New Mexico's white nationalists keep to the Web-and themselves.
Every six months or so, a newcomer to New Mexico posts a message on
looking for friends, meeting groups, restaurants, bars-all the normal things a recent transplant would need to seek out community. What's unusual about Stormfront.org is that it's hard to tell if newcomers are legit: They could be undercover FBI agents, lurking Anti-Defamation League operators or, indeed, investigative journalists.
The Web site's motto is "White Pride World Wide," and it's the central message board of the "white nationalist" community, a catch-all term for groups including neo-Nazis, skinheads, Ku Klux Klansmen, Confederate separatists, Minutemen border-vigilantes, Global Jewish Conspiracy theorists and common, everyday racists.
Since January, two new threads have begun spinning about New Mexico, with at least half a dozen white nationalists complaining about living in largely Hispanic communities, but mostly discussing the best time to throw a barbecue.
"We aren't white gangbangers, we have nothing to do with the Aryan Brotherhood meth-heads, we condemn terrorism and we aren't Nazis," an Albuquerque skinhead who joined the message board in 2005 tells SFR via Stormfront.org's private message service. "I know one white nationalist pursuing a PhD. We aren't fringe."
The skinhead's claim is backed up by the numbers. According to the FBI's hate-crime statistics released in late 2007, New Mexico comes in on the low end of the spectrum. Law enforcement agencies reported 20 hate crime incidents in 2006, which is extremely low compared to the 149 incidents reported in Arizona and 245 reported in Texas. The hotspots around the state are Albuquerque, Bloomfield, Corrales and Farmington, where the majority of the crimes were biased based on ethnicity and sexual preference.
The Southern Poverty Law Center reports there are only two racist groups in New Mexico-National Socialist Movement and the New Mexico Skinheads-while Arizona and Texas are respectively home to 17 and 67 groups.
Nevertheless, both the local branches of the FBI and the Anti-Defamation League, an international organization set up in 1913 to counter anti-Semitism, keep a close eye on the Stormfront message board. The ADL's Southwest intelligence officer will be briefing local law enforcement this week on current activity in the region.
"Funny in a state where MS-13 seems to run things," the Stormfront.org user says, referencing the Central American "Mara Salvatrucha", which the BBC recently called "the world's most dangerous gang." "Perhaps they should be watching a group that openly supports terrorism for the interests of another nation than watching me and my friends, who love this country more than anything and encourage using only real world activism to achieve our goals."
Despite this quarter's rise in New Mexico-related posts on Stormfront.org, the ADL isn't particularly concerned. According to New Mexico Regional Director Susan Seligman, the current crew on Stormfront.org isn't a threat.
"It's been pretty quiet here for a long time," Seligman says. "There's a couple of guys that we kind of watch that were trying to set up some barbecues in Albuquerque, but otherwise we just have not seen a whole a lot of activity here and both the FBI and our Southwest person are pretty much on top of this all the time."
Neither Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano nor Santa Fe Deputy Police Chief Benjie Montaño know of any local racist organizations or any incidences of violent hate crime in the last year, aside from anti-gay graffiti that appeared overnight outside RainbowVision several months ago. That case was never solved, which is typical with vandalism.
"It alarms us, too," Montaño says. "It's just those are a lot harder to catch because usually nobody saw them…If we were able to find who did that, that would be brought to the attention of the district attorney more so than somebody who just tagged a wall. You don't know what else they'd want to do or have done that hadn't been reported to us."
Chief Deputy District Attorney Shari Weinstein in the First Judicial District Attorney's Office in Santa Fe was instrumental in drafting and lobbying for New Mexico's 2003 hate-crime legislation, which allows an extra year in prison for hate crimes. But because the mandatory sentencing provision was removed from the bill before passage, she says it wasn't helpful when she prosecuted the perpetrators of a 2005 beating of a young gay man, James Maestas, on Cerrillos Road.
"The main people got a few weekends in jail and probation and the other people just got probation," Weinstein says. "Let's put it this way, the state was arguing for penitentiary time because the victim was almost killed and we didn't get that."
In July 2006, an 18-year-old gay man was beaten in Edgewood and, last year, Santa Fe police told The Santa Fe New Mexican they planned to charge a Hispanic 28-year-old under the hate-crime law for stabbing a Mexican national.
Seligman predicts that in the coming years, New Mexico may see a growth in anti-immigrant hate crimes, especially along the border. However, Weinstein says that hate is already a lot closer to Santa Fe than people realize.
"We have very few blacks and very few Muslims here, so I would count those groups out," she says. "The group I think gets preyed upon and we don't see the cases but I know it happens is the Mexican immigrants. Immigrants and the LGBT community are the two big groups."
But it's white nationalists who also feel marginalized, saying the media villainizes them and the government surveils them as they attempt to exert their right to free speech and to organize.
"We aren't terrorists, and don't condone that sort of behavior," the Stormfront.org skinhead says. "Maybe the feds should of joined the military and done some good for their country."
