A few local prosecutors were also involved, but at the state level for the longest time, Law Enforcement for that state was primarily focusing on illicit drug manufacturing and any opposition to the resource extraction leadership.
When Mom and Dad moved to Albuquerque for retirement in 2005, they were supposed to see how "stuck in the 1970's" the state was.
How much New Mexico reminded them of rural central California where districts and counties were basically run by wealthy facilitators or resource extractors, the money didn't stay in the counties, and Law Enforcement was more concerned with the political status quo than protecting and serving.
There are good people in New Mexico who are trying to clean up corruption and providing for an improved standard of living for the citizens of the state.
But there's also been decades and decades of out of state corporate ownership of land and resource extraction - oil, natural gas, uranium, asbestos, other minerals - bent keeping the locals poor and powerless.
I can easily see how a sleeze like Epstein could fly under the radar, especially if he recruited kids from other states instead of locally.
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