The human cost of right wing extremist idiocy

Innocent Chilean students paid savage price for man's hate


By MYRIAM MARQUEZ
mmarquez@MiamiHerald.com
With long, frosted hair and a sweet smile, Racine Balbontín-Aragondona was a natural cover girl. The 22-year-old college student studied hotel management and also worked as a model in her native Chile. She planned to marry in April.

Nicolás Pablo Corp Torres was studying engineering and had been a star basketball player. His coach and friends described the 23-year-old as a ``good student and a gentleman.''

Their lives were snuffed out by a madman on a rampage with a rifle in Miramar Beach, a sleepy town in Florida's Panhandle.

Dannie Baker, 60, looks menacing in his mugshot. He allegedly grabbed a rifle and walked past the pool complex to a town house where the students were gathered. At 1:45 a.m. Thursday, Baker opened fire through a window, according to the Walton County Sheriff's Office. Three others were injured, including Balbontín-Aragondona's fiancé, Francisco Javier Cofré-Fernández, 24, who was in critical condition.

After a standdown, deputies arrested Baker, who had fled to his town house near the rental home where the students were shot. The get-together of about 20 friends, deputies said, was not rowdy.

SIGNS OF DISTURBANCE

So what caused such savagery?

Baker had shown signs of emotional instability, sending disturbing e-mails to fellow Republicans during the presidential election. Baker's messages, friends said, were ''radical'' and ''inappropriate,'' the Northwest Florida Daily News reported.

So disturbing were the e-mails that the sheriff's office was notified last summer. For now, investigators won't say what he wrote.

Baker wasn't happy with the get-togethers by the Chilean students. Neighbor Crystal Lynn told a TV station that Baker asked him ``if I was ready for the revolution to begin and if I had any immigrants in my house to get them out.''

Was this a hate crime based on the presumption that the Chileans, who were in Florida for a six-month work/study program, were illegal immigrants?

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes, released a report last week noting a 54 percent jump in hate groups in 2008 to 926 active groups, including 56 in Florida. Among them: black separatist groups -- which believe Jews are the devil and President Barack Obama is in cohoots, doing Israel's bidding -- and the skinheads, Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazi groups that seek white purity.

''As in recent years, hate groups were animated by fears of Latino immigration. This rise in hate groups has coincided with a 40 percent growth in hate crimes against Latinos between 2003 and 2007, according to FBI statistics,'' notes the law center's study entitled ``The Year in Hate.''

A DANGEROUS PLATFORM

Two other factors: the faltering economy and Obama's candidacy. ''The idea of a black man in the White House, combined with the deepening economic crisis and continuing high levels of Latino immigration, has given white supremacists a real platform on which to recruit,'' wrote Mark Potok, the report's editor. And, of course, they all hate gays, too.

The report also notes extremists are inflaming passions by ``spreading propaganda that blames minorities and immigrants for the subprime mortgage meltdown.''

The courts will deal with Baker's guilt or innocence, his motivation, and whether he's mentally ill.

The horror of his actions serve as a warning about brewing hatred in small pockets of our country. Hatred that's fanned by the Internet and anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed on talk radio and some cable TV shows -- twisted into vendettas against the innocent.