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Notes -
Right before the confrontation and shooting, it's pretty clear the anti-Juan De Oñate protestors wanted to topple the statue and very likely destroy it; they literally had a chain wrapped around the thing and people trying to pull it over, a complete idiot who didn't know how to use a pickaxe, a guy waving around a "We don't ask permission" sign, so on. There's a lot to be written on the exact tactics, here, and watching the video closely shows a lot of roles spread across this group -- actors, observers, blockers -- but ultimately the point is to achieve a public and, if symbolic, concrete goal, usually as part of an approach to freezing and making the villain a target.
But ultimately the point is that there's a procedure and politics involved in doing this sort of thing above-board, and not everyone wants to wait for that when they've got a bunch of strongarms sitting around. Either because the government doesn't actually own the piece in question, or because it's politically complex to actually hold a vote, sometimes because there isn't as much public support to take down a statue as to just not put one back up, and probably at some points to make clear that they can. Sometimes this connection to local politicians is pretty overt, and you have State Senators telling protestors to vandalize statues and telling police they can't arrest the vandals mere hours before someone gets squished by falling rocks (the police chief to file charges was placed on administrative leave immediately after, and the charges dismissed by the state). But unless someone gets hit in the head with a rock fist, most of the time they're just an undistinguished mass of manpower; not only do these groups not face serious investigation, in some cases the state or city won't even bother listing it as a crime on open data sources.
The Civil Guard morons thought this was their time to shine! The police were demonstrably not actually upholding the law or protecting people or property, and they stopped Baca and provided first aid to the man Baca shot. They probably thought they'd be thanked -- not, you know, by the protestors, but the whole general 'silent majority' who don't like deaths at protests -- right up until the guys in full-body camo slapped them straight onto the ground.
Baca thought he'd stop people from doing something he didn't want them to do, and didn't think hard enough about what each specific escalation meant, objectively, til long after he'd either grabbed someone's shoulder out of nowhere or shoved someone who shoved him. Not much fancy going on there.
The state... I don't know. The Civil Guard wants to draw the anti-Onate protestors as the state gov's brownshirts and the police's shitty response to obviously criminal behavior at protests as an attempt to produce a scenario to legally destroy the NMCG directly, but while the public records request settlement raises some eyebrows, it's still a pretty complex conspiracy theory. Hanlon's Razor has the state leaving the protestors a free leash to avoid expensive lawsuits and bad publicity from lot of concentrated political alliances, and then trying to hammer everybody not in the group after things go tango uniform, but that doesn't exactly look great either.
Dunno. It's not the best set of facts for a self-defense case and far from the most sympathetic defendant -- the point of blockers as a role is to have people counter-protestors or even police can't touch without touching the (often photogenic and sympathetic-sounding) blameless -- but New Mexico's self-defense law doesn't actually rely on "first aggressor" like the prosecutor wished, and there's a lot of reporting suggesting that the prosecution was having a hell of a time getting witness statements. But I can definitely see why he wouldn't want to roll the dice.
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