ALBUQUERQUE — Attorney General Gary King urged New Mexico's congressional delegation to take a leading role to remedy the loss of land grants in the state in the 1800s as he released a response Saturday to a federal report on the issue.

The state report — prepared by David Benavides and Ryan Golten of New Mexico Legal Aid and reviewed by the Attorney General's Office — criticized a 2004 General Accounting Office report that found the U.S. government had met the legal requirements in vetting the land-grant claims in the second half of the 1800s.

The state report raises serious questions about the GAO's legal conclusions, the basis for its reasoning and inequities affecting the historical treatment of land grants in New Mexico, King said in a news release Saturday.

New Mexico citizens were granted millions of acres of land by Spain and Mexico, and the United States had promised to respect such land holdings under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican War. Many descendants of the original landowners contend the U.S. government failed to recognize their claims.

Because the U.S. Supreme Court has limited the land-grant heirs' ability to pursue claims through previous rulings, King said, Congress should consider legislation to address the matter.

U.S. Sens. Pete Domenici, a Republican, and Democrat Jeff Bingaman and U.S. Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M., requested the GAO report in 2001. Telephone calls to their spokespeople were not immediately returned Saturday.

The state report's conclusions included:

• The GAO made a superficial analysis of the 1848 treaty and case law following it.

• The federal agency sidestepped an in-depth evaluation of why community land grants were incorrectly granted.

• It counted land grants as confirmed even when the acreage was vastly reduced or the confirmations were "fundamentally erroneous."

The GAO report had acknowledged the federal process of certifying land-grant claims was inefficient and created hardship for people. Claimants were given scant notice of the proceedings. They were required to hire English-speaking lawyers and had to pay them in land grant land, and the cost of required surveying was crippling to the claimants.

Among the remedies the GAO recommended were a transfer of federal land to community land grants and financial payments to the claimants' heirs.




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