A small cluster of shops and restaurants in Columbus, N.M., a tiny town in turmoil after the arrests of its mayor, police chief and other top officials.
By MARC LACEY
Published: August 25, 2011
“Grandpa died over there,” said Richard R. Dean, the unofficial historian of Columbus and a descendant of one of the 18 Americans killed. Recounting that long-ago battle, based on family letters and conversations he had with a great-uncle who survived it, he speaks of bullets whizzing back and forth on Broadway and a panicked population huddling in their homes.
But there is another, more recent predawn raid for which Columbus has also become linked.
Ninety-five years and a day after the infamous Villa raid, another group of armed men crept into Columbus. And their operation this past March 10 was just as closely linked to the internal strife in Mexico as Villa’s foray on March 9, 1916.
Nicole S. Lawson, a resident awoken by the commotion earlier this year, recounted what took place outside her front window.
“I was sleeping, and I heard a very big bang and then shouting,” she recalled. “Someone was yelling through a bullhorn, although I couldn’t hear what they were saying. There was a helicopter overhead, and out the window I could see red lights flashing and a lot of people with guns.”
They were agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Drug Enforcement Administration. They led away in handcuffs Columbus’s mayor, police chief, village trustee and numerous others accused of smuggling guns, ammunition and body armor across the border to Mexican outlaws.
Columbus, with 1,800 residents, sits just across the border from Las Palomas, a Mexican town about 75 miles west of El Paso. Many families have relatives on both sides of the line. Hundreds of children cross every morning from Las Palomas to attend school in Columbus. But drug violence has strained the relationship. Columbus residents recount how the mayor of Las Palomas was killed some years back and how a popular dentist was taken away, never to be seen again. Although such violence has not spread to Columbus, residents say, the influence of the drug trafficking groups in Las Palomas has definitely reached north.
“We don’t like to say much because we don’t want to lose our lives,” said Mr. Dean, the historian.
The arrests and the guilty pleas that some of the defendants have entered, though, speak volumes.
“This town should be a lovely tourist attraction, but people aren’t coming,” said Mr. Dean, who runs a local museum and almost singlehandedly tries to keep the legend of that Pancho Villa raid alive. “People say, ‘Oh, it’s too dangerous there.’ And this has not helped our reputation.”
The evidence against Columbus’s leaders laid out in court documents leaves residents here shaking their heads in disbelief. “What can I say?” said Martha Skinner, a former mayor who runs a bed-and-breakfast in Columbus called Martha’s Place. “No one knew these guys were selling guns to the bad guys. We found out that morning. It was like Afghanistan.”
The smuggling ring bought about 200 automatic weapons from a gun store in New Mexico and transported them across the border to Mexico, according to the indictment. Bullets and body armor were also purchased in New Mexico for use by drug traffickers in Mexico, prosecutors say.
Blas Gutierrez, the jailed village trustee, is accused of arranging the deals with an inmate in a Mexican prison and using a Columbus police vehicle to transport weapons. Mayor Eddie Espinoza, who is related to Mr. Gutierrez by marriage, has already pleaded guilty to participating in the scheme and, on Thursday, Police Chief Angelo Vega also entered a guilty plea in federal court in Las Cruces.
In 1916, soldiers with the United States 13th Cavalry Regiment were stationed in Columbus, and at other points along the border, as part of an effort to keep the Mexican Revolution from spilling into the United States, Mr. Dean said. With Mexico in the midst of a drug war, those same concerns exist today. Mr. Dean said that with Border Patrol agents and National Guard troops in the area there was more of a security presence than a century ago.
After the Villa raid, in which the invading Mexicans had tried to torch Columbus into oblivion, the population of the village actually swelled as President Woodrow Wilson ordered in more soldiers for protection.
The recent arrests, however, may have the opposite effect and doom Columbus entirely. Ms. Lawson, who was appointed to replace the arrested mayor, has found the village’s books in such disarray, with hints of huge debts and reckless spending, that she fears that Columbus may soon lose its incorporation status and be taken over by Luna County.
At a meeting of the village board on Wednesday night, it was clear how deep Columbus’s financial hole had become. The fire chief pleaded with the village board to get serious and finish the paperwork for a state grant that had already been tentatively approved to finance a fire truck that the village had already taken possession of. As discussion went back and forth, he stormed out.
“If you want, I will put the pumper in the parking lot tomorrow with a ‘For Sale’ sign on it,” he said.
To save money, the village has disbanded its six-person police department, which had had eight police chiefs over the last five years, and contracted with the Luna County Sheriff’s Department for law enforcement. “Violation of public trust is probably one of the most heinous crimes that can be perpetrated on the public,” Sheriff Raymond Cobos told reporters. “I mean, it’s horrible.”
The village also wiped out its code enforcement, animal control and recreation departments because it lacked the money to operate them. “We’re dangling on the edge,” the mayor said. “We try not to look over. We try to climb back up. But I don’t know if we can survive.”
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