🌊 Inside New Mexico’s Sacrifice Zone

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By Max Frost

Wes Burress still remembers when “that bomb went off.” 

It was 1945 and he was five years old, living in the New Mexico desert. 

“We were in bed together,” he told Roca. “There was a little two-foot window over the door. When that bomb went off, it broke the glass out of it. And when I woke up, it was so bright in that room – so bright you couldn’t see.”

“I got out and looked out the window, and all I could see was just – bright.” 

Then came the ash: “It rained stuff out of the air for two or three days. It was all over the ground, everywhere,” Wes recalled. “But nobody ever bothered to tell us what it was that went off.”

He didn’t know it then, but he had just survived the Trinity Test, the world’s first nuclear explosion.

The Manhattan Project’s nuclear tests occurred in remote parts of New Mexico to prevent contamination and maintain secrecy. Yet thousands of people still lived in the fallout radius. These people – exposed to significant amounts of radiation then and via the continued environmental contamination since – became known as “downwinders.” 

The initial downwinders realized something was off in the 1950s, when they began experiencing high rates of unusual diseases. Bernice Gutierrez, who was eight days old at the time of the Trinity Test, told Roca she learned something was wrong “when we started getting cancer.” 

“After my mother got thyroid cancer, I started getting my thyroid checked. And my endocrinologist asked me if I had ever been exposed to radiation.”

Tina Cordova, who wasn’t alive at the time of the test but grew up in the contamination zone, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at age 39. Her niece, a college student, was also recently diagnosed.

To draw attention to the downwinders’ plight, Cordova in 2005 founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, a group that sought federal recognition of what had happened to the downwinders and thereby compensation and funding for their medical care. Years of DC visits and meetings with representatives and senators produced scant results, though. 

When we met Tina in New Mexico this February, she had little faith that things would improve under the new Republican administration. Last week, that changed.

The downwinders are one group of New Mexico’s nuclear victims. The “post-71 miners” are another. 

New Mexico didn’t just provide the testing grounds for nuclear weapons – it provided the uranium: From 1948 to 1982, New Mexico produced 40% of America's uranium – the uranium that built the country's nuclear arsenal and helped it win the Cold War. This boom transformed agrarian Native American villages overnight, as one mine after another opened up to harvest the silvery, radioactive metal buried beneath their earth. 

One such place was Laguna Pueblo, an hour’s drive west of Albuquerque. 

Until 1948, life for the local population had changed little over centuries: They lived in adobe homes, growing crops and herding sheep and cattle. Then, uranium was discovered – and Laguna soon had the world’s largest open-pit uranium mine. 

Twice a day, every day, a mining company would explode the earth, paving the way for local miners to go in and chip away at the uranium. The town boomed: People went from making a few dollars a day to $8.50 an hour, one miner told us. “We had brand new vehicles, furniture...it was a beautiful time for everyone,” said Loretta Anderson, who leads a group seeking compensation for the miners. 

At the time, the miners had no idea how dangerous their jobs were. So unaware were they that they would bring uranium rocks home and leave them on their mantles to remind their families what enabled them to eat. Their clothes would be caked in yellow dust, which would get into their mouths, food, and water. The daily explosions cracked the walls of their adobe homes, but they didn’t mind. 

Then the side effects came: Cancer, lost teeth, unexplained bleeding, breathing difficulties. Then the mine shut, leaving the locals to suffer the consequences with no income to confront it. Today, the area is known as the “Sacrifice Zone.” In interviews with over a dozen people in Laguna Pueblo, every person had lost a loved one to a uranium-related disease. People spoke to us through oxygen tanks, revealed tumors, and wept as they shared their stories. 

As one miner told us, “For 11 years, I’ve had prostate cancer, colon cancer. I'm barely surviving here. We're just dying from cancer. That's all – cancer, cancer.”

In 1990, the federal government passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which provided payments to select radiation-impacted counties across the country. The bill did not recognize the downwinders, though, nor the miners who worked in Laguna Pueblo after 1971, the year private companies began buying the uranium. For years, Cordova and Anderson, among others, have led the effort to expand RECA to secure recognition, restitution, and medical coverage for those affected in their communities. 

Anderson said she thought they had scored a breakthrough in 2020, when President Biden appointed Deb Haaland – a Native American from Laguna Pueblo – to serve as his interior secretary. 

“I was raised with her. Her sister was one of my best friends,” Anderson said. “We went to DC in September of 2023 and we met with her at her beautiful, big, huge ginormous office and she invited us in and promised that she would help us. We've never gotten anything from her.”

The Senate, meanwhile, took up RECA as an issue and advanced a bill to compensate the uranium victims, largely at the behest of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), whose state also suffered radiation. Yet while a bipartisan group in the Senate voted to expand RECA, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) declined to bring it to a vote in the House.

“When we go to Washington, when we ask, when we plead with our leaders to support us just a little bit, they say it's too expensive,” Anderson told Roca. 

She had little hope of things improving in the upcoming months but would not give up.

Last week, the breakthrough finally came: Hawley and others slipped an expansion of RECA into the Big Beautiful Bill, offering people who were physically present in an affected area for at least one year starting between 1944 and 1962 up to $100,000 in compensation. It also offered compensation to those employed in a uranium mine between 1942 and 1990.

Cordova said the bill didn’t have everything they needed – "They took the health care coverage out, which was very, very important to us, especially at a time when we know there's going to be big changes to Medicaid" – but it had a lot. 

She said she was “grateful”: "To finally receive this kind of acknowledgement and recognition and support from our government is historic. It's monumental."

Editor’s Note

Thank you for reading. Roca’s mission with this newsletter is to shed light on issues and places that have been under-reported. As always, please send in your thoughts and reactions by emailing us here. 

And in case you’d like to read more of our latest stories, find them here:

• The Curse of the 24/7 News Cycle

• The Breaking Point: How an American Debt Crisis Could Unfold

• A Tale of Two Borders

• The Big Beautiful Strategy

• What the Big Beautiful Bill Cuts

Enjoy your rest of your weekends. We’ll be back with more tomorrow.

—Max and Max