Piñon Canyon is simply a land grab and horrible abuse of power. It’s damage continues to be inflicted upon the people of southern Colorado since the Army started taking their land in the early 1980s.
What has become known as “Piñon Canyon” in Colorado is located near the communities of La Junta and Trinidad. It includes high mesa grasslands and deep red rock canyons. All were carved and created over millions of years by the slow flowing Purgatoire River.
This is a recent example of how leaders of an Army of the United States portends to be the defender of a free people. It has become the latest ribbon-ladened emblem of how our federal government portends to serve the people who must obey its laws but who itself is far above them. It has demonstrated this clearly with its treatment of prisoners and its treatment of civilians in southern Colorado.
If you have followed this ongoing situation you will see that average law abiding Americans have been abused, neglected, and intimidated by land speculators, defense contractors, generals who relish in the glory of their positions and similar thinking politicians now seek what they euphemistically call “a deal” something that is much smaller but still in the hundreds of thousands of acres.
A minority of political, military, and business elites with the use of our money and its power have systematically deceived and abused the people, cultures, customs and habitats of southeastern Colorado. More importantly they have on multiple occasion disobeyed the law and the will of the people.
What has happened in Piñon Canyon demonstrates to this observer that apparently not even our Congress has the power to reign in these moneyed interests.
Several years ago official looking U.S. Army maps were apparently leaked.
These maps (available at ) reveal the military’s interest that at one point was considering up to 6.9 million acres of private and public lands. This is an enormous swath of land that includes the entire southeastern corner of Colorado. In hindsight, one can only wonder did they actually think they were going to get away with taking that?
Or were they like real estate agents who double their expectation before setting on something significantly less but unwilling or unable to be honest about its dealings, even when they include its own citizenry?
One thing is for sure, the Army, the Bush Administration, and now officials of a new administration are left practicing the contemporary version of “duck and cover” as they respond to the questions of skeptical members of congress including Betsy Markey and John Salazar, both are democrats of Colorado.
The Army’s human face on Piñon Canyon has long been fuzzy to the general public view. Whoever first thought of the idea of taking huge swaths of public and ranch lands in Colorado and giving it to the Army is likely far from the picture. The military’s methods have become a kind of Chimera. It has become an imaginary monster to those who live there. It has unlimited funds, the upper hand of federal laws and is made up of grotesquely disparate parts.
When one head is killed or dies another rises.
It was true under the Bush Administration and sadly it now appears to be true under the Obama administration as well. That is until our leaders manifest the will to stop this immediately and forever.
The justification for a huge taking of the people’s land in Piñon Canyon expansion took on new vigor under the guise of a “War on Terror”. This is a term that the new administration has thankfully retired. But the “terror on terror”
the Army has waged in Colorado is one of obfuscation that protects its contractors and politicians with uniformed blank stares looking over laptops that arrive from the Colorado Springs “Green Zone” promising economic growth for all who agree.
The Piñon Canyon chimera had its origin in the lies of the 1980s when the Army first came to rural Colorado and told the people there that the land they sought was a necessity for a nation, that it would be good for the community and that this one time deal would never be used for “live fire.”
Some people moved off their land in patriotic ways as personal sacrifice for the defense of a nation. Twenty years hence their patriotism is greatly subdued and as the lies they were told have settled into truth that is as pointed as cactus, as hard as the rock that lays at the bottom of this land in the memories of what they have already lost.
The Army continues to skirt the will of the people that instituted a funding ban on Piñon Canyon expansion. It skirts that law because it knows it came from a grassroots movement not by those who it feels compelled to answer to.
The Army’s lies in Piñon Canyon ring across the canyons, the grasslands, and through the air that blows through the sage. It does so in canyons that were once homes to the ancients, to Native Americans, to Hispanics of New Spain and Old Mexico and now to families of this region who unlike those who receive bailouts and bonuses, these people get up each morning trying to turn land into a way of sustaining life.
The Army on the other hand wants to turn this land into a vehicle for destroying life. Like the earth in Piñion Canyon, that truth appears to me as one that is hard as a rock. When the Army says it is not compelled to obey the funding ban, you can imagine that this latest clarion call rings especially hard for ranchers and small town Americans who by their nature are patriotic people.
These are the people Presidents call upon when they want to invade foreign lands in the name of freedom and democracy. These are the people who historically have taught their children to salute a flag and enlist in the military. They will be less inclined to do so under the leadership of a military and civilian government they have been so abused by.
The chimera of Pinion Canyon Expansion is a virtual monster whose parts include an Army that uses our tax dollars infinitely against our will. This chimera is long on waves of publicity that promise schools, hospitals, and airports to poorer counties in Colorado. Its messengers arrive in SUVs like a drug cartel that reaches into the poor states of rural Mexico seeking to “make a deal” and to do favors.
They say they will help build hospitals and schools. In the process they always takes the soul of the people these favors are allegedly for. With blank stares under stylized sunglasses these representatives of our government deliver an unsaid message. You will never win, we are too big, too powerful.
So far that day has not yet arrived. The people who know this land or are aware of this fight have come to realize a very real multi-headed enemy. One that has the power to take the people’s money and use it for their own political and economic gain.
If it is true that we have waged war in other countries and swept up innocent people as “enemy combatants” and detained them indefinitely, it is also the case that the people of southern Colorado have been swept up into a larger tide of abuse by the U.S. Army, Department of Defense and military contractors who profit most in times of war.
The people of southern Colorado are now themselves detained indefinitely on land they have worked, inherited, or purchased over many generations and with tired eyes and worn hands. Even when the slow and encumbered wheels of our republic’s democracy said “no” the Army and its benefactors continue on with blank stares and worked to make “deals” all historical indications suggest will change as soon as that deal is made.
While many Americans want always to “support the troops.” This phrase and its genesis has been masterfully manipulated by certain Presidents, politicians and defense contractors.
They Army’s conduct in Southern Colorado is deplorable. It cannot help but cause the people of this land to realize they are experiencing a more tragic example of money and power manipulated name of protecting freedom and democracy for all.
In the name of freedom and democracy and the call for an accountable government, we have no choice but to support those who have steadfastly stood up to and opposed this gross abuse of power. With a new president we must force him and the federal, military, and defense contractors whose existence depends upon us that what our Army and Federal Government is doing in Southern Colorado must stop now and forever.
David James Baker is a documentary filmmaker and faculty member at Western New Mexico University.
