising an army of a million or more soldiers embedded in the U.S. as a “Fifth Column” willing to kill or die at a moment’s notice.  “The Sureños” (the Southerners) are notorious as well; “The Mexican Mafia or Emme,” a nationally recognized criminal enterprise imported from Cali.; the feared and dreaded “Syndicato,” the leading gang in the New Mexico prison system includes the O.G. (ol’ gang members), “shot-callers” who order the hits on other inmates, correctional officers, crime scene witnesses, and other rival gang members; “The 18^th Street Gang,” a low-budget, criminal org; “The Bloods” and “The Crips,” imported from So. Cali, recruit like powerhouse multi-level marketing conglomerates; “The Aryan Brotherhood,” a muscular and forceful entity, made-up of White Nationalists (O.G.s, skin-heads, and Nazis), a congenial group with operations across the country and in all prisons; “The EastSiders,” “The Westsiders,” and “The Southsiders” – offshoots of the gang quadrants of Albuquerque; and upstarts such as “505” and “Burquenos” wreak daily death, destruction, and chaos beneath the towering Sandias.

Nightly news stations cry out “Breaking News!”, “Breaking News!”, like Poe’s The Raven; these harbingers of doom showcase the latest bloody barbarity of the gangs’ performance art.  The shock value of the crimes facilitates the recruiting methods for these elite clubs in the impoverished mean streets of Albuquerque’s poorest neighborhoods.  A sense of hopelessness hangs over part of the City like the darkness of an approaching storm.

In the Narcolita state, the Rites of Passage – include children as young as nine-years-old following in the drug underworld’s “tradiciònal” steps for introducing children to syringes, rigs, and meth pipes.  Kids have trouble concentrating in school while high and disoriented on dope; they get “popped” for misdemeanors, the small stuff, until graduating to residential burglaries and car thefts or rape and murder.  Teens drop out of school with no job prospects, languishing – only to be tapped by older jailbirds until they become fully-fledged, initiated members usually through an act of elevated violence.

Drug abuse is the super-highway to prison, where they meet the “shot-callers”; the Ol’ Gangsters, the heavily tattooed, scarred gang leaders, who, in turn, teach the youngsters the tradecraft.  If the young ones do get released by the Department of Corrections before they age into the position themselves, they’ll quickly leap back on the streets, flanked by other ferocious members of the club, who roam over the former tropical landscape of the basin region, like “velociraptors” seeking prey.

Gangs are not the only organizations to fear – as corruption in the City can be found at every governmental level.  Governors of the State, some closely affiliated with drug-cartels, push the political platforms of “tough on crime,” while rapist judges (yes, we have them throughout the state, even in prison, where they are granted furloughs on weekends) and judges, who are well-known in the underbelly of the drug world and prostitution, dismiss criminal charges of major narcotraficantes and local connectas.

Corruption is unhindered within law enforcement itself, resulting in the Albuquerque Police Department being under the oversight of the Department of Justice since 2014, due to unjustifiedkillings of unarmed citizens.  The violent crime rate trending across the nation begs the question, “Why?”

The answer lies in the alienation of youth and disgruntled young adults in our society, which contributes greatly to the spike in rising violence.  Here’s a list of things we can do as a nation and society to reduce the crime, the alienation, and the deep divide that exists in our country splintering Americans and their values, which unite us all:

• Vote out all judicial incumbents, especially judges past their expiration date; urge young, prominent defense attorneys to run for the bench (one such notorious judge listed second-degree murder as a non-violent offense on a plea agreement to give an advantage to a killer, thereby reducing consequences).

• Look closely at the lives and promises career politicians and judges campaigning for re-election make to the community.  Are they keeping their promises?  Do they have affiliations or photo-ops with gangs or questionable business people?  (A candidate for the highest position in the state had photos taken with a C.E.O. of a notorious gang).  A successful democracy is well-educated and curious and they should be asking questions about politicians and judges.

• Begin early childhood development and parenting classes in middle-school.  Make completion of these classes mandatory for graduation purposes.  Carry the classes through to high school (New Mexico has some of the worst textbook cases of child crimes in the country).

• Invest all the time, effort, and resources that can be mustered for early pre-K through high school.  Provide nutritious hot meals, hand out fresh fruit after school (many parents or single-parent homes lack food or food preparation for their children), money that should be spent on food for the family often goes for alcohol or drugs, or if necessary, help with food assistance, be sure to address mental health services, ask volunteers to help mentor and nurture healthy friendships with adolescents, and maintain a positive environment for children and adolescents to flourish at all times.

• Introduce a curriculum-based program that includes mental health, along with parenting classes.  We can’t save all teens that choose gangs, but we can make a significant difference in our communities.  Consider money as a reward for good grades; it was proven successful in several major cities.  Don’t let a child-at-risk for ACEs, adverse childhood experiences, slip through the cracks; reach in and lift him or her out of the tragic circumstances of homelife.  Create an atmosphere of love, support, and care for these children, which will reduce gang affiliation.

• Support gun control, stop glorifying guns and killers; implement buy-back programs for weapons.  Teach teens and young adults the proper use and care of weapons.  Reduce the amount of violence spewed-out from the hundreds of TV programs that do little but numb the minds of youngsters to actual real-world violence children watch.  Push athletics, team sports, and outdoor recreational activities, drama, art, poetry, literature readings, rather than hours spent in front of a zombifying screen.

• Open the community’s mind to the successful prison reforms in Europe and the Scandinavian countries.  Bring back community service rather than expanding the prison-industrial complex, which only serves to enrich the prison profiteers who create super-criminals.

• Give prisoners who deserve a second chance that opportunity.  Life-sentenced prisoners often have the cleanest offender history background of all prisoners.  Often, they are more receptive to rehabilitation than any other classified prisoner.  Some are wrongfully-convicted.

• Enact policies and live by a zero-tolerance for all illegal drugs, replace draconian sentences with a step-system, allowing prisoners to rehabilitate, to receive education, to volunteer their time and services to community projects, and recognize prisoners for their accomplishments.  Encourage education for all prisoners – especially violent offenders.  Make it mandatory that release from prison is predicated upon attaining a GED.  Prisoners leave the Big House after serving five to twenty years or more, with no GED or any work skills, returning to the free-world only to sling dope on street corners.  Numerous felons will return to prison, shortly after release, with more serious charges.  They still can’t read or write after spending wasted years in prison.  They are being released into your communities NOW.  “Would you rather have these felons educated, leading productive lives or continuing their criminal careers?”  (This is a no-brainer).  The average cost to house an inmate for one year is approximately $40,000; in some states with a higher cost of living it may be as high as $75,000 to $100,000 depending upon classification.

• Create one hour a night for the family – without smart phones or television or gaming distractions.  Talk “real talk” to each other.  Avoid criticism at mealtimes.  Invite creative dialogue, meet your kids’ friends, who are their parents?  Who are your children associating with?  Your children’s friends have more influence over your own kids than you or their teachers.  If those kids are doing dope, so are your kids.

• Provide free college tuition for your community.  Implement online college classes at the local prisons, only education returns back $4.00 for every $1.00 spent in prisons.  Our current governor, Michelle Lujan-Grisham, just passed legislation for free tuition and fees at all state funded colleges and universities, called Opportunity Scholarship.  This is the most powerful legislation to have passed in decades; it will change, over time, the economic status of the state and personal lives.

• Think of providing an experienced Re-Entry Specialist on the outside, to work with those being released or discharged back into the community, to lower recidivism rates.  This is one of the most important things a community could do; it is not a probation or parole officer.

You can change the outcome of our communities’ futures by addressing the issues of alienation of our youth and disconnected young adults in our neighborhoods.  You probably have your own ideas.