The Amazing Teflon of Hector Balderas and the Boys Who Benefit From Knowing Him
The former New Mexico attorney general who halted the state's Zorro Ranch investigation in 2019 — and blamed it on the feds in 2026 — has a long history of protecting his friends and himself.
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When former New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas told reporters this month that he had no choice but to halt the state’s investigation of Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch back in 2019 — that, like the devil often does to unsuspecting men, federal prosecutors in New York made him do it — he was counting on something he had relied on throughout his career: that nobody would look too closely at what he actually did, or why.
What Balderas does not say — what I imagine he is counting on most people not to know — is that he was under no legal obligation to comply. Interagency requests to stand down happen routinely in overlapping federal and state investigations. States routinely decline them. Also, the files themselves reveal that federal prosecutors asked Balderas only to stop investigating allegations of human trafficking, noting he could carry on with everything else. But he didn’t, because, and I’m paraphrasing here, “that lady over there made me, I swear.”
This isn’t the first time he’s said something like this when reporters and others starting circling something questionable he’d done. A closer look at Balderas’ long career in New Mexico reveals it to be a consistent pattern. Again and again, Balderas has made seemingly unethical decisions that happened to benefit himself and the men closest to him. And again and again, when questioned about it, he’s blamed others, attacked his accusers, or waited for investigators to quietly clear him.
Hector’s Buddy Marcus
Balderas, who grew up on public assistance in tiny Wagon Mound, New Mexico, population 266, first met his longtime buddy Marcus Rael, Jr., from Questa, New Mexico, when they both ended up in law school together at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. They graduated together in 2001, according to reporting by Searchlight New Mexico, then worked together briefly before Balderas entered politics. And from the moment Balderas took office as attorney general in 2015, Rael’s firm — Robles, Rael & Anaya — became what public records would eventually reveal as the most favored outside counsel in the history of that office.
According to invoices and contracts obtained through public records requests by the watchdog group New Energy Economy and reviewed by Searchlight New Mexico, the attorney general’s office under Balderas retained Rael’s firm for at least 19 cases — at least three times more than any other private law firm. Those records show more than three million dollars in direct payments of fees and expenses to Robles, Rael & Anaya. That figure does not include the firm’s share of contingency fees from the eleven class-action settlements in which it served as co-counsel — cases whose settlement amounts ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
During that same period, according to campaign finance records reviewed by Searchlight New Mexico, lawyers and employees at Rael’s firm donated more than $36,000 to Balderas’ campaigns — more than from almost any other single entity in his donor history.
It is a circle that rotates cleanly: campaign donations flow to Balderas, state contracts flow to Rael, and the public — whose interests the attorney general is sworn to represent — picks up the tab.
Critics raised questions about the arrangement almost from the beginning. According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, one of Balderas’ challengers in the attorney general’s race noted as early as 2015 that Rael had been hired for a water law case despite having no water law experience. “Hector wanted to do a favor for that law firm,” the challenger said at the time.
The billing practices that eventually came to light were harder to ignore.
When Balderas hired Rael's firm to represent New Mexico in its lawsuit against Volkswagen — the automaker that was caught installing software in its diesel vehicles designed to cheat federal emissions tests, allowing cars to appear compliant during testing while emitting up to forty times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide on the road — the firm submitted a court filing stating it had accepted the case with the understanding that doing so would likely preclude other work. New Mexico ultimately won a settlement of more than thirteen million dollars in 2019, and Rael’s firm received over four million dollars for its role, according to reporting by Capital & Main. But billing records later obtained through public records requests told a different story about exclusivity: throughout the Volkswagen litigation, Rael was simultaneously logging more than a hundred hours per quarter on a separate state case, Texas v. New Mexico — and four times that amount during one quarter of the year.
The firm was billing the people of New Mexico for the privilege of being double-billed.
But it was the proposed merger between the Public Service Company of New Mexico and Avangrid — a subsidiary of the Spanish energy giant Iberdrola — that finally brought the Balderas-Rael relationship into the open in a way that could no longer be dismissed as conjecture.
The merger was an eight-point-three billion dollar deal that would have transferred ownership of New Mexico’s largest electric utility to a global conglomerate headquartered in Bilbao. For New Mexico consumers, the stakes were enormous — hundreds of millions of dollars in potential rate relief hung in the balance, along with the state’s energy future. The attorney general’s office, representing the public interest in merger proceedings before the state Public Regulation Commission, was one of the most important voices in the room.
Initially, Balderas’ office performed that role as it should have. According to testimony in the PRC proceedings, the AG’s own expert witnesses testified that the merger as proposed failed to adequately protect New Mexicans’ rights and did not serve the public interest. One of those experts, Scott Hempling — a recently appointed federal judge serving as expert witness — testified that the transaction had no public interest purpose, according to reporting by Capital & Main.
Then Iberdrola hired Marcus Rael, Jr..
Rael came on board in early 2021 at four hundred dollars an hour, retained by Avangrid’s Spanish parent company to oversee merger negotiations, according to PRC filings. In the weeks that followed, public records obtained by New Energy Economy show Rael met with the attorney general’s office eighteen times between late February and early April. Shortly after those meetings, Balderas reversed course. Acting on behalf of the state, he signed a stipulation agreement supporting the merger — a position that directly contradicted the testimony of his own experts, and that left consumers with fewer financial protections than advocates had sought.
The watchdog groups that had been monitoring the proceedings were stunned. Mariel Nanasi, executive director of New Energy Economy, told Capital & Main that Balderas had decided the merger was “magically in the public interest” despite everything his own office had said about it.
In July 2021, five civic and environmental organizations — New Energy Economy, Democracy Rising, Indivisible Nob Hill, Renewable Taos, and Retake Our Democracy — filed formal complaints with the State Auditor, the New Mexico Ethics Commission, and the Disciplinary Board of the New Mexico Supreme Court. The complaints, reviewed in full by this reporter, alleged fraud and corruption, conflicts of interest, improper contract awards, and what they described as the misappropriation of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds. The theory was straightforward: Iberdrola had hired Rael not for his legal expertise — of which there was little relevant to the case — but for his access to the attorney general. His value was his friendship with Balderas. His job was to flip the AG. According to the complaints and subsequent reporting by Searchlight New Mexico, it worked.
Balderas’ response was revealing. Rather than address the substance of the complaints, he attacked the messenger. He accused Nanasi of trying to “kill the deal.” According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, he suggested her objections stemmed from “cultural bias” — and when pressed on whether he meant that Rael was Hispanic, implied as much. It was a remarkable accusation to level at a civil rights attorney, and it said more about Balderas’ instincts under pressure than about Nanasi’s motivations.
The Public Regulation Commission’s hearing examiner, Ashley Schannauer, was less easily dismissed. In August 2021, Schannauer ruled that Rael had a clear conflict of interest and ordered him disqualified from representing Iberdrola in the merger proceedings, according to a ruling reported by the Associated Press. Schannauer noted that he lacked authority to rule on whether Balderas’ own conduct was improper — that, he said, would need to be determined in court — but made clear the commission would weigh the conduct of both Balderas and Iberdrola when evaluating the merger.
The three ethics complaints filed against Balderas were ultimately dismissed. The results of the State Auditor’s investigation were never made public, according to reporting by Retake Our Democracy. Matt Baca, serving as Balderas’ spokesman, called the allegations “entirely false” and dismissed the complaints as a “new low,” according to statements reported by the Albuquerque Journal.
Matt Baca.
Let’s talk about him now.
Hector’s Buddy Matt
On the night of October 23, 2021, Santa Fe police officer Fernando Cruz responded to a report of a vehicle that had crashed into a legally parked car on Garcia Street. He found the driver still sitting behind the wheel. The driver’s speech was slurred. His pupils were dilated. His eyes were watery. He smelled of alcohol. According to the criminal complaint filed in Santa Fe Municipal Court, Officer Cruz noted a dry tongue with what he described as heat bumps and a green distinct film consistent with the use of THC. When asked to perform field sobriety tests, the driver performed poorly. When asked to submit to a breathalyzer, he refused — a refusal that under New Mexico law automatically triggers a charge of aggravated DWI.
The driver was Matthew Baca. Chief counsel and spokesman for the New Mexico Office of the Attorney General. The public voice of Hector Balderas.
The same Matt Baca who, just months earlier, had gone on the record calling the ethics complaints against his boss and Marcus Rael “entirely false” and dismissed the women leading those complaints as having reached “a new low.” The same Matt Baca who had served as Balderas’ shield throughout the PNM controversy, deflecting questions, issuing denials, keeping the press at arm’s length.
Now he was being booked into the Santa Fe County jail.
Balderas’ office, when it finally responded to press inquiries, said Baca had been placed on administrative leave “to be with his family and handle this matter,” according to the Albuquerque Journal. It was a notably tender formulation for an aggravated DWI charge involving a crash, a refused breathalyzer, and signs of both alcohol and drug impairment. Baca subsequently pleaded no contest. According to court records reported by the Santa Fe New Mexican, the aggravated charge was downgraded as part of a plea deal. He was placed on supervised probation for 364 days and ordered to perform twenty-four hours of community service. Shortly after the plea, the attorney general’s office confirmed he was no longer employed there.
That, most observers assumed, was the end of the Matt Baca story.
They did not know Hector Balderas well enough.
In January 2023, Balderas left the attorney general’s office at the end of his second term and assumed the presidency of Northern New Mexico College, the small, chronically underfunded Hispanic-serving institution in Española whose board of regents had selected him — unanimously, without apparent hesitation — over three other finalists, all of whom came from the world of academia, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican. Balderas had no academic credentials beyond his law degree. He had never administered an educational institution. He had never taught. His pitch to the board was essentially political: he knew how to lobby the legislature for money, and he identified with the students.
The board found this persuasive. At a base salary of $232,500 a year, Balderas became the twenty-second president of Northern New Mexico College.
Within months, he had set about remaking the institution in a familiar image.
According to salary records provided to the Santa Fe New Mexican by Northern New Mexico College, he brought in Theresa Story — who had served as financial control division director and chief financial officer in the AG’s office since 2017 — as Northern’s new chief financial and compliance officer at $132,000 a year. He brought in Scott Stokes — who had served as chief information officer in the AG’s office since 2015 — to fill that same role at Northern at $133,000 a year. And then he created a brand-new position — “general counsel,” a role that had not previously existed at the college — and filled it at $110,000 a year.
He gave that job to Matt Baca.
Balderas defended the hire with the same rhetorical move he always makes when questions arise about the men around him: he reframed the obvious as virtue. Baca had “overcome some past challenges,” Balderas told the Santa Fe New Mexican. He had been “held accountable.” He was, Balderas suggested, actually an asset to a college serving Rio Arriba County — a community that has struggled with addiction and alcohol-related death — because his personal story made him a “good fit.”
What Balderas did not explain was why a small, rural community college that had never needed an internal general counsel suddenly needed one now, at a cost of $110,000 a year, and why the only candidate considered for that new position was his former spokesman and pal, fresh off a DWI conviction.
He also did not explain why, at an institution that the State Auditor had already flagged for financial irregularities in fiscal year 2022 — issuing a formal letter of concern over the college’s audits before Balderas had even arrived — he thought the appropriate response was to install his own loyalists in the compliance and financial oversight roles. The people now responsible for catching problems at Northern New Mexico College are the same people who spent years working for Hector Balderas at the attorney general’s office, in the same building where the Rael contracts were approved and the Baca press statements were issued.
It is a closed loop. And it is paid for by the taxpayers of New Mexico, the poorest state in the nation.
There is a word for the practice of rewarding personal loyalty with public resources, of filling government positions with trusted allies regardless of their qualifications or recent legal history, of treating institutions meant to serve the public as vehicles for protecting and advancing one’s inner circle.
The word is corruption.
Balderas has never been convicted of it. He has never even been formally charged. Every complaint filed against him has been dismissed, every investigation concluded without public findings, every accusation rebutted with attacks on the people making it. He is, by the official record, a clean man.
But the official record is assembled by institutions — an ethics commission, a state auditor’s office, a supreme court disciplinary board — that operate within the same political ecosystem Balderas spent seventeen years cultivating. The complaints were dismissed. The results were not published. The investigation into the state’s largest utility merger, in which the attorney general’s own experts testified against a deal he ultimately approved after his friend was hired by the other side, produced no consequences for anyone.
And the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, which Balderas halted in 2019, supposedly at the request of federal prosecutors he was not required to obey, sat dormant for years — until a different attorney general, with a different set of loyalties, under renewed scrutiny from literally the rest of the world, decided the law meant what it said.
Even in New Mexico.
Northern New Mexico Deserves Better
There is a particular kind of insult embedded in what happened with Balderas at Northern New Mexico College.
Northern is not a prestigious institution in the conventional sense. It does not have a famous football team or a billion-dollar endowment. It is a small, scrappy, perpetually underfunded college in Española, in the heart of the Española Valley — one of the poorest regions in one of the poorest states in the country, a place where the opioid crisis hit harder and earlier than almost anywhere else in America, where families have sent their children to Northern for generations because it is what they have, because it is close, because it is theirs.
Northern was founded in 1909 as the Spanish American Normal School, established specifically to serve the Spanish-speaking communities of northern New Mexico who had been systematically excluded from educational opportunity. According to Northern’s own constitutional charter, it is the first Hispanic-serving institution in the United States. It was a community college up until 2005, when it began offering bachelor’s degrees.
This is the institution Hector Balderas walked into in January 2023, at $232,500 a year, with no academic credentials and no educational administration experience, having just spent eight years as attorney general accumulating the record this article describes.
The board of regents that hired him — appointed, it should be noted, by the governor of New Mexico — did so unanimously, over three finalists who had spent their careers in higher education. One of those finalists, Patricia Trujillo, was a former Northern professor and the state’s deputy secretary of higher education, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican. She knew the institution. She knew the community. She was not selected.
Balderas, in his own account of why he was chosen over candidates with actual academic backgrounds, told the Santa Fe Reporter that the board was impressed by his experience in “strengthening board governance.” He had advised nearly a hundred boards and commissions during his time as attorney general. He had relationships in the legislature. He could get money.
It is worth pausing on what this argument concedes. Balderas was not hired to be an educator. He was hired to be a lobbyist with a title.
The students of Northern deserve better than this. The families of the Española Valley — families who have sent their children to this institution for over a century, families who built it and sustained it through generations of underfunding and neglect — deserve better than this. They deserve a president who came to their institution because of what it is, not because of what it could offer him and his friends after a controversial tenure running the state’s top law enforcement office.
They deserve, at minimum, a president whose career does not raise the question this one does: whether Northern New Mexico College is, for Hector Balderas, an institution to be served — or a refuge to be occupied.
Epstein Survivors Deserve Better
The survivors who reported abuse at Zorro Ranch were failed by Hector Balderas. Whatever combination of factors led Balderas to make the decision to halt investigating what happened at that ranch, their justice seems not to have been among the considerations that outweighed compliance with Trump-appointed US prosecutors.
We do not know with certainty why Balderas stood down in 2019. What we do know is this: across seventeen years of public service, Hector Balderas demonstrated a consistent and documented tendency to make decisions that protected and enriched the men in his circle, to deflect accountability when those decisions were questioned, especially by women, and to use the institutions he controlled as instruments of personal loyalty rather than public trust.
That tendency did not begin with Zorro Ranch. It did not end there either.
The ranch has now been searched. The files are open. The survivors are still waiting.
And Hector Balderas, collecting his $232,500 a year at Northern New Mexico College, is still pointing his finger at someone else.
Corrupt! I hope your article breaks the bubble of protection he’s built around himself. It’s disgusting (and an abuse of power) when people go into public service to enrich themselves rather than work for the community. I wonder if Baldaras chose not to search zorro out of laziness or if he had connections to that circle as well…
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