Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (40 page)

He looked for their leaders, and found them standing in a small cluster on Marquette Avenue by the front of the buses.  There were four men in complete camouflage uniforms, including matching BDU blouses, and pistols on web belts.  One he recognized immediately from previous surveillance, by his black and gray Vandyke beard: Carlos Guzman, the Peruvian communist military trainer-for-hire.  He zoomed the video camera in on these leaders’ faces, for later close examination and possible lip-reading.

A lone bicyclist pedaled around the traffic barricades on Marquette, and up onto the sidewalk behind the stage.  He dismounted and walked his bike onto the grassy area between the stage and Garabanda’s position in the Bernalillo County government building.  The man removed his helmet and leaned his bike against a small tree.  It was little more than a sapling, one of a dozen or so planted in the grassy areas on both sides of the stage. As he locked his bike to the tree, he looked up and nodded a subtle greeting.  Luis Carvahal had arrived, alone.  Despite the heat, Luis was wearing dark slacks today, and a cream-colored long-sleeved shirt.  He walked a dozen yards to a gap in the temporary fencing, showed some sort of credentials to a pair of Milicianos, and was allowed into the stage area. Luis Carvahal, Garabanda’s informant and formerly a local reporter, was once again covering the New Mexico political beat.

***

The Milicianos gave him no trouble
about entering the speakers’ area, not when he showed them his New Mexico press credential and the handwritten note on El Gobernador’s official letterhead, signed by Agustín Deleon himself.  After granting him entrance, the young Milicianos paid no attention whatsoever to the skinny old man with the curly gray hair. Luis Carvahal didn’t even warrant a quick frisking when entering the stage area, which suited him just fine.  

Metal folding chairs were set up in four rows parallel to the front of the stage, but only a few were occupied.  The front row of chairs was reserved.  Toward the back of the fifty-foot-wide stage there was a long table with several yellow igloo coolers on it.  Luis Carvahal poured himself a paper cup full of ice water, selected a second-row chair on the right side with a nice view of the podium, and settled in to wait.

Fortunately, the day was partly overcast, and not as hot as it might have been, because he was wearing long pants and a long-sleeved shirt, an old guayabera that had turned off-white after years spent languishing on the hanger.  The four-pocket shirt, with fancy embroidered piping down the front, had been worn to a traditional wedding years before and then forgotten. Deleon had told him that the leaders were all going to wear guayaberas today, as a demonstration of Hispanic solidarity meant to symbolize some sort of cultural changing of the guard.

Deleon, Magón and the rest would arrive in vehicles from behind the stage, from Marquette Avenue, thus avoiding the crush and danger of actually participating in the March for Social Justice.  It was understood that the march would in all likelihood turn violent, especially on the east side of the railroad tracks away from downtown, up Central Avenue toward the university.  By arriving separately from the marchers, the state leaders would not be tainted by direct responsibility for any unpleasantness that might occur during the march itself.

Carvahal looked around him for information that might be of value to his FBI contact, Alex Garabanda.  He sought out undercover security operatives, or hidden counter-snipers, but did not see any.  He thought that the Milicianos around the stage area seemed to be ordinary troops.  They carried black M-16s, and wore brown berets and brown t-shirts.  Their t-shirts were printed on the front with the modified version of the New Mexican Zia, containing the red star inside of the circle.

The sun came out from behind a patch of clouds, so he moved over one chair to a shadier spot, and leaned back and enjoyed the music.  The band was set up on the convention center side of the stage, toward the back. Each member of the band was dressed entirely in black, from their sequined sombreros to their cowboy boots.  They were playing “The Ballad of Tierra Andalucia,” an old tune celebrating the radical exploits of a much younger Agustín Deleon.  

Carvahal allowed the ringing guitar chords and plaintive trumpets to carry him back to his glory days, when as a young man he was the reporter with the closest access to the reclusive “Mountain Lion,” Agustín Deleon. What an incredible life the man had led! Deleon had come a million miles from his days as a fugitive hiding in the northern mountains, when he had been called “the most dangerous man in New Mexico.”

***

The clandestine Falcons
walked behind the first ranks of the Army of the Poor, tramping their way down Central Avenue.  This would enable them to lob their bricks, without being seen instigating the violence. A low concrete median divided the avenue, but the marchers swarmed in a mass across both sides of Central from sidewalk to sidewalk.

The leading edge of the mob passed a run-down motel, built around a central parking lot and swimming pool. The motel’s name on top of a thick steel pillar had been removed, and the marquee sign’s black plastic letters announced
¡Bienvenidos a la Marcha de Justicia!
in ungrammatical Spanish.  In place of the old name sign atop the steel tower, a flagpole had been erected, flying a large Nuevo Mexico flag with a hand-painted red star in the center.  Other modified flags were hanging over the windows by the reception office.  Clearly, this business owner had gotten the word and heeded its message, and as a result, his windows were spared.

Some foolish people had left their cars parked in front of stores along Central, and they were among the first targets.  Automobiles sporting American flag stickers were pointed out, kicked, spat upon, and scratched down their sides with steel tools.  The cars singled out for the worst treatment had red white and blue
“Kent Braswell for Governor”
bumper stickers, left over from the previous gubernatorial election.  Eventually a passerby in a red t-shirt, often a fit young man wearing a white ball cap, would take a length of steel rebar or a chunk of a brick and shatter the windshields of these cars.

These first unpunished acts of vandalism emboldened the ranks of marchers swarming down Central Avenue.  Once damaged, vehicles became targets for further abuse.  All of the other windows were soon shattered into glass pebbles, car bodies were scraped and dented with iron rebar and hammers and tires were cut.  In some cases, rags were stuffed into gas tanks and cars were set afire, blazing furiously.  Ominous pillars of noxious black smoke from the burning vehicles soared aloft, clearly signaling the advance of the march to the far corners of Albuquerque. Still, there were no police officers to be seen as the drumming, whistling, horn-blowing mob stomped and thundered its way down Central Avenue. A spirit of animalistic joy pervaded them, as they smashed, slashed and burned without any fear of reprisal or reprimand.

The power of mob psychology spread like an infectious intoxicant. Thousands of voices screamed in unison:
¡La Raza, Unida, Jamás Será Vencida!
—The Race, United, Will Never be Defeated!—until it echoed and reverberated from block to block.  Their “workers’ tools” rose and fell in rhythm with the chanted slogan
¡Sí Se Puede!
  Many of the marchers were carrying two pieces of rebar, or a piece of rebar and a tool, and were clanging them together.  The cumulative sound they made was like a nonstop car wreck, an iron avalanche.  Others were beating on the tops of improvised drums, made from upturned five-gallon industrial buckets. Some group had obviously passed out hundreds of whistles, which were all being blown in cadence.  The crashing of glass and the smashing of car roofs and hoods added another percussion section to the anarchical orchestration of the “March for Social Justice.”  The acoustic din created by the mob rolled away in all directions, an unambiguous warning of approaching violence.

There were no police along the route of the march, and no foolhardy shop owners standing guard in their doorways against the human flood tide. If anyone witnessed their cars being vandalized, they did so from hiding.  To confront this mob at any point would be to confront a psychotic human tsunami brandishing hammers, axes and iron bars.

A few minutes later, the leading ranks of the horde came upon the first row of stores still displaying signs written in English, and their fury found new targets.  Apparent “Army of the Poor” hotheads (many of them wearing plain white ball caps) instigated the initial acts of vandalism against the offending businesses.  Pulled along in the crowd, Ranya found herself with her two escorts in front of a store in a small strip shopping center.  She had not picked up any bricks and she had no desire to take part in this mayhem, but nevertheless she was absorbing the frenzy all around her, almost like a contagious fever.

On one roof, yard-high metal letters rimmed in neon tubing announced to the world that the shop below was the Toy Hut.  Taped inside its four plate-glass windows were poster-sized hand-painted paper signs now calling it the
Casita de Juguetes
. The temporary paper signs written in Spanish were not sufficient to placate the marchers’ rage at the offending six letters of outlawed English.

A brick sailed over the edge of the crowd, digging a chunk out of a window, leaving a milky star pattern.  A “worker” in blue jeans and a red shirt stood in front of the window with a sledgehammer, tapped the window twice, reared back and took a full-armed swing.  The window dropped, a glass Niagara cascaded onto the sidewalk as the crowd around the hammer-wielder roared approval.  The other shop windows quickly followed as the tool-swinging mob joined in the frenzy.  Emboldened “marchers for social justice” ran into the suddenly wide-open store, its alarm bells ringing unheeded, and still there was not a policeman in sight. 

Every business along Central with signs in English fell to the bricks and sledgehammers.  A car dealership prominently displaying American flags lost all of its ground-to-ceiling plate glass windows, and had every car trashed. A restaurant still called the New York Deli was plundered, a bakery was “liberated” of its bread and pastries and was then wrecked, and so it went, block by block.  Each business with smashed windows quickly became a target for looting by following groups, as the Army of the Poor marched through broken glass, heralded by alarms and sirens and rising towers of black smoke, down Central Avenue toward the Civic Plaza.

Ranya’s little team of three stayed near the leading edge of the crowd. Most of the crowd around her seemed to be made up of young Hispanic men, but she thought perhaps a quarter of them were Anglos, of university age or a little older, including some other females.  She guessed they were mainly
Voluntarios
like the four doomed students from Michigan, coming to Nuevo Mexico for an exciting summer vacation of riot, revelry, and
revolución
.

***

With the lights out in the small office
and the bright sunshine on the plaza, Alex Garabanda was confident that he was invisible behind the tinted glass.  Still, it was an unsettling feeling to stand by a window only a hundred yards from so many enemies, enemies who would cheerfully skin him alive merely for being an FBI Special Agent.  For a time he scanned the Civic Plaza with his binoculars, and left the video camera running on its tripod to film the stage area.  A special wafer microphone was taped to the window glass, with a long black wire leading to the camera to ensure decent sound recording.

He was especially interested in the guests who had been given access to the stage, in advance of the expected arrival of the official parties.  Some were seated on folding metal chairs and some were standing by a refreshments table, chatting in small groups.  Luis Carvahal sat by himself on the near side of the stage in the second row of chairs, writing in a notepad.  

Garabanda was almost certain that he was seeing some old faces he remembered from his days in Foreign Counterintelligence.  Was that short man with the droopy mustache a Cuban DGI operative he had known in New York, who had been working under UN diplomatic cover?  He was talking by the beverage table with a well-groomed gentleman in a gray suit.  Garabanda thought that he was a so-called Venezuelan oil minister named Rogelio Lechuga, who was considered to be one of Hugo Chavez’ leading itinerant bagmen.  Chavez’ oily fingerprints were all over the destabilization of New Mexico.  He had been exporting arms, explosives and cash from petroleum-rich Venezuela to subversive groups all over Latin America for years, but the United States was by far his most hated enemy.

And who were the other paramilitary officers with Carlos Guzman, inspecting the Milicianos around the stage? Were they Americans, or were they other foreign “advisors?”  The FBI supervisor continued to film and photograph interesting persons on and around the stage—he could load their images into the Facial Recognition System databases later.

But would anyone in Washington actually care if there were hostile spies and agents operating openly on American soil, with the goal of subverting the government of a border state? Was anyone back East concerned that there was a foreign hand guiding the supposedly homegrown
revolución
in Nuevo Mexico? Did the State Department have any position on the matter? Might the President even support the foreign interference, perhaps because she privately shared their goal of advancing the cause of international socialism?

Would FBI Headquarters even give a damn about what happened in New Mexico, given the enormity of the crises it was dealing with in Detroit and Los Angeles and elsewhere? Would anyone ever analyze this videotape and his digital photographs, other than himself?  To whom in Washington could he even send this tape, who would not simply toss it in the circular file?  Why was he even bothering with this exercise in futility?

I suppose, he mused, it’s because I still believe in the United States— all fifty of them, together.  And maybe, because I still believe in my sworn oath to defend the Constitution—even if I’m the only one left who does. Even if I’m only shoveling coal into the furnace of the Titanic, I’ll continue to do my duty.