Albuquerque police are holding a man who allegedly shot a protester Monday night during an attempt to pull down a statue of a Spanish conquistador, Juan de Oñate.
“The shooting occurred during a clash following a peaceful protest to remove the controversial sculpture,”reports the Albuquerque Journal. The FBI is assisting in the investigation and U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) has called on the Justice Department join it.
The 31-year-old suspect, Stephen Ray Baca, is charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon with firearm enhancement.
His alleged victim, Scott Williams, 39, is hospitalized in critical but stable condition after being shot “several times in the torso,” according to the Journal.
Video taken moments before the shooting shows a man identified as Baca holding a gun and backing away from the crowd. Protesters closed in, one beat him with a skateboard and pulled him to the ground.
Baca allegedly fired at least four times. Police arrived moments later.
City workers used a jackhammer to remove the bronze Oñate statue from outside the Albuquerque Museum, near the city’s historic Old Town area, on Tuesday afternoon. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham called that “a step in the right direction.”
Another Oñate statue in a town north of Santa Fe also became the target of protesters on Monday; it was removed for safekeeping.
Baca, the Albuquerque shooting suspect, once ran for the city council on a law-and order platform. He was one of several armed members of a self-styled “militia” group calling themselves the New Mexico Civil Guard, who had attempted to protect the statue, which was part of a large sculptural group called “La Jornada.” Other members of the group were arrested along with Baca.
Baca apparently is a strong supporter of President Trump; a video posted on Twitter shows him at a Trump rally.
“I am horrified and disgusted beyond words by the reports of violence at a protest Monday night in Albuquerque,” Gov. Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “To menace the people of New Mexico with weaponry – with an implicit threat of violence – is on its face unacceptable; that violence did indeed occur is unspeakable.”
The New Mexico protests were inspired by others around the country following last month’s killing of George Floyd while he was in police custody in Minneapolis. Led by the Black Lives Matter movement, those protests often target statues Confederate generals and leaders who supported slavery.
Monuments to European colonial conquerors have also been torn down or removed in cities around the world.
Juan de Oñate is a famously controversial figure in New Mexico history. He led Spain’s colonization of the territory in 1598 and was its first governor, becoming a revered figure to descendants of those early Spanish settlers.
But Spain later banished Oñate from the territory after he ordered a brutal massacre of the Acoma, a Native American Pueblo tribe, after a fight that killed 15 Spaniards. As many as 1,000 Acoma were slaughtered, 24 men had one foot cut off and others were sentenced to decades of near-slavery.
