Thirty-Six Hours at Santa Fe

To the inmates, the pen was like a small-town virgin. Once they took it, it belonged to them, the ordinary prisoners as well as the real cons. No matter then who became its master, they knew that they could always have it back.

Built a Quarter Century ago with the usual grudging appropriation and local, graft, the New Mexico State Penitentiary stands 11 miles outside fashionable Santa Fe on a site of stark, incongruous beauty. Southward, the soft Ortiz Mountains round gently toward Albuquerque at, far beyond, the Mexican border. On the west, across the Rio Grande valley of scrub and piñon, is the shadowed, ever-changing escarpment of the Jemez range. And to the north looms the last great spur of the Rockies, the Sangre de Cristo chain--named the Blood of Christ more than 300 years ago by frightened, pious conquistadors who first recorded the haunting sunsets that draw over its peaks, a sudden drain of color, crimson to gray, sky to ground, if the mountains were suffering some massive hidden wound.

Beneath these vistas, the prison itself is in a harsher setting. Except for a nearby trailer court, some scattered ranches and several tiny remnant mining towns a few miles east and south, the institution remains isolated and distinct on a treeless, wind-swept plateau, its perimeter lights flickering unexpectedly in the mountain darkness off the Santa Fe--Albuquerque highway. Yet on the chill night of February I, 1980, there was, strangely, little wind. The next day, the smoke from smoldering cellblocks and corpses (continued on page 114) Santa Fe (continued from page 111) would curl almost motionless over the desert.

For weeks there had been warnings of a riot. The ever-vigilant prison psychologist had reported in early January that inmates were hiding weapons in dormitory E-2 and were preparing to take hostages. Although a routine shakedown search found nothing, informers told the deputy warden and the superintendent of security a few days afterward that an uprising was still planned, probably following an evening count of prisoners. By late January, there were increasing requests from convicts for transfer out of dormitory E-2. The inmates there and elsewhere had become tense and withdrawn. Junior employees were afraid to go to work. The textbook omens of prison violence were everywhere.

On Thursday, January 31, a nervous penitentiary intelligence officer, a former military policeman on the job barely two weeks, convened a meeting of senior corrections officials to appraise the gathering evidence. In perfunctory, manly tones, they talked of a possible hostage seizure in E-2 the following spring, of potential escape attempts, of smuggled weapons, of the usual racial unrest between white supremacists and the pen's dominant chicano gang, La Familia. The mood of the inmates, the intelligence officer advised, was "quite ugly."

What mattered in that meeting, however, were not the intelligence memos nor the many portents nor the new intelligence officer's inexperience but, rather, the men around the table. At their head sat the deputy secretary of corrections, the highest career official in the state system and, for the past 27 years, at least--whether as associate warden, warden or simply headquarters bureaucrat--the ruling jefe of New Mexico's pen. More than any other single figure, save perhaps his own patron, the present governor of the state, this man had shaped the history that had come down to that moment. It was largely his creation, his domain, that was about to erupt in the most savage riot in American penal history. Most of the others in the room were likewise his creatures, men of the system, men too accustomed to ugly omens.

When the meeting was over, there were no orders for special precautions or procedures, or even for checking and enforcing routine security practices. A week before, the warden had asked supervisors to review the riot-control plan; only two staff members could even find copies. As the officers of the morning shift arrived at the pen for work late the next night, they knew nothing of the Thursday intelligence meeting, nothing of the warnings about dormitory E-2 or a nighttime take-over.

In the first minutes of Saturday, February second, the prison guard changed with a routine briefing. The evening census count had been taken and the situation reported normal. The morning watch began at midnight with 15 corrections officers and one civilian medical technician left inside the penitentiary to oversee 1157 inmates, the guards outnumbered almost 80 to 1 in an institution built to keep safely and humanely no more than 850. The prisoners, some with mattresses on a cold floor, were jammed through ten two-story dormitories, cell houses and maximum-security cellblocks that form the north and south wings of the institution--all connected by a single central corridor running wing to wing through a middle administrative area housing the prison offices, mess halls, kitchen, gymnasium and control center. With each intersecting unit and each wing sealed off by riot-control grilles, the single-corridor "telephone pole" design is intended to conserve staff and security and to confine disturbances to their point of origin. But this design does not reckon with the human realities of penitentiary life.

Outwardly, there is a familiar institutional feeling about this prison: the hard textures of concrete and tile, poorly painted steel and tattooed skin, the hollow, sometimes crashing sound of footsteps, or doors slamming, or sudden voices down a distant corridor, the mingling of food and disinfectant with the hidden, sour scent of 1000 confined men. Yet beneath that surface, there is another world. It is a world of daily uncertainty and fear and hate, for guards and inmates alike. In the next few hours, that world will rise and turn its vast accumulated, unrelieved rage on itself--smearing the state's concrete and tile with blood, shocking and puzzling those who refuse to acknowledge it--and will then disappear again behind the shoddy walls of official failure and self-protection.

At 1:09 A.M., shift supervisor Captain Gregory Roybal and his second-in-command, Lieutenant José Anaya, started a tour of the prison's south wing to close down the dayrooms--open areas adjacent to dormitories and cell houses where inmates are allowed to watch television on weekends until 1:30 A.M. Roybal and Anaya were both 52, with more than 20 years of service at the pen. Neither had formal training in corrections. On a prison staff where a turnover of 80 percent is common, they were officers of a guard corps composed of a small clique of unschooled veterans and a majority of new, inexperienced officers whose starting salary was little more than $700 a month and of whom fewer than one third had received even minimal training.

The commanders began their rounds by passing through the steel corridor grille that separates the south wing from the administrative area and the central control room of the prison. The grille was supposed to be closed during those hours, but it was not. Like their fellow officers, like the warden and his deputy, like the high-ranking corrections-department officials who had walked the same corridor over the past months, Roybal and Anaya left the grille open as they passed through.

The officers secured a few of the south units without incident. Ahead, beyond another open, seldom-closed control grille, was dormitory E-2. The crowded dormitories, some with their flanking rows of double bunks, are the least secure units of the prison, designed for comparatively well-behaved convicts. Yet that night, E-2 housed among its 62 prisoners some of the institution's most violent men, transferred there in a group the previous autumn while their maximum-security cellblock five was being renovated.

Three inmates from E-2 had recently been sent back to cellblock segregation, though none for suspicion of a take-over. On the other hand, there were men in E-2 who had been named by informers and in official intelligence reports as among those plotting a riot. There were cells available for them, but they had not been moved.

Two weeks earlier, several inmates in E-2 had smuggled yeast and raisins from the kitchen, mixed them in plastic garbage bags and made a pungent home-brew. By the time the guards climbed the stairs to the locked door of the dormitory, the men had been drinking heavily for several hours. They were angry, and they were waiting.

Inside, E-2 was shrouded in darkness. Small blue night lights over the aisle had been burned out, routinely reported and routinely unreplaced for over a month. Only the faint cast of the lights from the lavatory and on the perimeter fence outside silhouetted the still forms in the room.

Joined now by guard Michael Schmitt, Roybal and Anaya entered the dormitory (continued on page 164) Santa Fe (continued from page 114) about 1:40 A.M., following their usual route up the aisles to close the dayroom at the far end. Another guard--Ronnie Martinez, 18 and working at the pen scarcely four months--was assigned to secure the door.

But Martinez, like many other officers on many other nights, did not close the door. Small, slack men, Roybal and Anaya were in the aisle when they were quickly taken by the inmates, some of them weight lifters. At 25, Schmitt was bigger and stronger but no match for the several men who now jumped and beat him, some with ax handles. At the same time, two inmates hurled themselves at the door. There was a crash as it was hit, and quick muffled cries of the guards inside being overwhelmed, but the sounds died in the stair well. For a moment, Martinez struggled to shut the door. Then the prisoners slammed it open, carrying the young guard with them.

This bloodiest, most anarchic of our prison riots then began, not with a wild rush or screams but with an almost controlled pause and quiet. The rioters methodically stripped, tied and blindfolded the four officers, while one inmate dressed in Roybal's uniform to screen the others as they descended toward the central corridor. But once they were down the stairs, through the unlocked gate at the bottom and through the open riot-control grille, the hard, half-drunken men of E-2 waited no longer. They spilled into the central corridor past other open grilles, rushing up the stairs of an adjoining dormitory, F-2, to engulf four more guards, viciously stabbing and beating one who put up a fight. In the attack in the stair well, 49-year-old Herman Gallegos, who had worked as a guard at the pen for a quarter century, slipped into the darkened dormitory and was sheltered there by sympathetic prisoners. Down the hall, in unit E-1 just below the dorm where the riot had begun, protective-custody inmates began to barricade their door against the freed prisoners. Moments old, the riot had already begun to expose the lethal divisions in inmate society.

With keys from the guards, the rioters hurried to unlock six other dormitories, and in minutes, more than 500 prisoners were loose in the south wing. The crowd milled for a minute or two in the forbidden territory of the central hall and then began to move slowly north down the corridor, kicking ahead of them one of the officers seized at F-2--who was then stripped, bound, blindfolded and leashed around the neck with his own belt.

By that time, guards at the door to the mess hall had seen convicts pummeling a naked man up the corridor, and an officer in the control center had learned from an inmate using Roybal's captured two-way radio that at least one hostage had been taken. But the guards were powerless as the rioters passed through the open south-wing-corridor grille into the administrative area.

There was time only to close the rest of the guards behind the north-wing grille before the rioters appeared at the windows of the control center, beating their naked hostage with pipes and rods and taunting the terrified officers behind the "unbreakable" glass panels installed only two weeks before. (The deputy secretary himself had reassuringly tested a security glass with a sledge hammer before installation, but no one seemed to have noticed that it was not the same kind of glass.)

The rioters began to beat at the windows with pipes and a fire extinguisher ripped from the corridor. Inside the control center, officers watched the canister bounce once, twice off the glass. The third time, one of the panels began to crack. As the control-center officers fled out the front entrance of the prison, inmates were already through the glass and standing over the control console with its keys and electronic locks for the entire prison. The seizure of the penitentiary had taken about 22 minutes.

Now the inmates would head for the hospital pharmacy, for the drugs left there in such ample supply by the obliging bulk-purchasing policy of the state--and for the plumbing shop in the basement, where they would find an acetylene torch and other tools. They would need the torch, for there were still guards holed up behind a few locked grilles in the north wing. And, of course, there was cellblock four, the protective unit at the far end of the prison housing the child molesters and killers, the mentally ill, the weaker men who were vulnerable to homosexual assault and other abuse and those who were thought to be the pen's notorious snitches. The rioters would need the torch in cellblock four to cut from cell to cell, and for the slaughter. that was to follow.

•

A territorial relic from the 1880s, the forerunner of the present pen stood at the end of Pen Road in Santa Fe, not far from the state capitol. Neighborhood children bicycled around its dark-red homemade brick walls. But a few feet away from the cyclists, on the other side of the walls, was what an ex-inmate called an "endless nightmare" of overcrowding, primitive sanitation and brutality. When four successive riots burst open in a single year in 1952-1953, the new institution was quickly erected on the barren Cerrillos plain well out of town, and the awkward antique pen was expunged to the last brick--though not before wide-eyed Santa Fe school children were toured through both buildings to see the obvious wisdom and progress at hand.

Yet the change of prisons in 1956 simply transported to the new pen the deeper problems of the old. In two years, the penitentiary census had clinked past capacity to 905, and by 1963 averaged nearly 1300. Still worse, along with the swelling inmate population came the squalid sociology of New Mexico's corrections bureaucracy. The state in the Fifties left the custody and reform of its felons largely to a poor, meagerly educated underclass of native Hispanics. The arrangement only mirrored local society beyond the prison walls, in which most of New Mexico's Hispanic majority--a people of proud cultural parochialism and ancestry in this country before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock--lived in economic and social subordination to their own small aristocracy and to the growing Anglo minority whose money and men controlled the state.

Over the next 25 years, New Mexico would realize genuine progress in lifting such discrimination. If the barrio's men of the Fifties were guards, clerks and laborers, their sons and daughters were moving in growing numbers to Santa Fe and Albuquerque subdivisions as an emergent middle class. But for the prison, the damage was done, the chemistry of poverty and misrule as relentless as the brewing of the raisin hooch in dormitory E-2.

In the politics of New Mexico's poverty and racism, the penitentiary promptly became a center of bureaucratic nepotism and corruption, fostering the inevitable clique of administrators and guards tied by family, complicity and a shared incompetence in jobs none could afford to lose. Moreover, as a major employer among the extended families of the region's Hispanic society, the pen provided votes, patronage and campaign contributions in the traditional Democratic counties around Santa Fe.

For almost every purpose, the system was pervasive and self-reinforcing. By all accounts, New Mexico's doomed prison was hardly an institution where educated new guards were welcomed or promoted; nor was it a place where embarrassing intelligence was reported or given credence, or where old friends, relatives and other fellow members of the guard clique were reprimanded for such minor matters as unclosed corridor grilles.

In much the same way, the cumulative corruption blocked any chance of help from the outside. Nervous officials reportedly rejected valuable Federal funds in the Sixties for fear of the accompanying fiscal audits. While this prison, like most others, suffered harshly enough from stingy, shortsighted legislative appropriations over the past two decades, the modern management and budgetary sophistication that might have made a difference were resisted as a threat to both personnel and business as usual.

Finally, the circle closed with politicians who found no reason to clean out a state sinecure that was a virtual commissary of votes and graft. There would be even less incentive for reform when, eventually, the long-tenured corrections officialdom came to know so much about those politicians, about who was profiting on the outside from shady contracts and dubious vouchers, about prisoners the politicians wanted favored and why.

On the lowest level--the daily encounter between prison captors and captives--this system took its toll in several ways. Added to the common oppressions of prison life, the entrenched nepotism in Santa Fe made change or relief for many inmates all the more hopeless. Ignorant, unschooled guards meant caprice, brutality and exploitation by cunning inmates. Through it all coursed the ethnic suspicion and hatred between the predominantly Hispanic guard corps and the one third to one half of prisoners who were Anglo or black, a raw exposure of the bigotry buried just beneath the surface of the chamber-of-commerce image of New Mexico's bicultural society.

"From the beginning, it was run by a gang of officers and the strongest thugs in the population," remembers one veteran employee of the prison. "There were no real rules and no real security. Anything could have happened. It finally did."

The haunted history of the modern state pen paralleled the rise and close relationship of the two principal public officials in the events of 1980. A tall, thick man of square face, no better educated than his peers but armed with what backers and critics alike call a "magnetic personality," Felix Rodriguez was singled out early from the guard ranks of the new prison. By 1958, he was associate warden, and he rose steadil--including five years as warden--to become deputy secretary of corrections. For 21 years, as several senior corrections officials swiftly came and went, Rodriguez was the one administrator continuously in a position of authority and responsibility over the New Mexico penitentiary. It was he who chaired that meeting of the prison officials the day before the riot.

Perhaps the most important admirer of Rodriguez' administrative talents through the years was Bruce King, whose own political fortunes were similarly impressive. Portly, educated at a rural New Mexico high school before World War Two, launched from the fortune of one of the state's largest feed-lot operations, the ambitious King entered Santa Fe. County and then legislative politics in 1955, about the same time Rodriguez joined the prison bureaucracy. King's hallmark as a politician would be a penchant for expensive cowboy boots and the good-ol'-boy twang and manner of the great panhandle plains that lap over into the state from the east, depositing grassland, money, political reaction and ethnic bigotry. By 1963, he had become the state's 'powerful speaker of the house, with heavy Democratic vote margins around Santa Fe; and in 1970, he ran successfully for governor. It was King who would install his friend Rodriguez penitentiary warden for an entire gubernatorial term--and who, re-elected governor in 1978, would continue to preside uncritically over the state's corrections department and penitentiary.

"Inadequate people were surrounded by inadequate people," says a former prison psychologist of the pen in the years before the riot. "The officials became indistinguishable from the inmates, and the riot, in a way, was simply a continuation of administration."

•

It was 2:15 A.M. Saturday, February second. The carnage was about to begin.

As the prison control center fell to the rioters, a guard in the north wing placed a last call to an outside tower, telling the chief of security there that if help did not arrive at once, rioters would control the entire prison. "We're doing all we can," answered the chief.

Two guards then hid in the crawl space near the gas chamber beneath the north wing, where they would lie safely during the next 36 hours of horror above them. While the prisoners sacked the pharmacy below, the medical technician and seven inmate patients would also hide away on the second floor of the hospital, somehow unnoticed, for the duration of the riot. But the three retreating guards in the north wing, and another who had locked himself in a far south-wing dorm, were soon taken with the keys from the control room and the acetylene cutting torch from the plumbing shop. There were then 12 hostages inside the pen.

As the guards surrendered, the rioters rushed exultantly, yelling and whooping, to release the residents of maximum-security cellblock three--among them the elite toughs and most-feared men in the penitentiary, some of whom would play powerful and prominent roles in the later negotiations with officials. Even while cellblock three was being opened, those negotiations were starting. At 2:30 A.M., an inmate elsewhere in the pen radioed the warden and his deputies then anxiously congregated in the main tower at the entrance. There would be no escape attempt, he told them, but any assault to retake the prison would mean the death of the hostages. The rioters demanded to meet with Governor King and the media to air their grievances. The inmate then put Captain Roybal on the radio to make his point. After a brief discussion among themselves, the officials agreed to negotiate. The decision was academic. A handful of state police arrived soon to plug the perimeter of the prison, but the forces necessary to recapture the building and its 1000 suddenly uncontrolled, unpredictable men would not be there, or even remotely ready, for several hours. The officials began sporadic radio contact with the inmates, and waited.

What was about to happen then inside the prison would become the subject of more than 100 indictments, nagging political embarrassment, much myth, theory and revulsion--and a singular new chapter in the history of atrocity. In the next few hours, rioting prisoners would bludgeon, butcher, kill and then rekill again and again each of 33 fellow inmates. There would be a theory that the murders happened in a drug-crazed frenzy, and at that moment, rioters were pawing through the pharmacy and sniffing the large stores of paint thinner and glue in the basement repair shops. But then the pillaged drugs were mostly soporifics. Nor was there clear evidence that the killers were high on sniff. There would be a theory, too, official and simple and widely accepted, that the victims had been mostly snitches, the treasonous, despised tools of petty, incompetent prison administration. Yet fewer than a third of those who died may have been known informers. Perhaps the only certainty in those murders was what happened to the people who discovered them after ward, the National Guardsmen who vomited, the experienced medical examiners who would be offered therapy, the nightmares.

It began at three A.M. with a screaming Spanish voice reverberating from the lower tier of cellblock three: ";No era yo ... no lo hice!" ("It wasn't me ... I didn't do it!"). He was beaten to death, that first casualty of the pen's self mutilation, a young thief from a superstitious northern New Mexico village where they believed he changed himself (continued on page 220) Santa Fe(continued from page 166) into a dog to escape the sheriff so many times. When his body was later dragged outside by rioters and driven away in an ambulance, the police dogs in patrol cars in front of the prison would begin to howl.

Others from the cellblock died minutes later, one gouged and hacked with a small weapon, perhaps a screwdriver, a second with his face obliterated by a tear-gas launcher fired point-blank. Two more escaped, or were dragged, from the cell-block, only to be executed somewhere else. And across the main corridor in cellblock six, an Indian and a Hispanic would be blowtorched.

Then, just as suddenly as the screams and murders began, there was a pause in the slaughter. The tide of rioters sweeping through the north wing, through cellblock three to release and to kill, had broken against a jammed grille at the entrance to cellblock four, the protection unit. At the other end of the pen, guards were being beaten, stabbed and sodomized by ax handle and otherwise. The strong were raping the young and weak prisoners in the south-wing dormitories, especially in A and B, where residents were alternately molested and beaten. They had begun to demolish the administrative rooms and to burn the hated files in the warden's office and the psychological unit. There were cries and smoke and fear in the corridors. But for the last hours of that night, there would be a kind of ominous order about the entrance to cellblock four, where they were impatiently but methodically burning through the grille gate.

Minutes after the two-A.M. take-over, warden Jerry Griffin. a former aide to Rodriguez and hand-picked by him for the warden's job, tried to call the deputy secretary at home. He telephoned Rodriguez even before he called the state police for help. But there was no answer. Griffin called repeatedly, to no avail.

Joanne Brown, another Rodriguez protégée, who was then his powerful assistant, arrived at the pen at 3:30 A.M., having tried also to contact her chief without success. The callers finally reached Rodriguez at home at 4:15 A.M., and at five A.M. he arrived at the pen, where he immediately took charge, as he told Griffin, on the governor's authority.

As Rodriguez assumed command, elements of the state police and the Santa Fe city SWAT team were drawn up, ringing the prison. There at the front gate in the final hours before dawn, there were even a few encouraging developments. At 5:25 A.M., Officer Gallegos--who had been hidden by sympathetic inmates in a south-wing dormitory since the takeover--sneaked down the main corridor in the smoke and confusion and was noticed only as he left the front entrance; amid confusing orders from officials outside, he barely escaped through the gate ahead of pursuing prisoners. In the next three hours, the rioters willingly released two badly beaten officers from the south wing, leaving nine hostages inside. Meanwhile, the inmates who had barricaded themselves in dormitory E-1 in the first moments of the riot escaped into the yard through a window.

Fifty yards away, around the north wing of the pen, however, time had run out in cellblock four. It was the home of snitches, or at least generally thought to be. And it would not matter much that on that night, many of the block's 96 men were there for other reasons--because they were weak or victimized or unjustly branded, or were simply mentally ill felons in a state with almost no facilities or treatment for them save those cells. When a prison is he'd together by fear of the faceless informer, when the only way to buy needed protection. from guards or prisoners may be to inform, and when a heedless administration may betray by stupidity or design its own informants--when that is the system, the truth about individual men will not matter.

Now the rioters were about to break into cellblock four, and there was one last betrayal before they did. For hours, the inmates in four had watched and listened to the unquelled riot, and in moments of quiet had heard the sickening hiss of the blowtorch eating away the grille. Desperately. they barricaded themselves in their cells, some even trying to tie their grilles shut with towels or blankets.

Then, suddenly, there were lights and forms outside, state police. arrayed on the perimeter--only yards away through a back door to the cellblock letting onto the yard. "And you know," remembers one inmate of the cellblock, "we started calling for the guards. There weren't any guards there. We were flashing SOSs with our lights, trying to get those cops to come in. I mean, all the state troopers that were parked all tip and down the fence, man--why didn't they come in? The back door was right there."

The riot plan of the prison did require that the main tower keep at all times an emergency set of keys to every door of the prison. That night, as for several months, there was a tower key to the outside door of cellblock four--but none to the grille just beyond that closes off the cell area. In any event, the state police watching the rampage inside, seeing the glow of the torch, did not even ask for the keys.

The sun was coming up behind the Sangre de Cristo. As the last of the grille bars melted away, the predators began to yell the names of their intended victims. Once inside the block, in the minutes before they cut through to open the individual cells, rioters ran from cell to cell, pointing to the condemned, sometimes throwing flammable liquids through the bars and then matches to ignite the victims. Some men in the cellblock remember an organized "execution squad" of seven or eight assassins, some a wild mob of merciless killers. Outside, a prison official heard a whistling sound, looked up toward the cellblock with binoculars and watched four or five inmates hold a man down while another burned his head and face with a blowtorch. Execution was also by ax and rope, by electric drill and sander, by stabbing and by a steel rod driven through the head. A convicted child molester, a loathed untouchable at the bottom of the prison caste system, was hacked and incinerated. They cut and killed and then decapitated a mentally ill inmate, whose worst offense in block four had been to be different, to lie naked day after day on the cement floor of his cell. Someone would subsequently pick up the severed head of the man, carry it about on the end of a rod as a fetish of battle or revolt. And then somehow, in this charnel-house madness, the head would be returned to the original owner, placed between the legs of the corpse when it was later taken out.

Smeared paths of blood led through the doors of the cells from their back corners, where the victims had been cringing. The killing ground included not just the cells but the catwalk outside, and some mangled bodies from the upper tier of cells were hurled with great force over the catwalk fence, thudding on the basement floor two stories below. A few minutes after sunrise, the carnage ended in cellblock four. The survivors streamed into the rest of the prison like dazed refugees from a massacre, which was exactly what they were. Men had tortured and murdered 12 other men in that place. And it was not over.

In another wave of killing around dawn, six inmates of dormitory F-1 in the south wing of the pen were variously beaten, chopped to death and some later blowtorched. Six more died much the same ways in dorms A and B. There would be 50 screwdriver wounds in the eyeless corpse of one inmate whose enemies had called him the King of the Snitches.

Earlier in the night, one inmate had been sought out specially in a south-wing cell house and bludgeoned in his bunk with a shovel, his body later dragged to the gymnasium and cremated in a pile of corpses. Another man was taken alone from far-south dormitory D; they left his crushed skull and shredded torso in the corridor adjacent to the prison classrooms. Everywhere, bodies were mutilated, the killing and rage continuing long after the men were dead, the fingers of one hand broken as an afterthought on a burned, dismembered body.

Although the district attorney would later try to draw the murky but necessary distinctions from terrified witnesses, there had been murder there by both frenzy and tribal rite, by race and chance and by scores to settle. Of the 33 dead, 24 were Hispanic, seven were white, one black and one Indian. It would be said that there had been mutilations because there'd been no organizations, and also that organizations fed the hate that led to mutilation. It would be said that La Familia had swiftly taken care of a few enemies in selected places and ways and had left the bulk of the extermination to the bad-dude Anglos. It would be said that the Aryan Brotherhood had killed to assert its status and control in that predominantly brown-skinned prison. It would also be said--by officials with an eye on the future--that La Familia and the Aryan Brotherhood did not exist, or had not played a role, or should never be given too much credit, whatever happened.

•

The carnage at the New Mexico pen, and the sequel of official blunders and evasions through 1980, were a natural outgrowth of the state's shabby prison politics over the preceding years. Throughout the Seventies, incompetence or corruption, or perhaps both, ruled the local corrections system with brazen impunity, the misgovernment of the penitentiary a mocking fulfillment of the New Mexico state motto, "Crescit eundo," "It grows as it goes."

1971: The decade began with an inmate work and hunger strike protesting bad food, the almost total absence of programs and the abusive and capricious administration. Broken up by ax-handle-wielding guards, the strike achieved little improvement in conditions. There was no further inquiry, though Eugene Long, the pen security chief (and husband of Rodriguez' cousin), was subsequently indicted for three counts of battery and aggravated battery in putting down part of the disturbance and was promptly acquitted. Later, he was promoted to a corrections-department headquarters position, served also as director of the women's prison and eventually returned to the prison's top security job after the 1980 riot, where he soon faced new inmate charges of abuse, was investigated and was again cleared.

1972: An Albuquerque Presbyterian minister and leader of prison-reform efforts was pursued and shot at on the highway south of Santa Fe after testifying before a legislative committee.

The same minister had been approached by a newly released ex-convict and a young Hispanic journalist, saying they wished to expose on television several penitentiary scandals. But the night before the scheduled program, the ex-con and the journalist were killed by police in a mysterious incident. Meanwhile, a former corrections secretary active in prison reform was threatened in anonymous night calls. There was no further inquiry.

1973: An internal corrections-department report charged that several outsiders had improperly. influenced paroles from the pen. Named in the report were Governor King's chief administrative aide, Toney Anaya; the governor's wife, Alice; his lieutenant governor, Robert Mondragon; and Democratic U. S. Senator Joseph Montoya. All denied any impropriety.

According to later accounts of former officials and ex-inmates, paroles at the time were going for $20,000 and up.

A subsequent 1975 investigation of parole practices found "questionable conduct" and "peculiar behavior" by the board but no wrongdoing by the King administration or anyone else. The investigation was conducted, however, by the governor's Organized Crime Commission and by the then--attorney general, Anaya--the same ex--King aide accused in the 1973 corrections-department report.

1975: Attorney General Anaya reported evidence of uncontrolled traffic in drugs and other contraband, bribery of inmates, favoritism and discrimination among employees, suspected livestock theft and other offenses under Rodriguez' wardenship. After the report came out, Rodriguez was promoted to director of all the state's adult institutions. There was no further inquiry.

1976: The New Mexico pen was pronounced a "national disgrace" by the new warden, Clyde Malley, a former Federal corrections official who deplored the denial of inmate rights, the general filth, guard cliques and the resulting poor staff morale. Malley turned up hundreds of ice picks, hack saws, knives and other weapons in what was described as the first complete shake-clown in the history of the penitentiary.

Praised by the citizen corrections commission, the grand jury and ex-inmates for his effort to make basic changes in prison conditions, the warden left Santa Fe in less than two years and was later publicly called a liar by Rodriguez. There was no further inquiry.

1977: The powerful Democratic chairman of the Legislative Finance Committee declared "unreasonable" a proposed salary raise for pen guards, whose pay level was then 39th out of the 50 states.

A major class-action suit was filed for prisoners by the A.C.L.U., charging pen overcrowding, violence, bad food, inhumane visiting procedures, the lack of medical or psychological services and other abuses.

According to prison records, mentally ill inmates were untreated, put in body casts, confined to 6' x 9' unventilated, unsanitary "strip cells" without bedding for indefinite periods and often left to self-mutilation and suicide. Yet there would be no executive program, and no legislative appropriations, for expanded forensic facilities. There was also no further inquiry.

1978: King and Mondragon were reelected in a close race. But the black secretary of corrections, former university professor Charles Becknell (retained in an election deal for black votes), was soon forced out by the governor's men in the legislature. ("My wife's very best friend is a black woman," said one state senator during his attacks on Becknell.)

1979: In December, 11 men escaped from the penitentiary. The usual attorney general's investigation implicitly excused Rodriguez and middle-level officialdom, leaving the blame on low-ranking guards and the department secretary, Becknell, who immediately resigned. Rodriguez was then, at last, in line for the secretaryship.

1971-1980, inclusive: Some 13 grand-jury reports detailed major problems at the pen, often calling for special audits or investigations. The reports were duly filed with no further inquiry.

A series of court orders on prisoners' rights and conditions went ignored by die penitentiary administration and un-enforced by judges, with no inquiry.

Legislative appropriations for the pen, consistently lower than official budget requests, were also often less than the amounts actually spent by the prison. But there was no inquiry by legislative budget officers or the state auditor.

Meanwhile, there were repeated and specific charges by ex-inmates of widespread penitentiary corruption, including traffic in drugs and firearms, graft in food supplies, fraud in state vouchers, theft of inmate personal property, official embezzlement of thousands of dollars in Veterans Administration funds intended for inmates' education, manipulation of the parole system and deliberate overcrowding to justify increased budgets, and even organized gambling between the prison and nearby Santa Fe Downs (where race days were said to reduce pen water pressure: "You could get a bet down, but you couldn't get a shower, "remembered one staff officer). And about all of this, there were no official inquiries.

"Somebody, "one former penitentiary official said later, "had something on everyone."

•

It was nine A.M. Saturday morning and the wounded and trembling inmates fleeing the building into the yard were beginning to relate the scenes of carnage. Through the day and into the cold night, the official radios would crackle with voices confirming their stories.

"We got no dead staff members in here," one voice said.

Then a voice interrupted: "There are dead people all over this damn floor."

Later, another voice: "Attention, all units. Attention, all units; stop killing each other. No more hurting each other. "A pause, and the same man speaking to no one, and everyone: "Man, there's blood all over this damn floor ... up to your ankles."

Outside, officials heard all that as the penitentiary grounds rapidly took on the tableau of a battlefield. National Guard troops--until a few hours before just some sleepy citizens on a Saturday morning--deployed uncertainly around the building. Helicopters thrashed and throbbed overhead. Ambulances and patrol cars lurched through the throng, hundreds strong, of relatives, reporters and sight-seers on the two-lane state highway leading past the prison reservation. Medical tents were set up and began to receive a mounting stream of wounded and drug-overdosed inmates among the refugees, who by the end of the day would also number in the hundreds. Huddled under guard at one end of the yard, wrapped in blankets against the 40-degree cold that day and the freezing desert night to follow, those men stared out blankly at the ponderous siege camp formed in front of the pen.

At the tiny main gatehouse, the siege command, Rodriguez was in control. Everyone--not least Governor King, who arrived on the scene at 9:15 A.M.--understood that Rodriguez was el jefe, the chief there, as always. Other interested parties swarmed in and out of the gatehouse: the lieutenant governor, legislators, Rodriguez' men, King's men, favored journalists; utter strangers.

Fortunately, the negotiations were never particularly subtle. Despite the butchery of inmates or the beating and sodomy of hostages, the rioters assured the authorities no guards would be killed. The governor said the pen would not be stormed. Officials were intent on freeing the hostages, rioters on better conditions. In the early exchanges, the prisoners demanded first the resignation of the clique, including the deputy warden to whom they were talking, and at least four other senior officers. But as the negotiations wore on, as the inevitability of the old politics outside became all too clear, the inmate envoys began to refer respectfully to "Mr. Rodriguez" and to reduce their demands to postriot immunity and to specific improvements in the pen.

The inmate positions were a familiar litany, echoing back over 20 years--a Federal presence to prevent retaliation; reformed classification; an end to overcrowding; better food, recreation and education; increased visiting; the stopping of disciplinary abuses, the snitch system and general harassment. Official responses--the consensus of Rodriguez and his underlings--were variously vague, evasive, disingenuous. Months afterward, none of the concessions apparently given this bloody Saturday would have been genuinely realized.

At midday, the killing abated. Some bodies were dragged into the gym and set ablaze, while most others were left where the murderers had finished with them. And around both the dead and the living now seeped the effluence of the rest of the mayhem, the sheer physical ravaging of the building as well as the men. Toilets and sinks and exposed pipes had been bashed and pulverized, and the sewage now ran out of cells and lavatories into the hallways, mixing with broken glass. with torn paper of every description from official files to photos of children. with sheets and slashed mattresses and with blood. Almost every floor of the pen was covered with that gruesome manmade silt. Through the day, the water grew foul and cold. Fires smoldered in the dormitories and, of course. in the gymnasium-become-pyre. The sunlight filtered through barred windows, piercing the smoke and muck. The prison had the odor and feel, as one witness would say later, of an open-pit dump.

Yet there were also strange islands of order amid the devastation. Dormitory E-2. where it had all begun 12 hours before, was almost undisturbed. As the killing and screaming had gone on within earshot, as the corridors flooded and filled with smoke. inmates moved in and out of E-2, drinking coffee and watching television.

There were islands, too, of humanity and genuine heroism. Inmates in the north wing gave their three guard hostages food, coffee and cigarettes, and repeatedly protected them from attack by other inmates. Those officers would be among the last to be released--but also the only hostages uninjured. Meanwhile. by Saturday noon, other convicts began to give first aid to the slashed and sodomized officers in the south wing. arguing courageously with riot leaders that the suffering guards should be released. Throughout the morning's slaughter. men had protected fellow men from the pen's predators, and some now helped others escape. or carried out wounded--and even when they were outside, free, they went hack into the dank. acrid hell to help still more.

At 8:30 on Saturday morning Governor King had promised the rioters access to the media. For the next ten hours. amid lurid reports of murder and lunacy inside, there were no more hostages released while Rodriguez and other negotiators in effect overruled King's commitment. No reporters in the pen, they told the prisoners, until all hostages were freed. At three P.M., the gatehouse got a false report of the murder of four guards and the governor ordered an assault on the prison, only to rescind the order 15 minutes later, when the report proved unreliable.

Finally, a little after seven, inmates met with two local broadcasters, who promised to take a television camera inside the pen the next day to air the convict grievances. Within an hour, the rioters released Anaya, badly beaten and suffering from a previous heart condition. Between then and midnight, two more hostages, the fifth and sixth of the 12, were sent out in return for conversations with the media. But with the night, the mood turned ugly again on both sides. Corrections officials were furious at the presence of the reporters. One of the freed guards was the man the rioters had kicked naked down the main corridor to break into the control center, and that night he had been beaten again, moments before being released tied to a chair. The other officer given over was Schmitt, who had been stabbed, sexually assaulted and repeatedly tortured since he'd been taken 24 hours before in the dark aisle of E-2.

"We're going to hold off till tomorrow morning," an inmate radioed through the pen at1:07 A.M. Sunday. "Make sure those guys are fed and nothing happens to them. No hostages will be hurt." Rioters told reporters they would end the nightmare the next day if negotiations were held in front of the media. But there was that night left. As a comparative quiet settled over the encampment outside, as relatives and reporters shivered in cars along the highway, sections of the prison were still aglow with flames. The smoke was a sharp gray against the night sky. Listening above the hum of the crowd, relatives far clown the road could hear the screams from inside.

One of those who heard the screaming in the night was a newcomer to the scene. As the rioters got their news conferences and the remaining hostages were slowly talked free the next morning, reporters and inmates noticed him among the ranking officialdom moving importantly about the gatehouse. Heavy-set, a jowly, creased face beneath graying black hair, he would later posture as commander of the troops and police retaking the penitentiary. He seemed practiced, perhaps too practiced, in the role. And although no one there apparently knew it, he had brought to that cold smoking plateau yet another bizarre element of the story.

•

Having rid himself of his unwanted black corrections secretary--a man whom the clique called "the nigger upstairs"--Governor King seemed ready in early January 1980 to appoint Rodriguez at last to the highest penal position in the state, a title and career-crowning prestige to match the de facto power he had wielded for years. At the last moment, however, a group of powerful old-family Anglo legislators warned the governor that the appointment would be too much, would compel an investigation, and King hurriedly looked elsewhere.

At the ardent recommendation of both the state's chief justice and its purchasing director, the governor selected without further question a native Hispanic New Mexican and erstwhile Federal official said to have much law-enforcement experience. On January 31, the clay of the fateful intelligence meeting of pen officials, King announced the appointment of Adolph B. Saenz, "a person of such excellent quality and expert experience, "said the governor, that it was a "great pleasure "to have him. Summoned to the riot-torn pen that weekend, Saenz was later swiftly confirmed by the New Mexico senate to preside over rebuilding the state's shattered facility and reputation.

What no one in the Statehouse knew, or acknowledged, was that the vaunted new corrections secretary had spent 17 years in the U. S. Office of Public Safety (OPS), a CIA-inspired program established in the late Fifties to advise foreign police in suppressing political dissent in Latin America and elsewhere--and then abolished by bipartisan Congressional action 20 years later amid well-documented charges of U. S. complicity in torture and political terror.

The whistle was blown on OPS after the body of U. S. police advisor Daniel Mitrione was found crumpled in an old Buick convertible on a barrio side street of Montevideo, Uruguay, on August 10, 1970. Kidnaped by the Tupamaro urban guerrillas and then killed when the Uruguayan government refused to ransom him by freeing political prisoners, Mitrione was flown back to the States to a martyr's funeral by the Nixon Administration. While the murder aroused antiterrorist sentiments, it also stirred a mounting controversy over U. S.-supported repression in Latin America. Scores of Latin journalists, clergy and others told of grisly police torture of political prisoners in Uruguay, Brazil and elsewhere. Stripped, beaten, sexually abused, tortured under water and on racks, burned with electric needles under fingernails, shocked with electrical wires on the breasts of women and the testes of men, the victims described their agonies in accounts that repeatedly implicated. the OPS. U. S. advisors were said to have supplied the torture devices, instructed their Latin police clients in the latest techniques, in some cases even been present at or participated in the sessions.

Mitrione, Washington's official martyr, became a prominent figure in much of the emerging scandal. But in the accumulating evidence about police torture in Uruguay, there were also numerous reports of atrocity for some time prior to Mitrione's arrival in Montevideo in the late summer of 1969. The evidence poured in not only from political dissidents and victims but from a multiparty inquiry by the Uruguayan senate, from the Nobel Prize--winning Amnesty International, from a former Uruguayan police commissioner who resigned in revulsion, from another police official who was tortured himself as a suspected Tupamaro spy, from Catholic priests and then from the U. S. Catholic Conference, of Bishops. Torture in Uruguay, said the array of authorities, had been "common," "normal," "habitual" before 1969. And the U. S. advisor who had been Mitrione's predecessor for four years, whose office was on the first floor of the Montevideo jefatura, where torture reportedly took place and the screams of victims reverberated, who by his own account had intimate and influential relations with the Uruguayan police, was Adolph Saenz.

From Montevideo, allegations of torture by his police clients would follow Saenz through subsequent assignments in Colombia and Panama. By the time he left Panama to return to teach at the International Police Academy in mid-1974, the OPS was under rising condemnation in the U. S. Congress and press. When U. S. advisors were exposed in the scandal of the infamous "tiger cage" underground torture cells in South Vietnam, when then-Senator James Abourezk revealed the existence of a torture "school" in Texas for foreign police, when columnist Jack Anderson and other researchers could find theses, films and other documents at the International Police Academy dealing with torture, Congress moved in bipartisan action to abolish the OPS--the only agency so eliminated in the postwar period. Without opposition from a Ford Administration fearing a full investigation, the OPS was disbanded by 1975.

The cream of the disgraced agency glided quietly into similar work with some of its old clients in Washington--consulting firms and the new Drug Enforcement Administration. Meanwhile, Saenz himself drifted through four Federal jobs over the next four years, the first at barely half his old $37,800 OPS salary and none for longer than a year and a half.'

Along the way, he applied through merit channels for a junior $10,000-a-year planning position in a bureau of the New Mexico corrections department and was routinely rejected for lack of experience or training in penology. Then, just as his last job as a deputy director of the Customs Patrol was being Abolished in late 1979, Saenz's patrons in Santa Fe swung into action. Still without qualifications and with his OPS background apparently unknown or ignored, he was promptly offered by King the $40,000-a-year secretaryship of New Mexico's troubled corrections department.

•

It was now after sunrise on Sunday, February 3, 1980. On a smoking high desert in northern New Mexico, there Has the nervous rustle and the dull crack of readying weapons among helmeted troops preparing for an assault. Anguished dark-eyed women begged passing officials for news of casualties, their pleas turning to vapor against the sharp morning cold. An ominous, clingy concrete building stood surrounded by police cars, military trucks and armed men in various uniforms, while off to the side, between the besieging forces and the building, behind a high encircling fence, hundreds of men wrapped in blankets clustered together to keep warm, and to wait.

Just after dawn, another guard escaped the pen, having been hidden by inmates and then given convict clothes to sneak out with a group of surrendering prisoners. The rioters released another hostage, a battered Roybal, in return for a promised 8:15-A.m. news conference. The beaten and stabbed Martinez, the young guard at the door of E-2 so long before, was helped to escape from the rear of the pen later in the morning, and by noon still another officer was freed, leaving two hostages inside, along with the men still hiding above the hospital and the two guards in the north basement crawl space.

Most of the pen's few dozen blacks had banded together to protect one another, and now, having fled, they were huddled in the yard when a larger group of Hispanic prisoners suddenly started to chase them, shouting, "Kill the blacks. "As the blacks pressed against a corner of the fence and the mob advanced, a county sheriff ordered Guardsmen and police at the fence nearby to "lock and load" and aim their weapons and gave the attackers five minutes to retreat. Seconds before the deadline, the Hispanic prisoners faded back.

The news conference scheduled for 8:15 had not yet been held, and officials still stalled for time. Finally, a little after noon,34hours after the guards had been jumped in E-2, the rioters were granted the television and press interview they had been demanding. The self-appointed negotiators, and now spokesmen, were the hard men of cell-block three. Although they talked of grievances and harassment, the interviews wandered, and the inmates were now concerned with warding off retribution--and with their postriot housing. Oncam era, Rodriguez assured five of them they would be transferred out of state. The drama and carnage, the tumult and agony, were all suddenly ending in talk of a few inmate transfers.

At the last moment, a helicopter swooped low over the negotiations in front of the pen. The inmates angrily pulled back the two remaining hostages, whom they had taken to the entrance. But the helicopter was urgently radioed away and the last two officers went out. It was 1:26 P.M. Sunday. The riot--this riot--was over.

Minutes later, after a series of false starts and aborted orders over the past day and night--and now with Saenz yelling "Move out!" to SWAT teams that had no idea who he was--the police re-entered the prison. From front and back of the pen, the special assault groups went in with only vague information and small crude maps of a complex most had never seen. Some believed there were hostages still inside. One team entered the outside door to cell-block four but was blocked from the horror inside by that grille to which an emergency key was missing. The team had to circle around to the back of the pen to enter by the kitchen, and, once inside the main corridor, they met another team that did not expect them and almost opened fire. At the same moment, in the north end, a SWAT team encountered sheriff's officers who had unexpectedly followed the assault, and there was another near disaster of scared armed men mistaking one another for the enemy. To add to the confusion, miscellaneous officials, politicians and onlookers now filtered into the prison in morbid, officious, self-important curiosity.

Police and civilians alike tramped through ankle-deep water, blood and muck, past the charred remains in the gym, by the crushed, mutilated bodies strewn the length and breadth of the pen from dormitories to cellblocks. The hiding fugitive officers were freed from the crawl space and the medical technician and inmates with him from the second floor of the hospital. Some trembling, empty-faced men were still crouching in their cells in block four. A few dead bodies were in cells jammed shut and could not be removed for days. Wounded, drug-overdosed men were being led from the building. Medical and state-police forensic teams entered to tag and photograph the bodies for the massive criminal investigation to follow, but :It least two corpses were removed before they could be photographed, and photographers hurried through the rest. Anthropologists would later be summoned to examine the ashes and muck for fragments of bone; they knelt carefully in the gymnasium, as if searching some primeval burial ground.

Through the smoke and slop and sheer vileness of it all, some of the deliverers, like the train of official visitors that would come later, took weapons and other objects as souvenirs. Some, too--the attorney general's report would later refer to them tactfully as "noninmates"--then pillaged the unharmed prison hobby shop and prison industries of more than $7500 in items owned by inmates, as well as by the state. Retaking officers found the penitentiary's Protestant chapel desolated, like most other parts of the building, while die Catholic chapel had hardly been disturbed, except for the outline of a corpse stained into one of the aisles.

Out on the highway, the relatives keeping their vigil heard of the assault with new alarm. For 30 hours, they had been treated indifferently by officials giving vague, sometimes conflicting information. Warden Griffin, ostensibly the public spokesman, had been cut off from the decisions and intelligence and was often misinformed. Numbers, names, conditions had been given, taken away and then rearranged amid growing agitation and despair among the families. Then it was over and the cruel confusion and uncertainty continued for hours and, for some, even days.

Rodriguez, had entered the building after it was secured. Then the came out and was surrounded by reporters. "I opened this pen in 1956," he told them somberly. "It was depressing to see the state it was in--it was really bad."

Yards away, the governor was triumphantly announcing to a crowd of relatives that the prison had been retaken. When he finished, he pointedly stepped forward and kissed the forehead of a small Spanish woman. King smiled. The woman's face was tight, impassive. "But what happened," she asked, "what happened to our men?"

•

In the days afterward, the state and touch of the nation were shocked at the barbarism of the riot. The New Mexico legislature repentantly authorized $88,000,000 to repair the prison, house inmates elsewhere and design and build a new $50,000,000 prison. Governor King promised a "model" penitentiary. All save 100 of the inmates were transferred temporarily to other state and Federal prisons across the country. But from primitive, stifling stone jails in Oklahoma, (continued on page 242) Santa Fe(continued from page 238) from new Orwellian electronic isolator cellblocks in Arizona, from harsh work details and rigid discipline, they watched what then happened--and petitioned desperately not to be returned to Santa Fe.

Within weeks, Saenz transferred Griffin and brought Rodriguez back as acting warden. Although his own OPS history had by then been exposed, he also named as departmental deputy an old friend and former OPS officer in Colombia and Guatemala. Over the next four months, the habits of the jefatura governed the corrections system. Pen and department were closed to the press. Budgets were juggled, employees threatened with lie-detector tests, critical journalists smeared as "Marxists" and liars. The pen was left to it sold unaccountable masters, while King was conducted on periodic tours to assure the public of suitable progress. Reformers accompanied state-supreme-court justices on a spring tour of the pen, and when they insisted on the justices' seeing the strip cells, when the tour then found fresh blood on the floor of one of the strip cells and the attending guard furiously thrust the keys at a woman reformer, saying, "Here, you run this goddamned place." the state chief justice (and Saenz's erstwhile patron) merely laughed.

By mid-June, Saenz had obliterated what morale remained in his bureaucracy, hired one nephew to a key job and intervened to prevent the firing of another, and was at last under widespread fire in the press and even among out-of-session legislators. King then went to Lake Tahoe for a governors' conference, taking Rodriguez with him. When he returned, he fired Saenz and named an aide to be acting corrections secretary.

Saenz blamed his demise on Rodriguez and the clique, as well as on Marxist conspiracies. But in a stormy open hearing on corrections policies after Saenz's departure, King clashed savagely with testifying ex-convicts and prison reformers. "You're excused. I've heard enough," he snarled at them when they insisted on more than the five minutes he'd given them. There was no clique, no wrongdoing, he told the hearing. His defense of Rodriguez and his dismissal* of the critics was emotional and transparently personal, far beyond the political loyalty of a governor to a state employee.

Then, too, a new wave of intimidation struck public critics of the system. Families of prisoners were photographed and threatened as they demonstrated in front of the pen, and the photos were reportedly used later as the object of obscene remarks by administrators as inmates passed through meal lines. Others active in prison-reform movements were nearly run down on Santa Fe streets, were followed by strange cars, threatened by night calls, harassed as they attempted to visit prisoners and had their homes and apartments burglarized.

At the penitentiary, there was a postriot regimen of brutality, caprice and incredible security lapses in which both inmates and conscientious guards were victims. The new chief of security and the deputy warden were accused by inmates of abuse--the former promptly cleared, the latter removed from the pen, though quietly shifted to a department sinecure. In a summer settlement and consent order, the old 1977 A.C.L.U. class-action suit produced a thick, elaborate set of new regulations. Yet when the A.C.L.U. and the inmates pressed for enforcement, especially for Federal involvement, the U. S. Attorney and the FBI remained paralyzed by local politics, and the justice Department took no initiative lest it embarrass the state Democratic machine Jimmy Carter needed badly in the Presidential election at hand.

In the corrections department, bureaucrats shrank in fear of Rodriguez' obvious and sustained power. They would offer no help to undermanned, frustrated new guards who had been hired after the riot at improved salaries, only to struggle against slovenly security, the hostility, fear and cover-ups of the old entrenched officer corps and the resurgent violence and institutional control of the feral men in cellblock three. Through summer and early autumn, there were a suicide, two murders and numerous stabbings and assaults on guards and staff personnel, most of them uninvestigated and hidden from public view.

Finally, in late October, frightened prison guards and other workers appealed in a formal "safety grievance" to the state personnel director, begging that "something be done before it is too late." In more than 30 internal prison memos--reports sent to Rodriguez from June through October and continuously ignored--the corrections officers documented a gathering torrent of abuse, threats and physical attacks by inmates. The maximum-security men of cellblock three, the most unstable and lethal in the pen--many of them about to be indicted for murders during the riot--had been stripping away a shoddy chain link fence in the unit to make knives and ice picks. They had showered guards with urine and bleach, hit them with rocks and fists. They had roamed the cellblock unhand-cuffed, crawled under unanchored fences in the exercise yard, congregated by scores when there should have been no more than five outside at any one time. It had all happened as senior guard commanders, Rodriguez' men. men of and around the clique, had stood by. And it climaxed at the close of October in a week of stabbings, murders and mounting terror.

There was much the same derelict security throughout the penitentiary, said the protesting guards--no binoculars in watchtowers, patrol and pursuit vehicles with flat tires and dead batteries, riot-control grilles left open, as always, sally-port gates that had not worked for a year, new electronic locking mechanisms carelessly placed in reach of possible inmate "hot-wiring," guards with faulty radios or none at all, and often only two officers assigned to supervise the 350-400 inmates of the entire south wing--in blatant violation of the recent court order requiring at least one guard for each dormitory and cellblock.

There was speculation that the prison regime had deliberately allowed security to lapse in some heavy-handed attempt to show they could not run the pen under the restrictions of the court order, that there were too many privileges and standards and that such unruly inmates did not deserve better conditions. "It's obvious somebody wants it this way," one angry young guard said of the incredible negligence. "And when you look at it, it's criminal. "But whatever the crude bureaucratic games, there was also much evidence last summer and autumn of the old, familiar incompetence, of men who routinely made mistakes, buried the evidence and ran the penitentiary only in an uneasy, craven coalition with the dominant felons of the institution.

By mid-November, the contagion of violence had spread from cellblock three with a near-fatal stabbing in a south-wing dormitory. The victim was an inmate who had testified against the deputy warden in an earlier investigation of brutality. An immediate shakedown produced two guns and more than 100 knives--which the administration later proudly displayed. But the state did not admit nor show the haul of some 25 gallons of home-brew, which could have been produced and store din such amounts only with the complicity of the prison authorities. The next day, there was another incident in cellblock three as three guards were injured and inmates tear-gassed. At the same time, a prison psychologist was told by several inmates not to go to work anymore, that hostages would soon be taken. In the weeks before Christmas, under the rule of many of the same men who had run it for a quarter century, the New Mexico state prison teetered on the edge of yet another catastrophe.

Meanwhile, Rodriguez had been honored by his peers for outstanding service and bravery during the riot. And after a relatively neutral, factually accurate report on the riot itself, the state attorney general had issued the long-awaited part two of the legislatively mandated study, the section purporting to examine causes and history. Written under the direction of a scion of an old Anglo family thought to be independent, the report nakedly exonerated Rodriguez and King with ersatz sociology about prison life and implicitly blamed a former governor and other officials, like Warden Malley, long gone. "It was the final fucking over of the natives by the Anglo establishment," one observer said angrily of the report, pointing to the majority of poor Hispanic inmates who had been, and remain, the main prey of the prison-system abuses.

By November, too, in time for the tear-gassing and cover-up of the home-brew, a new corrections secretary had arrived to replace King's close aide, who had been an affable caretaker after Saenz. The new man was named Roger Crist, a former warden in Montana and an old friend of Rodriguez. They had smoked cigars together, agreed that the pen had its ungovernable men and settled that Rodriguez would be the ranking deputy secretary in a new reorganization of the department. Grist insisted that he had seen no cliques in the New Mexico system and pronounced it "farfetched" that an inmate stabbing could have had anything to do with testimony against an official. He had complete freedom to hire and fire, of course, like his predecessors--and he would keep Rodriguez and his men. "You have to give the governor the benefit of the doubt," said the chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, who had approved Saenz without question and who would then rubber-stamp Crist.

"Why did it all happen out there?" a former forensic psychiatrist asked himself in a conversation with reformers as the first anniversary of the riot approached. "To the rage and madness of criminally disturbed men, we added the extra rage and madness of a rotten administration. Its corruption and incompetence not only led to neglect of the prisoners but also created the conditions that then let loose the madmen on the others."

"Society doesn't like that place," a former guard said of the penitentiary. "And people in this state willingly went on in ignorance, while the politicians didn't want them to know, anyway. Men like Felix Rodriguez took care of the prison when no one else wanted to, and now we're shocked at the consequences. We have only ourselves to blame."

Nine months after their ordeal, the 12 guards who had been held hostage in the riot were given paltry 50 to 60 percent disability settlements by the state. None had returned to any sort of work. Some were deeply, perhaps permanently scarred. No sooner had they been freed from the rioters' tyranny at the pen--one of them thrown out the front door of the prison with a fragment of broomstick still lodged in his anus--than the tortured officers entered a new captivity. On one side, they have been ensnared by a state government denying its responsibility to them lest it have to admit a larger liability in the millions of dollars of civil suits stemming from the riot; on the other, by a legal swamp in which their very recovery could jeopardize a just compensation. "The state wants them to disappear," said a psychologist familiar with their plight. "The theory is that to collect, they'll have to be vegetables."

On the wall above the console of the demolished control center at the pen, there had been a small familiar sign, a frivolous popular slogan put there long before, that had somehow survived the frenzy of last February. Many of those involved would later remember it as a bitter, ironic epitaph on all that had happened before and after the riot at the New Mexico State Penitentiary. The sign read simply, Thimk.

"The watch began at midnight with 15 corrections officers and one civilian to oversee 1157 inmates."

"This bloodiest of prison riots began, not with a wild rush ro screams but with an almost controlled quiet".

"Desperately, they barricaded themselves in their cells, some trying to tie their grilles shut with towels."

New Mexico State Penitentiary

The take-over: how it happened

1. At 1:40 A.M., inmates seized Captain Roybal, Lieutenant Anaya and officers Schmitt and Martinez in dormitory E-2

2. At 1:45, four other officers were taken outside dormitory F-2. Residents of the entire south wing were released.

3. At1:57 inmates moved through an open grille into the administrative area, kicking one hostage down the corridor.

4. At 2:02 A.M., ritoters smashed the controlcenter windows and gained access to the entire pen; some officers escaped through the front entrance. As that was happening, two other officers hid in the basement of cellblock five, beneath the gas chamber.

5. Between 2:15 and 2:30, rioters broke into the hospital and sacked the pharmacy for drugs. An infirmary technician and seven inmates hid on the second floor of the hospital.

6. At three A.M., three officers were captured in cellblock three and the residents of that cellblock were released; inmate Archie Martinez, the riot's first casually, was killed. At the same moment, other inmates were taking an acetylene cutting torch from the plumbing shop in the basement under the kitchen.

7. At seven A.M., inmates finally cut through into cellblock four. Thirteen inmates soon would be killed.