Sunland Park Déjà Vu: Water, Management Crisis and Community Protest

April 15, 2024

By Kent Paterson

El Chuqueño

Momentous days riveted April in the southern New Mexico border communities of Sunland Park and neighboring Santa Teresa, where renewed controversy over water quality grips the public stage..

Dozens of people jammed the small Sunland Park City Council chambers April 5 in a town hall convened by City Councilor Alberto Jaramillo. Billed as the “Let’s Celebrate Our Hispano Heritage” event, the gathering heard city and utility company officials report on different municipal initiatives. …

Woods: Potential Buyers are Not Admissible Evidence

April 11, 2024

By Jessica Carranza

El Defensor Chieftain

RESERVE – Judge Roscoe Woods of the Seventh Judicial District Court, granted the State Engineer’s motion for summary judgement thereby upholding the State Engineer’s denial of Augustin Plains Ranch LLC’s application to pump 54,000-acre feet of water a year from the San Agustin Plains basin at the Catron County Court house on April 5….

Speaking with One Voice

April 7, 2024

By Linda Pentz Gunter, Beyond Nuclear International

Tribes call for cleanup, remediation and an end to uranium mining and milling

They were there to tell their stories. The contamination of air, land and water. The sicknesses. The displacement. The loss of community, culture and language. The deprivation of fundamental human rights. And they spoke with one voice in their plea for justice, the voice of Indigenous peoples in the United States and their lived experience of uranium mines and mills. …

Judge Denies Pumping of Water from the San Agustin Basin

April 5, 2024 

by Jessica Carranza Pino

El Defensor Chieftain

Judge Roscoe Woods, Seventh Judicial District Court Judge, denied the application from the Augustin Plains Ranch LLC to pump 54,000 acre feet of water a year from the San Agustin Plains basin at the Catron County Court house this morning, April 5, in Reserve, New Mexico.

There was standing room only with over one hundred people present at the hearing in protest as lawyers shared their arguments for almost five hours. …

Federal Government Must Halt New Uranium Mining and Clean up the 500-plus Abandoned Mines

March 24, 2024

By Eric Jantz, Allbuquerque resident and Teracita Keyanna, Gallup resident

They look like small mesas — indistinguishable, really, from the buttes and juniper-dotted hills that are common features on New Mexico’s landscape.

Rather than being part of a landscape that reflects the ebb and flow that millennia of seasons have sculpted into the Earth, however, these mounds of uranium mining waste are obelisks memorializing the point at which humanity completely divested itself of its moral compass and put its faith in the destructive power of the atom. …