Victor and Dax Contreras share a last name, a passion for their community, state and nation — and a mission to lower the volume in many political debates while raising hopes.
The father-and-son team leads the non-partisan organization Hispanos Unidos, founded in 2008.
“Our mission is to unify New Mexicans who want more jobs and opportunity by fighting for our constitutional and natural rights,” Victor Contreras said. “We want to help the people of New Mexico maximize the potential of this amazing land. Our culture and natural resources have been stifled by ineffective government. Our mission is to change things for the better.”
Dax Contreras, 34, is the organization’s executive director. He lives in Santa Fe and has been involved in politics most of his life. He said he helped start Hispanos Unidos to make a difference in the community.
“I felt local government bureaucrats and elected officials were not responsive to the needs of the community, especially election integrity concerns that affected people I knew, including friends who were voting for the first time who had their vote stolen,” he said.
“Our mission is to unify New Mexicans who want more jobs and opportunity by fighting for our constitutional and natural rights, advocating for policies that make New Mexico a better place to raise a family and pursue the American dream,” Dax added. “Government transparency, economic freedom and election integrity are three big issues for us. We seek to hold government accountable to the people of New Mexico by giving New Mexican families a voice in government and keeping voters informed.”
He said one of the missions of Hispanos Unidos is to reach across the chasm that separates the major political parties.
“The hyper-partisan nature of our current political environment is great for energizing the political extremes and maintaining the status quo, but more and more the moderate, middle-of-the-road voters are politically homeless and apathetic to the election process,” Dax Contreras said. “Getting them active and engaged is the only way the status quo in New Mexico will change for the better. We are working on fixing that problem by getting more and more folks engaged with the election process.”
Victor Contreras sees major problems with the process, and wanted to do something.
“Being active in elections for many years, I understood how important voter integrity is,” he said. “By the early 2000s, it was clear that election fraud was rampant and also covered up by corrupt public officials. Election integrity was a major factor in our group forming.”
Most election studies have shown that voter fraud is rare nationwide.
Hispanos Unidos has been expanding its efforts, especially in the past year, Victor said. In addition to field work — knocking on doors, making phone calls during election season — it now actively participates in the legislative session and on social media.
“We fight for economic opportunity for workers and entrepreneurs, which means fighting for a free market. Some examples are the right to work; allowing workers to negotiate their own wages; allowing people to keep more of their hard-earned money to provide for their families and help their neighbors,” he said. “We fight to protect the rights of the soon-to-be born; for the right to self-defense; for freedom of speech. We fight for the rights of parents and students to choose the best education available.”
Hispanos Unidos regularly updates its website, nmhispanos.org with blog posts and reports. It also issues a weekly newsletter of events around the state.
“A lot of our communications are through direct conversations with community leaders across the state, but we also have an active digital presence on our website and social media,” Dax said. “During the legislative session and around elections we also engage with voters with paid advertising in traditional and digital media.”
Victor, 71, a Mesilla resident who serves as chairman of Hispanos Unidos, pointed to some of the most pressing issues in New Mexico today.
“Our rights to healthcare decision-making and personal choice have been under attack by executive dictatorship for over a year,” he said. “This has led not only to a shattered economy, but people have been denied medical treatment and mental health support. People are suffering and some have died due to lack of access. This is horrifying and beyond tragic. It’s inexcusable.
Dax has combined his passion for politics with his educational background.
“Voter apathy is a serious problem, and the partisan nature of most modern media outlets only further divide us,” he said. “I worked for (Sen. Pete) Domenici (R-N.M.) in D.C. in 2007 when there was push for bipartisan immigration reform, and I had a front-row seat to the collapse of that effort. Seeing that collapse was part of the motivation and inspiration to getting more involved in politics in New Mexico, and the catalyst that drove me to help found Hispanos Unidos.
“Using my background in predictive analytics and marketing we seek to end that apathy and mobilize voters to participate,” Dax added. “Plato was onto something when he said one of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. We deserve better leaders in government but without better engagement of the electorate that won’t change.”
The father-son team wrote an op-ed in the Albuquerque Journal that discussed the complexity of the ongoing border crisis, saying it is often weaponized politically. They also noted crucial information is being lost in the debate around this issue.
“Immigration is a great political wedge issue, but actually fixing our broken immigration system requires engagement with those moderates I mentioned before [who as we mentioned are tired of the identity politics often cited around the immigration debate by folks on the far left]," Dax Contreras said. "[This is] coupled with leaders who have the political will and courage to hash out solutions that consider the real-life consequences of all stakeholders, including the security needs of the border communities and incentivizing the skilled [and sometimes unskilled] labor our business communities need to thrive.”
Since President Biden's inauguration, the U.S. Border Patrol has reported more than 1,076,000 land border encounters along the nation's s southern border, representing a 313% spike in encounters since fiscal year 2020.
Several border Democrats have been critical of the Biden administration’s handling of the crisis at the border. A South Texas member of Congress, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), told the Washington Post in late March that Biden had created a “system that incentivizes people to come across” and was sending a message to “that if you come across you can stay.”
For Gonzalez, the fix must be “by changing the policy at our doorstep,” without which the flow “isn’t going to stop or slow down.”
A recent Pew study revealed that 68% of Americans think the current administration is doing a “bad job” at dealing with the border crisis and nearly 79% of respondents believe it is very or somewhat important to reduce the number of asylum seekers at the U.S. border.
Along with a spike in illegal immigration, the crisis at the border has brought with it an increase in other crimes related to cartel criminal enterprise. For Victor and Dax Contreras, this is more than the policy questions around immigration. In their op-ed, they note the “real-life stories of injustice, tragedy and loss” that accompany the border crisis. Contreras specifically points to tragedies of increased human smuggling, sex-trafficking, rape, and violent crime both immigrants and border communities face.
According to Reuters, many cartels in Mexico who previously stole oil and sold drugs are shifting to a new line of work, human trafficking. Mexico is an origin, transit and destination country for the sex trafficking industry, and has recently seen an uptick in gangs shifting to dealing in people. Cartels that have shifted to human trafficking include the oil pipeline tapping and Guanajuato-based Santa Rosa de Lima gang, as well as the Mexico City Tepito Union drug gang.
Victor said he is struck by the human element.
“There are real-life consequences to the politics,” he said. “The people who are impacted are not even an afterthought. We are regarded as collateral damage or a means to an end. It’s inhumane and it’s dehumanizing.”
Fox News recently reported that Mexican cartels make as much as $14 million a day smuggling individuals across the border and into the United States. Retired Tucson Border Patrol Chief Roy Villareal recently stated that trafficked individuals become slaves to pay to be smuggled across the U.S. border.
Santiago Nieto, head of Mexico’s financial intelligence unit, is heavily involved in the investigation and arrest of cartel members. He recently stated that many gangs are shifting to sex trafficking as their predominant source of revenue: “A lot of criminal groups are mutating... when one possibility ends ... they start to link up with other kinds of criminal activities.”
Nieto estimates that trafficking has become the third-largest illicit activity in Mexico, behind drug and arms dealing.
Victor Contreras said New Mexicans and Americans can come together to find a solution to border crisis, but it will take a unified effort.
“We need serious people who genuinely care and have the courage to get the job done,” he said. “We need to work hard to get these people elected because the people in charge now either have a political agenda that is part of the problem while others simply have no backbone and are not doing anything to be part of the solution.”
“We need all hands on deck," he added. "We need to unite, to come together regardless of race or class or party affiliation. “We need to unite and organize to be effective advocates for solutions and to get good people elected. Please go to our website, nmhispanos.org, and sign up so we can connect with you to organize and take back control of our state from incompetent and corrupt politicians and their enablers."