Correction appended.
Rio Arriba County activist and organizer Antonio “Ike” DeVargas, whose lifelong penchant for prodding public officials and challenging the local power structure gained both scrutiny and acclaim, died this week following an apparent heart attack.
He was 77.
A relative discovered DeVargas’ body on a chair outside a residence around noon Wednesday, Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Maj. Lorenzo Aguilar said. Elisa DeVargas, one of his six children, said he died at the home of a relative in El Llanito, a small community between Vallecitos and La Madera. A cause of death was unconfirmed Friday, but authorities did not suspect foul play, Aguilar said in a telephone interview.
At an age when many people are long retired, DeVargas was still vigorously working to hold elected officials to account.
He recently ran for the Rio Arriba County Commission and was pursuing the recall of County Commissioner Alex Naranjo — a onetime friend and political foe — as part of a push to implement what he told the Rio Grande Sun was an eight-point plan to upend the “entire establishment.”
Attorney Richard Rosenstock — who had assisted DeVargas at various points in his decadeslong crusade against entrenched political power in Rio Arriba County — said his friend’s death came as shock.
“I feel like I lost a brother,” Rosenstock said.
Rosenstock said he met DeVargas in 1975, after DeVargas returned home from serving in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam War.
“I was seriously impressed with his organizing ability and his ability to think strategically,” Rosenstock said, adding his friend was a “spellbinding speaker in front of a crowd.”
DeVargas, who grew up in the tiny village of Guachupangue, was engaged in activism throughout his life. He focused his efforts on challenging the Northern New Mexico patrón system. It often put him at odds with people with whom he’d grown up.
“He had a great intellect and sensitivity to what he perceived as injustices and worked hard to try to correct things with no personal or financial benefits to himself,” said Wilfredo Vigil, who along with DeVargas was one of the founders of La Raza Unida in the 1970s. “He had a great sense of social and economic justice. He was always interested in making life better and more fair for his people in Rio Arriba County.”
DeVargas attended high school in Española but dropped out at 16. He joined the military at 17, his daughter said. He had many jobs over the years, including managing a local clinic. He also worked for a time in the uranium mines near Grants, Rosenstock said.
His original occupation, and one he returned to over the years, was cutting timber. He organized workers in hopes of helping locals secure timber-cutting contracts from the U.S. Forest Service, Rosenstock said.
DeVargas advocated to improve the quality of special education in area schools and pushed back against police brutality, once organizing a march from La Madera to Santa Fe to bring awareness to the problem.
The kickoff for the march drew a crowd of hundreds, Rosenstock said, and was punctuated by the hanging in effigy of longtime Rio Arriba County strongman Emilio Naranjo.
DeVargas’ activism also made him a target, Rosenstock said. Two months after the rally, local law enforcement officials procured search warrants and arrested DeVargas on drug charges.
“They found meth in a cereal box and a few marijuana plants,” Rosenstock said Friday.
“Ike said, ‘The plants are mine, not the meth,’ and he passed a lie detector test,” he added.
DeVargas countersued the Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s Office in a case that went to trial in federal court in 1979. A jury awarded him $56,000 in damages, Rosenstock said. Rosenstock said while DeVargas ran for political offices, “he was never interested in power … it wasn’t because he expected to win, he was just trying to raise an issue.”
When DeVargas’ daughter Carmela DeVargas, 34, died from sepsis related to an infection in the Santa Fe County jail in 2019, Ike sued the county. He alleged her death was caused by officials’ failure to adopt best practices.
For about two years following her death, Rosenstock said DeVargas fought the state Children, Youth and Families Department for custody of his grandson. He eventually adopted the boy.
More recently, DeVargas had focused on the actions of the North Central Regional Solid Waste Authority and collected enough signatures to impanel a citizens’ grand jury to conduct a special inquiry into the multigovernmental agency’s practice of putting liens on customers’ property.
The grand jury released a scathing report in 2023, concluding the authority should be placed into receivership and a new board immediately appointed due to a range of problems, some potentially illegal.
The report recommended two board members — Alex Naranjo and former County Manager Tomas Campos — be criminally charged with perjury and malfeasance. The charges were later dismissed by the special prosecutor assigned to the case who determined the grand jury had overstepped its authority in the case.
DeVargas subsequently launched an effort to recall Naranjo — citing his unilateral decision to reinstall a statue of controversial Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate, which later was reversed.
A judge gave the go-ahead for DeVargas to start gathering signatures for the petition in May, but Naranjo appealed to the Supreme Court, where it was still pending at the time of DeVargas’ death.
“Ike was the straw that stirred the drink for decades, even in old age,” Rosenstock said.
Correction: This story has been amended to reflect the following correction. A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that a judge dismissed perjury charges against County Commissioner Alex Naranjo and former County Manager Tomas Campos which had been handed down by a grand jury empaneled as the result of DeVargas' activism. The charges were later dismissed by the special prosecutor assigned to pursue them, not a judge.
