The communities that will never forget the ‘Amalia compound’ raid
It’s been more than five years since the Taos County Sheriff’s Office arrested five adults and took 11 children into custody at a tumbledown compound at the very northern edge of Taos County, placing New Mexico in the national limelight for weeks.
It was a chaotic time, one which many Taos County residents might now only vaguely remember. But for the quiet, sparsely populated communities that surrounded the compound, which federal prosecutors are arguing at trial this fall was a terrorist training ground — the “Amalia compound” saga remains for them a stark reminder that no place, however remote, is immune to an extraordinary event.
Sending newsroom staff back up into Costilla and Amalia last week to find out how local residents look back on the raid was an interesting exercise in grasping how a community remembers collectively, and to us, an important part of reporting on the trial.
While many different people came from far and wide to get a piece of this story, which now appears to be in its legal final phase as it moves through what is expected to be a protracted trial in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque, the story of the compound raid belongs to the communities that witnessed it, which is why we wanted to return there to get their perspectives.
We hope you enjoy the reporting and hearing from our neighbors to the north about how this important event changed their lives.
Know where candidates stand this election season
Starting this week, readers will begin to see our political coverage ramp up now that early voting has begun and Election
Day, Nov. 7, is a short four weeks away.
With 55 candidates running in 15 contested races, there is an unusual number of names and issues to keep track of this year, which is why the Taos News will be publishing a comprehensive election guide in our Oct. 26 edition. We hope it provides voters with a single, digestible resource to prepare to vote in this year’s election, with profiles on each candidate and overviews of each race. This week’s A1 election story by Geoffrey Plant is a short preview of what’s to come in the section.
To support the guide, Taos News Editor John Miller will also be hosting a political forum over Zoom next Friday (Oct. 20) starting at 5:30 p.m. for our three Town of Taos Council candidates: Darien Fernandez, Genevieve Oswald and Billy Romero. For roughly an hour, we’ll be discussing the critical issues at stake for the Town of Taos — from the future of Taos Regional
Airport and Taos Air, to creating competitive pay and compensation plans for town employees, to ongoing and future capital improvement projects. You can watch the forum live on our Facebook page and on taosnews.com. If time allows, we’ll also take questions from viewers. If you have questions to suggest in advance, please email them to editor@taosnews.com with the subject line, “Forum question.”
Elections are the mechanisms by which we all exercise our democratic rights, and we consider keeping the community we serve well-informed about local politics central to the newspaper’s role in our democracy. We hope you’ll all tune in next Friday evening to hear from our town council candidates and pick up the Oct. 26 edition of the Taos News for even more information in our upcoming election guide. We also encourage you to reach out to candidates with your own questions.