BY GAIL BINKLY

More than 200 people crowded into the county annex Thursday night to hear a panel of speakers warn that federal agencies and environmentalists are trying to take over their land.

"How will they do it? They can’t just take it away, so they run you out of business," said Cricket Cox of People for the USA, a property-rights advocacy group with 30,000 members nationwide and a number of affiliates.

"I like to categorize this as a war, and that’s what it is, folks."

Cox said a few years ago she moved into a 100-year-old log cabin on a public-lands inholding in Catron County, N.M., a county considered "the pit bull of America" because of its hostile attitude toward federal powers.

"When I saw what was happening to my neighbors, I started asking questions," she said, "and the first one was, ‘Why is my government doing this?’ "

The speakers in general were short on specifics about government actions, but their message was clear: Federal public-lands agencies such as the Forest Service and BLM are attempting to drive ordinary citizens off public lands, as well as private inholdings within public lands, as part of a global conspiracy.

"Incrementally things are made more difficult" for public-lands users such as grazing permittees, said Howard Hutchinson, executive director of the Coalition of Arizona and New Mexico Counties, and another Catron County resident. "Every year it’s something new — some new regulation. It gets harder and harder to make a living."

The problem, he said, is that in the 1960s the United States began borrowing more money from foreign sources.

"Prior to that time, our debt was essentially internalized," Hutchinson said. "But when we externalized that debt, the debt-holders wanted collateral, and in the late ’70s this nation declared its natural resources the collateral for that debt."

Countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua and Costa Rica have already lost lands through similar situations, he said.

An international "World Wilderness Bank" was created in Canada, he said, and it will forgive the debt of an impoverished nation in exchange for the title to its public lands.

Montezuma County resident John B. Nelson said Costa Rica had gone broke and dropped its bonds on the market, at which time the Nature Conservancy, an environmental organization, bought them for a fraction of their value.

Now, he said, "You do not go into the Costa Rica public lands without a special-use permit or a guide. The guided trips are spaced out so people have the illusion they’re in that public land alone."

The environmental movement is just a cover for an international land grab, Cox agreed, advising the audience not to donate to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation till they "found out the truth about them."

She said when large corporations donate to environmental causes, it’s because deals are being cut behind closed doors "as to who is eventually going to have the right to that land."

A Pagosa Springs-area woman embroiled in a battle with the Forest Service said she is being made an example of because the agency wants to use her case as a precedent to drive others off their land.

Diana Luppi said that in 1995 she bought a 35-acre inholding 1 mile into the San Juan National Forest near Pagosa Springs. The Forest Service wanted her to purchase a permit to use the road, her only means of access to her land, and demanded she sign a contract, she recounted.

"But the contract was so one-sided you would have to be crazy to sign it," she said, stating that it called for her to do maintenance and snowplowing on the road and share costs in the event of a wildfire.

Although her land was a homestead property with prior rights to use the road, and although there is a document dated April 8, 1997, showing the road to be considered a county road, she was cited Aug. 5 of that same year for using it to go home, she said.

She was then prosecuted on three criminal counts, convicted and placed on probation, Luppi said. Because it would be a violation of her probation for her to use the road, she hasn’t seen her home in more than a year, she said, although she must continue to pay the mortgage on it.

"What they want is my property, and they want your property too," Luppi said. "They’re desperate to get this case concluded because they want to use it against other people."

She is continuing to refuse to sign the agreement, she said.

Hutchinson said, although the situation may look grim, it is possible for citizens and counties to fight back.

"Congress put some amazing powers (for local entities) into those federal statutes (governing public lands and environmental reviews)," he said. "But local governments have not been putting input into the process."

Citizens must do more than vote, he said, they must back up their elected officials in battles against the federal government.

"Unless this number of people turns out at the meetings and writes letters, you’re not going to get anywhere," he said.

The other avenue for battling federal powers is the courts, Hutchinson said, but legal fights take money.

"Not even a stable county government can afford to take on the federal government," he said. "You have to have allies."

That is why the Coalition of Arizona and New Mexico Counties was formed, and a southern Colorado coalition may be created as well, he said.

In addition, Cox urged those attending to become affiliated with People for the USA and passed out membership applications.

"We are the stewards of the land," she said. "We know how to take care of it.