MEXICAN GANG INFESTED
MEXIFORNIA:
CA IS A
SANCTUARY STATE. NOT ONE VOTER VOTED TO SURRENDER TO LA RAZA “THE RACE” OR TO
EXPAND THE STATE’S MEXICAN WELFARE SYSTEM, OR TO HAND JOBS TO ILLEGALS… BUT THE
LA RAZA DEMS DON’T REALLY CARE WHAT LEGALS THINK. THEY’RE TOO BUSY HISPANDERING
AND WORKING TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED WITH ENDLESS HORDES OF ILLEGALS!
*
"A
rough-and-tumble world of small-city politics has come to define the drug- and
gang-infested cities clustered around the 710 freeway: Bell Gardens, Cudahy,
Huntington Park, Lynwood, Maywood and South Gate, among others.
*
CALIFORNIA IS A STATE IN MELTDOWN
DUE TO THE CORRUPTION OF THE LA RAZA DEMS, FEINSTEIN, BOXER, PELOSI, LOFGREN,
WAXMAN….ALL ADVOCATES FOR AMNESTY, or at least continued non-enforcement until
there are enough illegals voting for dems, amnesty will be a de facto fact,
OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY which is now a law in Mexifornia!
HERE ARE A FEW FACTS ON THE MEX
OCCUPATION OF A FORMER AMERICAN STATE:
1. CA PUTS OUT $20 BILLION PER YEAR
IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS AGAINST DEFICITS OF $28 BILLION.
*
2. CA ATTORNEY GENERAL KAMALA
HARRIS HAS DECLARED THAT NEARLY HALF OF ALL MURDERS IN CA ARE BY MEXICAN GANGS!
*
3. CA HAS THE MOST EXPENSIVE PRISON
SYSTEM IN THE NATION, AND HALF THE INMATES ARE MEXICANS.
*
4. WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS IN LOS
ANGELES COUNTY ALONE EXCEEDS $600 MILLION PER YEAR.
*
5. THERE ARE ONLY EIGHT STATES WITH
A POPULATION GREATER THAN LOS ANGELES COUNTY WERE HALF THOSE WITH A JOB ARE
ILLEGALS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS. THE DEMS RESPONSE WAS TO MAKE IT
ILLEGAL FOR EMPLOYERS TO USE E-VERIFY!
*
6. ILLEGALS COST HOSPITALS $1.2
BILLION PER YEAR FOR “FREE” MEDICAL!
*
7. ONE IN FIVE BIRTHS IN LOS
ANGELES COUNTY ARE BY PREGNANT MEXICANS THAT HOPPED OUR BORDERS FOR LA RAZA
WELFARE AND “FREE” ANCHOR BABY BIRTHING. HER CHILD WILL ALSO BE A CITIZEN OF
MEXICO.
*
8. THE TAX FREE MEXICAN UNDERGROUND
ECONOMY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY ALONE IS CALCULATED TO BE OVER $2 BILLION PER
YEAR.
*
9. CA NOW SENDS FOUR LA RAZA
SUPREMACIST TO CONGRESS. THESE ARE RACIST REPS. XAVIER BECERRA, JOE BACA,
SISTERS LINDA & LORETTA SANCHEZ (OBAMA’S SEC. OF ILLEGAL LABOR LA RAZA
SUPREMACIST HILDA SOLIS WAS A FORMER CA CONGRESSWOMAN). ALL OF THESE LA RAZA
SUPREMACIST WERE VOTED INTO OFFICE BY ILLEGALS!
*
10.THE CITY OF LOS ANGELES, UNDER
LA RAZA VILLARAIGOSA, PUTS OUT $10 MILLION PER YEAR FOR MEXICAN GRAFFITI ABATEMENT!
*
CALIFORNIA HAS MORE SANCTUARY CITIES THAN ANY STATE IN THE
COUNTRY. LA RAZA HAS DECLARED MEXIFORNIA OCCUPIED!
HERE’S WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE FOR ONE MEX INFESTED CITY OF CUDAHY:
“Crime statistics for the Potrero Club show
700 calls for police assistance there since September 2003, in response to
reports of shootings, assaults, stabbings, beatings by security guards, drug
use — even rape.”
*
“For the race everything! For others
nothing!”… LA RAZA “THE RACE”
Mexico right here in America
Illegals' low expectations for the rule of law is turning Southern California
into Mexico.
SEE: http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/the-town-the-law-forgot/15731/?page=2
EXERPT:
"A rough-and-tumble world of
small-city politics has come to define the drug- and gang-infested cities
clustered around the 710 freeway: Bell Gardens, Cudahy, Huntington Park,
Lynwood, Maywood and South Gate, among others.
In recent decades, the demographic shift from white working class to
Mexicans and Central Americans resulted in immigrants and their sons and
daughters gaining political power. Now, most elected officials reflect the
majority Latino population. But high unemployment, illegal immigration and a
maze of freeways, truck stops and industrial areas — just a half-day’s drive
from Mexico — have contributed to the busy drug-trafficking zones, blight and
violence.
Residents, many of them illegal or too young to vote, have it rough. After
complaining to authorities or taking too much notice of suspicious activity on
their block, some low-income residents have been repaid with retaliation or
violent threats. In Cudahy, one persistent complainer got a door-knock from the
police — a public no-no that alerts drug dealers to the complainer’s identity
and can result in that person’s property being vandalized.
“It gets a lot worse than that,” says a local cop, acknowledging that criminal
threats are so common that police are hard-pressed to investigate them.
In contrast to the vulnerability of the average Cudahy resident, business
owners who operate questionable businesses get velvet-glove treatment from
politicians that would be considered scandalous in the city of Los Angeles. In
Cudahy, the Potrero Club is one of several magnets for crime and is frequented
by gangsters, but it is nevertheless embraced by Cudahy authorities. A
notorious nightspot that parents warn their children to stay away from, the
Potrero Club has a long record of being the scene of thefts, assaults and drug
activity.
Officials in Cudahy openly promote this crime magnet, however, holding
fund-raisers for the Cudahy Youth Foundation there and even using it as an
annual gathering spot for a children’s Christmas pageant. Cudahy has sunk so
low that each year at Christmastime, Perez and the city council parade around
town on the back of a tow truck and toss candy to the children, with the
procession ending in a toy giveaway at the Potrero Club, whose owners in the
past have displayed photos not of Hollywood movie stars but of famous Mexican
drug traffickers.
Crime statistics for the Potrero Club show 700 calls for police assistance
there since September 2003, in response to reports of shootings, assaults,
stabbings, beatings by security guards, drug use — even rape.
City leaders don’t find it strange that a dangerous nightclub passes for a
civic pillar in Cudahy. Cars disappear from the Potrero at an alarming rate,
according to police reports obtained by the Weekly. When asked about Cudahy’s
use of the Potrero for official events, Perez says, 'It’s not my favorite
place, but we’ll continue to use it.'"
*
IN
THE LOS ANGLES BURBS, THE CITY CUDAHY UNDER MEXICAN OCCUPATION
“Cudahy is a strange little
city; some say a scary one. In 2003, city leaders fired the L.A. County
Sheriff’s Department — which had policed Cudahy for 14 years, focusing on gang
and drug crime — in favor of a nearby municipal police force that recently erupted
over public allegations of police brutality and kickbacks to police and city
officials from a towing company.
In Cudahy, the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency has seized almost 20 times more cocaine over the past five
years than in Bell, a bordering city of similar size, and the city suffers more
crime per capita than small towns nearby. It’s a city with 200 active gang
members, where shootings are common though homicide rare — that is, until 11
killings occurred in the wake of the sheriff’s departure in 2003.”
LOS ANGELES
MAYOR ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA IS A MEMBER OF THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY OF LA RAZA
AND THE FASCIST SEPARATIST MOVEMENT OF M.E.Ch.A.
The Town the
Law Forgot
An L.A. ’burb is mired in gangs,
cartels and south-of-the-border-style politics
Jeffrey Anderson
published: February 22, 2007
The first sign
of trouble for Cudahy City Council candidate Tony Mendoza was a pair of thong
panties mailed to his wife, with a note telling her to watch her husband’s
back. Then came the phone calls — and the death threats.
A
political novice in a tiny city of Mexican immigrants that hasn’t had an
election since 1999, Mendoza had expected dirty tricks. But to his dismay, the
caller, who spoke poor English and called every day for three days, said
Mendoza would be killed if he did not leave Cudahy, a 1.2-square-mile city 10
miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. After the third call, Mendoza pulled
out of the March 6 race. “I have my family to think about,” he said.
Running
for council seats against a slate of incumbents in a city infested with gangs
and drugs, Danny Cota and Luis Garcia faced similar tactics. A truck owned by
Garcia, a former city employee, was painted with graffiti, and ex-felon and
Cudahy city employee Gerardo Vallejo sought a restraining order against Garcia
for criminal threats. A judge tossed the complaint, but Garcia’s campaign was
rattled.
In
late December, at a holiday gathering at the City Club in downtown Los Angeles
hosted by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Cota ran into Bell Gardens City
Councilman Mario Beltran, who was perplexed to see Cota, a 29-year-old teacher,
hobnobbing and being photographed with Villaraigosa and others.
“Who
brought him here?” Councilman Beltran asked onlookers, some of whom are friends
of Cudahy’s Vice Mayor, Osvaldo Conde, who is running for re-election. “You
better watch out,” Beltran warned Cota, the bright-eyed challenger. “Conde will
take care of you with his cuerno de chivo.”
Though
Beltran was smiling as he tossed off some Mexican slang for an AK-47, Cota says
he did not appreciate such talk. A witness, Maywood Mayor Sergio Calderon, a
friend of Cota’s, says, “It was a joke, a tasteless joke.”
Cudahy
is a strange little city; some say a scary one. In 2003, city leaders fired the
L.A. County Sheriff’s Department — which had policed Cudahy for 14 years,
focusing on gang and drug crime — in favor of a nearby municipal police force
that recently erupted over public allegations of police brutality and kickbacks
to police and city officials from a towing company.
In
Cudahy, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has seized almost 20 times more
cocaine over the past five years than in Bell, a bordering city of similar
size, and the city suffers more crime per capita than small towns nearby. It’s
a city with 200 active gang members, where shootings are common though homicide
rare — that is, until 11 killings occurred in the wake of the sheriff’s
departure in 2003.
*
Cudahy
leaders seem satisfied. Consider the tone-deaf reaction of Cudahy City Manager
George Perez in early February, after the news broke on KNBC Channel 4 and in La
Opinión, a Spanish-language daily, that the city of Maywood, currently
under a $2-million-a-year contract to police Cudahy, was facing a state
takeover because the police department — the Maywood-Cudahy Police Department —
is so out of control.
“Police
problems in Maywood have nothing to do with us,” said Perez. “Our city council
is happy, and our citizens are too.”
Cudahy resembles a Mexican
border town more than it does a Los Angeles suburb. Entrenched gangs and
Mexican drug trafficking have trapped working-class legal and illegal
immigrants in a cycle of violence and fear, in a city where less than a quarter
of the 28,000 residents are eligible to vote. An uneducated city council, a
deeply troubled police force imported from Maywood two towns over, and the raw
power of the 18th Street Gang — a complex criminal organization with a knack
for setting up business fronts and obscuring underground drug activity — make
Cudahy residents seem like hostages in their own city.
By
most accounts, Cudahy City Council members — two retired union managers, an
insurance salesman, a waitress and a grocer — do not run the city as they were
elected to do. Rather, they defer to City Manager Perez, a former janitor who
is known to favor revenue traps such as DUI and driver’s license checkpoints
over aggressive tactics that make gangs and drug dealers less comfortable.
In
2001, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office convened a grand jury to
investigate whether Perez violated criminal conflict-of-interest laws. The
probe stemmed from his actions as a city councilman, when, after voting for an
ordinance that lifted a one-year waiting period between holding political
office and appointed office, Perez stepped down from the council and was
promptly appointed city manager, the city’s highest-paying job. According to
prosecutors’ memos and letters obtained by the L.A. Weekly, the D.A.’s
office was forced to drop the investigation after concluding that it “could not
prove a criminal violation” of state laws “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Known
as a ruthless political boss, Perez is not running for city council in the
upcoming March 6 election, but he is deserving of scrutiny. After all, he calls
the shots in Cudahy.
Perez
shrugs at allegations of foul play on the campaign trail, or any possibility
that his minions could be involved. “I’ve talked with Mendoza,” he says of
death threats that knocked the would-be candidate out of the running. “He
apologized for talking bad about me.”
Since
his revolving-door ascent from the council to city manager in 2000, Perez’s
salary has risen by $30,000 — more than most residents make in a year — to
$120,000. Meanwhile, the city’s problems remain dire: poverty, density, gangs
and drugs. One-third of residents are under 14 — a vulnerable population. Out
in front of Cudahy City Hall one November day, 16-year-old Erica summed up
Cudahy this way: “It’s small, so everything is close by. But it’s ugly, and
there are shootings.”
Victor,
a 16-year-old honor student who plays varsity football, runs track and holds
down a part-time job, says, “Some streets are too ghetto. There’s lots of
violence. My mother has been going to community meetings to ask about this, but
it always seems to stay the same.” Victor liked it better where his family used
to live: Compton, one of L.A.’s notorious trouble spots. “There should be more
police here in Cudahy. Kids don’t play outside. People don’t feel safe.”
With
its narrow, deep lots — the result of an agricultural past that is long gone —
its glut of rundown apartment buildings and its lack of economic growth, Cudahy
offers a good example of how Mexican drug cartels, the prison-based Mexican
mafia and gangs like 18th Street are attracted to the Los Angeles–adjacent
industrial sprawl populated by poor immigrants.
Do
these criminal elements influence Cudahy’s leaders, with city officials
answering to someone other than the public or the rule of law, in a town policed
by another town’s troubled police force? The answer is unknown.
Neither
the DEA nor the FBI has ever established a connection between city officials
and business fronts in the United States’ $65 billion illegal-drug market.
Beyond the street crime, behind the scenes, groups finance border tunnels and
run other drug-trafficking gateways that have helped make Southern California
the highest-intensity drug-distribution center in the United States.
Who
is actually responding to that? Local cities’ law enforcers have their hands
full with violent street crime. Local gang- and drug-task-force police officers
who talked to the Weekly on condition of anonymity say they are busy
with three criminal groups: traffickers, who are not always involved in gangs;
the Mexican mafia, which can be involved in either gangs or drug cartels; and
gangs such as 18th Street, which specialize in drug transportation,
distribution, money laundering and muscle.
Some
cops say they lack confidence in the feds to clean house at the civic level,
where drug traffickers rely on distribution fronts, money-laundering businesses
and tainted law enforcement. “You hear about all kinds of scandalous shit,”
says a local veteran detective. “But federal agents don’t have the street
knowledge to figure out what’s going on. They rely on us.”
DEA
agent Sarah Pullen says drug trafficking “has crept into society” via cash
businesses, real estate deals and otherwise legitimate civic leaders with
interests in both. “Southeast L.A. County has always been heavily involved in
all levels of drug trafficking,” says Pullen, who pursued Cudahy-based targets
in six of 12 cases in the past few years.
When
asked by the L.A. Weekly why Cudahy has shown up so frequently in
eye-popping drug busts from the 1980s to the present — sometimes with as much
as 500 pounds of cocaine seized at a time — Pullen says her agency doesn’t
track drug seizures by city. It tracks drug organizations, which aren’t
confined by borders.
But
after doing some research, Pullen was able to determine that from 2002 to 2007,
the DEA seized 27.5 pounds of cocaine from the city of Bell, Cudahy’s neighbor
directly to the north. In comparison, during that same time period, the agency
seized 486 pounds of cocaine in Cudahy — more than 17 times the amount seized
in Bell.
Mostly,
Pullen says, gangs and traffickers go where they feel most comfortable. She
cautions, “Once it gets past drugs and money, we turn it over to the FBI. We
don’t have the tools to connect all the dots.” For its part, the FBI will not
confirm public-corruption probes, much less whether any such probes involve
drug trafficking or money laundering. When asked, FBI agent Laura Eimiller
snaps, “I can’t talk about that. It could compromise ongoing investigations.”
A
rough-and-tumble world of small-city politics has come to define the drug- and
gang-infested cities clustered around the 710 freeway: Bell Gardens, Cudahy,
Huntington Park, Lynwood, Maywood and South Gate, among others.
In
recent decades, the demographic shift from white working class to Mexicans and
Central Americans resulted in immigrants and their sons and daughters gaining
political power. Now, most elected officials reflect the majority Latino
population. But high unemployment, illegal immigration and a maze of freeways,
truck stops and industrial areas — just a half-day’s drive from Mexico — have
contributed to the busy drug-trafficking zones, blight and violence.
Residents,
many of them illegal or too young to vote, have it rough. After complaining to
authorities or taking too much notice of suspicious activity on their block,
some low-income residents have been repaid with retaliation or violent threats.
In Cudahy, one persistent complainer got a door-knock from the police — a
public no-no that alerts drug dealers to the complainer’s identity and can
result in that person’s property being vandalized.
“It
gets a lot worse than that,” says a local cop, acknowledging that criminal
threats are so common that police are hard-pressed to investigate them.
In
contrast to the vulnerability of the average Cudahy resident, business owners
who operate questionable businesses get velvet-glove treatment from politicians
that would be considered scandalous in the city of Los Angeles. In Cudahy, the
Potrero Club is one of several magnets for crime and is frequented by
gangsters, but it is nevertheless embraced by Cudahy authorities. A notorious
nightspot that parents warn their children to stay away from, the Potrero Club
has a long record of being the scene of thefts, assaults and drug activity.
Officials
in Cudahy openly promote this crime magnet, however, holding fund-raisers for
the Cudahy Youth Foundation there and even using it as an annual gathering spot
for a children’s Christmas pageant. Cudahy has sunk so low that each year at
Christmastime, Perez and the city council parade around town on the back of a
tow truck and toss candy to the children, with the procession ending in a toy
giveaway at the Potrero Club, whose owners in the past have displayed photos
not of Hollywood movie stars but of famous Mexican drug traffickers.
Crime
statistics for the Potrero Club show 700 calls for police assistance there
since September 2003, in response to reports of shootings, assaults, stabbings,
beatings by security guards, drug use — even rape.
City
leaders don’t find it strange that a dangerous nightclub passes for a civic
pillar in Cudahy. Cars disappear from the Potrero at an alarming rate,
according to police reports obtained by the Weekly. When asked about
Cudahy’s use of the Potrero for official events, Perez says, “It’s not my
favorite place, but we’ll continue to use it.”
Even
before recent threats against the upstart Cudahy City Council candidates,
politics and violence bled together in the surrounding and equally troubled
immigrant suburbs.
The
widely publicized nonfatal shooting of a councilman in South Gate by an unknown
assailant in 1999 ushered in a brutal era. Soon afterward, police investigated
the mayor of neighboring Bell Gardens for allegedly trying to run over a former
city councilman. Former South Gate Treasurer Albert Robles allegedly threatened
to rape and murder his political opponents. No charges resulted from the
alleged threats, but Robles was convicted of bribery and sent to prison. In
January of this year, a city council candidate in Huntington Park reported to
police that he received “terrorist threats” on the street from three men in
dark suits who sped off in a luxury car.
Some
Mexican-American politicians are apologists for the dark side in these troubled
little cities, chalking up the chaos to lack of experience on the part of the
Latino officials who took power as the demographics changed.
“Just
like a mother never gives birth to a criminal, no politician ever gets elected
with criminal intent,” says Rosario Marin, former U.S treasurer and former
Huntington Park mayor, who was followed in her car and terrorized by unknown
assailants as her city struggled with gang violence, drug trafficking and
federal investigations.
“I
have to believe that,” adds Marin, a prominent California Republican with close
ties to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who appointed her as secretary of the
State and Consumer Services Agency. “Yet it hurts me to see how people get
corrupted.”
Confronted
with an alarming pattern, District Attorney Steve Cooley distinguished himself
from his predecessors by going after public corruption in L.A. County — with
mixed results. Some say his convictions of officials in Compton and South Gate
were low-lying fruit, and that Cudahy got away from him.
Ever-present
in Cudahy and its neighboring cities are three attorneys who have, over the
years, blended municipal law and lobbying to great effect. Arnoldo Beltran,
Francisco Leal and David Olivas have made a small fortune representing
scandal-plagued cities. Today, Olivas represents Cudahy and Leal represents
Maywood, with the two cities sharing a police force that is in disarray.
Perhaps
foremost among the many controversies in which these lawyers have been
embroiled are allegations explored in a 1999 L.A. Times story that
Beltran, a Stanford-educated lawyer, and Leal, a Harvard Law School graduate
raised by immigrants in El Paso, were threatening to launch recall campaigns
against elected officials in Lynwood, Commerce and Bell Gardens if they did not
vote to retain the two men’s legal services.
Beltran
and Leal, former partners in a now-defunct law firm that also included Olivas
as an associate, at the time denied the allegations. Beltran would not comment
for this article. Leal did not return several calls for comment. But they would
be hard-pressed to deny that their political savvy has earned them a reputation
for being influential advisers to many small cities.
In
1999, the firm split, with Leal and Olivas going off to form Leal, Olivas &
Jauregui, which represented the city of Cudahy in 2000 when Perez made the
revolving-door move, through a series of ordinances drafted by David Olivas,
from city councilman to city manager. The resulting grand-jury investigation
did not lead to criminal charges but left a lasting mark on the city.
Less
than a year later, in Bell Gardens, Beltran drafted a slightly different
ordinance with the exact same effect: to upgrade a city councilwoman, Maria
Chacon, to city manager. The move had serious consequences. Investigators from
the D.A.’s office searched Beltran’s offices in 2001 in connection with an
investigation of Chacon, whom they later charged with criminal conflict of
interest. Beltran hired celebrity defense lawyer Mark Geragos, though Beltran
was not named as a target of the investigation, nor was he charged with a
crime.
Chacon
spent the next several years defending the charges on grounds that Beltran
advised her it was okay to vote on the ordinance that allowed her to switch
roles from council member to city manager. The state Supreme Court rejected
that defense recently, clearing the way for Cooley’s office to take her to
trial.
The
methods of Beltran, Leal and Olivas left a mark on their former law partner
Jesse Jauregui, who broke all ties with the group in 2001. Jauregui has this —
and only this — to say about his old colleagues: “I’m glad to no longer be a
part of Tammany Hall–style politics. How far it goes, I do not know. It became
a seamy situation.”
The
legal maneuvering that led to new leadership in Cudahy was part of a larger
strategy, says former Cudahy councilwoman Araceli Gonzalez, a child of Mexican
immigrants. “They were very outspoken,” says Gonzalez of the lawyers who
advised Cudahy and Bell Gardens. “They were telling people they were going to
take over these cities and put Latinos in power.”
Olivas,
now in his own law practice while wearing two hats — as Cudahy city attorney
and councilman in Baldwin Park — argues that the move to anoint Perez as Cudahy
city manager was about Latino self-determination, and that change in leadership
in small southeast L.A. County cities was for the better.
“People
were tired of being governed by outsiders,” Olivas says. “This was people from
Cudahy, of Cudahy and for Cudahy.”
But
since that time of upheaval, certain actions by Cudahy officials have raised
questions about whether they are acting in the public’s best interest as
Maywood struggles to get the two cities’ shared police force under control.
Near
downtown Cudahy, a thick haze hovers over the 710 freeway, with the Los Angeles
skyline barely visible beyond an expanse of rail yards, storage containers,
terminals and freight cars. Billboards for casinos and strip clubs and a tangle
of power lines clutter the skies surrounding this bleak stretch of highway.
The
cities around the 710 freeway — a gateway from the Port of Long Beach to the
rest of the nation — are so small they share freeway exits. Graffiti is
scrawled on overpasses, exit signs and the concrete banks of the L.A. River,
informing visitors that they are about to enter gangland. The grimy strip
malls, auto-body shops and fast-food joints further speak to a loss of
prosperity.
Cudahy,
the smallest, poorest and most violent of these cities, feels like a place the
law has forgotten — a feeling that intensifies along Santa Ana Street, where a
large “18” is spray-painted on a telephone-utility box at one end of the block,
and another large “18” is tagged at the other end — on a government dumpster,
no less, at Cudahy City Hall.
City
Hall is a squat brick structure in a remote corner of the city bordered by the
L.A. River and next to an often-empty park, a school and a weed-filled would-be
basketball court with a sign that reads “Opening Fall 2006.”
Inside,
City Manager George Perez sits behind his desk listening to Frankie Valli and
the Four Seasons on his iPod. His walls are adorned with photos of him and his
’64 Chevy Impala, with a license plate that reads, “2 Cudahy.” Perez, stocky
with helmetlike black hair, is equally feared and loved in Cudahy.
He
likes to tell people he has the city “locked down.” In his mid-40s, he’s the
consummate Mexican-American political boss — just don’t tell him that. Perez, a
man who sports a T-shaped tattoo between his thumb and forefinger, argues:
“This is so different from Mexican politics.” Perez refuses to discuss the
tattoo, or say much about the other one, on his leg — of Cudahy’s official city
seal. “I’m not from Mexico; I’m from here.”
Perez
is bracing for the March election, although he is not a candidate. He knows
that two novice candidates are out there, hearing from poor immigrants, renters
and property owners about how they are afraid to walk the streets at night, how
there is nowhere decent to shop, and how other cities mock Cudahy, calling it
“Crudahy.”
“We’ve
never had greater public service in this community,” Perez insists. “We’ve
broken down barriers by hiring more bilingual staff. I have an open-door
policy. My wife and I grew up here and understand the underprivileged
families.”
Thirty
years ago, Perez started as a janitor, “fishing turds out of the toilets,” he
says with bitter pride. Perez now owns four parcels in Cudahy and recently
purchased a $700,000 house in Hacienda Heights, in the San Gabriel Valley,
where he lives part-time. In addition to his Impala, in mint condition, he
tools around in a convertible BMW, a luxury made possible by his
$120,000-a-year salary plus a $600-per-month stipend — an unusually large fee
to act as a commissioner on the board of one of three water companies serving
Cudahy.
How
Perez got to where he is today is a controversial subject in Cudahy.
As
they did in Bell Gardens, investigators swept down on Cudahy City Hall and
Perez’s house in 2001, looking for evidence that he violated criminal
conflict-of-interest laws when he backed the maneuvering that led to his switch
from councilman to city manager on the same day.
According
to sworn statements and memos from District Attorney Steve Cooley’s office
obtained by the Weekly, Cudahy employees were pressured to use the same
law firm that represented Perez in the investigation. (That firm, astonishingly,
was headed by Cooley’s best friend, former District Attorney Robert
Philibosian.) A clause in the document that city employees were pressured to
sign stated in part: “An advantage of using a single law firm in a criminal
matter may be to help assure a common position and increase the likelihood that
none of the clients will cooperate with the prosecution.” Other city officials,
later named as targets, also retained top-shelf attorneys on the city’s dime.
The result was a stonewall defense that cost Cudahy taxpayers $1 million in
legal fees.
The
aftermath has not been as promised by the upbeat Perez. Some of his harshest
critics — L.A. Sheriff’s deputies who worked in Cudahy — accuse him of seeking
out a predatory tow-truck company to tow cars for minor violations and thus
boost city coffers. Property owners accuse him of being quick to aggressively
ticket them for small building violations, even as the city's main commercial
corridor wallows in blight.
L.A.
Sheriff’s Detective Raul Gama patrolled Cudahy in the mid-1990s, trying to
eradicate gangs. He claims that Sheriff’s Department raids and sweeps, aimed at
catching gang members with probation and parole violations and putting them
back behind bars, were reducing gang-related crime by 35 percent.
Gama
describes his interactions with then-councilman Perez as “a game of cat and
mouse.” He says Perez preferred him to focus on vehicle checkpoints, which
allowed the city to tow cars and charge impound fees when the city nabbed
mostly illegal immigrants for not having driver’s licenses.
“I
had a problem with preying on people,” Gama says. “It wasn’t the best use of
our resources.”
Later,
as city manager, Perez eliminated jobs, concentrating power in his office,
according to internal city memos obtained by the Weekly. After
disagreeing with a member of the Chamber of Commerce, he stopped the city’s
longtime contributions to the chamber, causing the chamber to leave Cudahy,
which contributed to disarray in the city’s business community.
L.A.
County Deputy Sheriff Miguel Mejia, who served for several years in Cudahy,
says he always was baffled by Perez’s obsession with wielding power while law
enforcers were fighting an uphill battle against gangs and drug dealers, who,
he alleges, seemed to have an inside line into Cudahy City Hall.
Says
Mejia, “We brought in helicopters, a special gang-enforcement unit. I seriously
believe gangs felt our presence.” But, he says, “If we suspected someone of
committing a crime, we’d have to keep it from the city.” Interviews with two
former Cudahy municipal officers, who asked to remain anonymous, confirm that
part of their job was to report to City Hall about what the police were doing,
and who they were talking to.
Perez’s
revenue-generating activities paid off —? sort of. The city reserve climbed to
$3.8 million in 2006 — an unusually high reserve for any California city with
an $8 million annual budget.
Yet
unpaid bills mounted. The Weekly has reviewed internal e-mails from city
employees warning that road-repair companies were threatening to send the city
to collections and reminding Perez that payroll expenses were reported for
employees no longer with the city. Despite the huge city reserve, payment on
the police contract fell behind last year by $245,000, according to a June 20,
2006, letter to Perez from former Maywood City Attorney Cary Reisman.
A
2003 decision shows where the city’s priorities are — and may begin to explain
why Maywood’s current police troubles are not easily separable from Cudahy.
Perez
and the sheriff had already been at cross-purposes for years when, three years
ago, Perez moved to oust two local tow-truck companies the Sheriff’s Department
had long worked with. Perez wanted to bring in Maywood Club Towing, giving it
access to sensitive law-enforcement data, according to Sergeant Ruben Martinez
of the L.A. Sheriff’s Department.
“You’ve
dealt with two companies for years that are located right in your city, and all
of sudden you go outside with a company you’ve never worked with before?” asks
Martinez. “We weren’t comfortable with that.”
Not
to be thwarted by the Sheriff’s Department, Perez shopped for another agency to
police Cudahy — and Maywood, despite sharing no boundaries with Cudahy, liked
the idea of earning $2 million a year, which allowed Maywood to double the size
of its small force. Perez says the move had nothing to do with a towing
dispute.
Dumping
the sheriff’s contract was bizarre. Interviews with local drug police and a
review of search-warrant records from 2006 confirm that Cudahy — all 1.2 square
miles of it — is a crime hotbed, even as Maywood police work overtime on
traffic patrol. In April, federal agents seized automatic weapons and 270
pounds of marijuana and caught Cudahy-based suspects on a wiretap discussing
plans to buy and sell “20 to 30 pounds” of methamphetamine and large amounts of
cocaine.
“The
Sheriff’s Department is a large, professional organization,” says former Cudahy
City Attorney Michael Colantuono, who was fired by Perez. “But the city manager
does not have as much control over the Sheriff’s Department . . . the
sheriff won’t protect your friends or punish your enemies.”
Along
with the Maywood Police Department came Maywood Club Towing. A mess ensued — at
least in Maywood, which last week imploded in scandal. On February 13, under
intense community pressure, the Maywood City Council unanimously voted to ask
California Attorney General Jerry Brown to probe allegations of kickbacks to
cops and city officials by Maywood Club Towing, as well as claims of police
sexual and racial abuse. Among the accusations is that Maywood police flew to
Las Vegas, courtesy of the towing company, getting free rooms and the services
of prostitutes.
A
spokesman for Brown said on Tuesday that the attorney general will defer to
District Attorney Cooley, who announced last Friday that he has launched a
criminal investigation of Maywood officials and police.
Last
August, Maywood police officer Alfred Hutchings received anonymous letters at
his office at Chapman ?University, where he works part-time as an ethics
professor. The letters, copies of which were obtained by the Weekly,
?apparently were written by a Maywood Police Department ?whistleblower and
contain graphic descriptions of racially and sexually abusive cops who were
protected if they met quotas for impounding vehicles. The letters also accused
two City Council members of taking kickbacks from Maywood Club Towing.
Hutchings
turned the letters over to Maywood Police Chief Bruce Leflar, who in November
named Hutchings to head the department’s professional-standards unit. But
within a week, Leflar went on medical leave, according to an internal e-mail
from Lieutenant Paul Pine, who, as the new ranking cop, promptly dismissed
Hutchings.
The
letters claim that Pine lived rent-free in an apartment in Maywood owned by the
owners of Maywood Club Towing, and that many Maywood officers, including Pine,
left previous jobs under pressure from superiors. According to civil rights
lawyer Tom Barham, the new acting police chief, Richard Lyons, was promoted
from patrol sergeant with no command experience or training, after leaving jobs
with Santa Ana Park Police and the city of El Monte. “He’s no Audie Murphy,”
Barham told a packed Maywood City Council hearing last Tuesday.
Sergeant
Enrique Gonzalez, the Maywood Police Department’s official liaison to Cudahy,
insisted to the Weekly recently that the allegations “are isolated to
Maywood. In Cudahy the citizens want us there. They cooperate with us.”
In
recent months the Weekly paid numerous visits to the Maywood Police
Department to gather Cudahy crime statistics and ask about public safety.
During one of our visits, in January, acting Maywood chief Lyons refused to
discuss the Cudahy police contract or anything related to policing or public
safety, referring all questions to the new Maywood city attorney, Francisco
Leal, formerly of Leal & Olivas. (Leal’s former partner, David Olivas,
served as Maywood city attorney until 2004.) The Weekly has called Leal
for comment several times, but he has not responded.
Why
did Cudahy want Maywood police and Maywood Club Towing in the first place, and
why is Cudahy City Manager George Perez satisfied with them amid all the
problems?
The
Weekly confirmed with Perez that several of the officers named in the
anonymous letters to Hutchings have policed the streets of Cudahy, including a
current motorcycle officer named Florencio Mesa. Mesa stands publicly accused
of sexual misconduct, and also is known as a prolific ticket writer, racking up
some 100 impounds a month, which brings in $100,000 in revenue, according to
the letters. Perez acknowledges Mesa’s ticket-writing prowess but says the
allegations against Mesa are “out of character.”
Perez
says that in Cudahy, people don’t tolerate bad police behavior. But some
residents are extremely unhappy with the job Maywood police are doing in
Cudahy.
Three
months ago, 15-year-old Joseph Garcia was shot and killed on Santa Ana Street,
less than 100 yards from Cudahy City Hall. Perez was at the scene when police
arrived, and he received an earful from Garcia’s father, according to police
sources, who say Garcia’s father was blaming Perez for his son’s death — not
enough Maywood police patrolling the streets. Perez, when asked by the Weekly
about the father's anger, replies dismissively, “People are always looking
for someone to blame.”
Two
weeks later, with residents still shocked by the City Hall–adjacent killing, a
Neighborhood Watch meeting attracted 200 people — but crime was never
discussed. Instead, Perez presided over a surreal pep rally featuring “happy
birthday” sing-alongs, rounds of applause for new parents, sales pitches from
Herbalife and New York Life, and a gift raffle.
For
two hours, nobody mentioned murdered teenager Joseph Garcia, or street violence.
The most pressing matter raised was speed bumps. “That’s how George plays it,”
Sheriff’s Sergeant Martinez says. “He’s into petting puppies and kissing
babies.”
Perez
urges folks to call him with problems, but one woman went too far and ended up
with an unwanted visit from Maywood police and a vandalized car. After the odd
Neighborhood Watch meeting last November, the woman reminded Perez that he had
advised her to call police about young men loitering outside her apartment, a
chemical smell she thought was related to drugs, and strangers suspiciously
running into the building from idling cars.
After
she complained to Perez, police loudly knocked on her door in full view of the
trouble spot. Then, someone scraped her car with a key. She was afraid to let
her children outside after that. Perez listened intently, as she described her
fear. “Call me next time,” Perez was now telling her, “and I’ll see it doesn’t
happen again.”
The
next day, Perez presided over another community event in which he once again
acted as the benevolent political boss: free turkeys and bags of food for
everyone — compliments of the city with a $3.8 million reserve and one of the
highest unemployment rates in Los Angeles County.
Such
events enhance Cudahy’s south-of-the-border image. While residents get these
nominal handouts, the Weekly has learned, gang members get city jobs. In
May 2006, according to a Maywood Police arrest report, police were attempting
to pull over 20-year-old city employee Robert Garcia in traffic, when Garcia
drove into Perez’s driveway and started yelling, “George! George! George!”
Police searching Garcia’s car found a knife and less than a gram of meth and
booked Garcia, identified in the report as an 18th Street gang member, for
possession of drugs. Garcia pleaded guilty and is receiving drug counseling,
according to the District Attorney's Office.
Perez
says he believes in second chances. But when asked by the Weekly whether
he believes he should be held accountable for the dangerous conditions in his
city, Perez offers an anecdote that suggests he is unable to confront them.
In
December 2005, 28-year-old Cudahy resident Francisco Lopez was shot and killed,
Perez says, a murder which prompted a woman to loudly criticize Perez in public
while her son, an active gang member, looked on. Perez, knowing about the son’s
gang involvement, said nothing about the mother’s hypocrisy.
Clearly
proud, Perez tells the Weekly, “The next day the son came and thanked
me” for not publicly mentioning his gang affiliation.
Others
find that benevolent attitude outrageous. “That is empowering a gangster and
telling him it’s okay,” says former councilwoman Araceli Gonzalez.
At
the same time, Perez has cordial relations with Hector Marroquin Sr., an 18th
Street Gang member who, despite touting himself as a gang-intervention worker,
also is a street enforcer for the Mexican mafia, according to confidential
law-enforcement documents obtained by the Weekly. (See “Broken Bridges,”
L.A. Weekly, December 15-21, 2006.)
Perez
is hardly shy about his relationship with this alleged mafia associate whose
street nickname is “Weasel.” Marroquin owns a bar called Marroking’s Deuces on
Atlantic Avenue in Cudahy. This month, campaign signs for the longtime Cudahy
City Council incumbents adorn the property, the scene of an alleged assault in
2005 during which Marroquin, according to an arrest report, warned a patron who
owed him money: “You’re messing with the Mexican mafia. I run all of Cudahy.”
Last
March, police searched the bar and adjacent buildings in connection with a
home-invasion robbery they suspected Marroquin’s son had committed. The police
found ammunition, drugs and gang literature.
Marroquin’s
reaction to the police search? He called City Manager Perez.
Perez
pauses briefly before conceding that he placed a call to then-Maywood Police
Chief Bruce Leflar, going to the top on behalf of a dubious associate. “I’m
concerned any time a business owner in this community feels harassed,” Perez
says.
Perez
fumbles for an explanation when asked why Marroking’s Deuces, according to city
records, has not had a valid business license since 2004: “I don’t know how
that happened.” When asked about the community’s low perception of the bar
Marroquin owns, Perez shrugs, “We’ve noticed a certain element hanging out
there.”
A
key figure in the upcoming election is Cudahy Vice Mayor Osvaldo Conde, the
owner of a meat market and check-cashing store. Conde, at times a Perez ally,
seems to lead a double life.
A
regular at the Potrero Club, where he doesn’t bother to clear security but just
walks right in, Conde was arrested in the early-morning hours in December in
Huntington Park on charges of driving under the influence of alcohol, according
to information released by Huntington Park Police.
He
was not booked as Osvaldo Conde but as Osvaldo Lopez. He has pleaded not guilty
to the charge of drunken driving. But the Weekly has learned that Conde
has two different birth dates and two different Social Security numbers on
business-license records in Cudahy. Conde lives part time in Lynwood, four
miles south of Cudahy. Conde would not respond to the Weekly’s requests
for an interview.
It’s
hard not to feel for Cudahy, the little city plagued by gang and drug crime —
and no apparent interest on the part of local, regional or federal authorities
in stopping it. Observers say the government won’t act until residents raise a
big enough stink — as Maywood residents just did.
“People
in Cudahy are immigrants and renters, and all they want is to come home from
work and enjoy a barbecue on weekends,” says L.A. Sheriff’s Detective Gama.
“There are good people there, but they don’t want to challenge authority.”
Drug
police say that many drug shipments crossing the Mexican border make two stops
in San Diego and head straight for Cudahy. Drug runners from Cudahy return from
Arizona and Texas and bring new guns into the community, police say. Meanwhile,
18th Street is engaged in violent conflict with a group called Just Blazing It,
and the Clara Street and Cudahy 13 gangs remain active.
Nothing
is likely to change in Cudahy until elected officials and appointed City
Manager George Perez take a different approach. That seems unlikely. Perez is
campaigning for the longtime incumbents he appears to influence — and he is
guaranteeing victory on March 6. “We’ve already won,” he declares.
Former
councilwoman Araceli Gonzalez is concerned that upstart city council candidates
Danny Cota and Luis Garcia, seen as challengers not to their rivals running on
the ballot but to Perez, don’t stand a chance because they refuse to raise
money for their campaigns.
Garcia
says he doesn’t want to owe anyone. Cota seems like he’s just enjoying the
thrill of an election. Despite the thuglike tactics that scared off their
friend Tony Mendoza, Cota and Garcia are not intimidated.
Still,
Garcia confides he has misgivings about life in Cudahy. “Our parents left
Mexico to have a better life here,” he says, implying that Cudahy is falling
short of that dream.
Gonzalez,
who left Cudahy after George Perez took over as city manager, has moved back.
She says she is interested in teaching people how to stand up to the city’s
bullying. But she too knows her limitations. As a longtime resident of Cudahy,
she seems to sense the darker forces at play. “Some things are not worth
getting ?killed over.”
*
When Mexicans take over..... THE LA RAZA (THE RACE)
OCCUPATION PLAN at MAYWOOD or like Maywood’s sister city, TIJUANA?
The city of Maywood in Los Angeles County
declared itself a sanctuary zone for illegal aliens this year. Then it got rid
of its drunk-driving checkpoints, because they were nabbing too many illegal
aliens. Next, this 96 percent Latino city, almost half of whose adult
population lacks a ninth-grade education, disbanded its police traffic division
entirely, so that illegals wouldn't need to worry about having their cars towed
for being unlicensed.
Have you ever heard of CALIFORNIA’S LA RAZA DEMS speaking
out about the 30 billion Mexican drug invasion? OR THE EVER GROWING MEXICAN
GANG INVASION?
What happens when the Mexicans invade. Beyond walls covered
with graffiti, surge in crime, anchor babies, contempt for the American flag,
language, and laws.... the place becomes a filthy Mexican ghetto.
The sad thing about this is
there are communities being destroyed by Mexicans all over the 50 states. It’s
not just the border states close to the Mexican drug routes.
The city of Maywood in Los Angeles County
declared itself a sanctuary zone for illegal aliens this year. Then it got rid
of its drunk-driving checkpoints, because they were nabbing too many illegal
aliens. Next, this 96 percent Latino city, almost half of whose adult
population lacks a ninth-grade education, disbanded its police traffic division
entirely, so that illegals wouldn't need to worry about having their cars towed
for being unlicensed.
With crime rampant, political
rivalry fuels armed feuds between city and state forces.
By Richard Marosi
Times Staff WriterJune 4,
2007
*
[W]e
ought to be able to learn the perils of illegal immigration by looking at
California.
WHAT
CONSERVATIVES AND THE GOP DARE NOT SAY ABOUT IMMIGRATION
By
Selwyn Duke
January 6, 2012
NewsWithViews.com
In
a recent election piece, pundit Ann Coulter identified illegal migration as one
of the two most important issues of our time. She writes that if we fail at
halting it, “the country will be changed permanently.”
She continues:
Taxes can be raised and lowered. Regulations can be removed
(though they rarely are). Attorneys general and Cabinet members can be fired.
Laws can be repealed. Even Supreme Court justices eventually die.
But capitulate on illegal immigration, and the entire
country will have the electorate of California. There will be no turning back.
She expands on this later in the piece:
[W]e
ought to be able to learn the perils of illegal immigration by looking at
California.
Massive legal and illegal immigration has already so changed
the California electorate that no Republican can be elected statewide anymore.
…If even Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, two bright,
attractive, successful female business executives – one pro-life and one
pro-choice – can't win a statewide election in California spending millions of
their own dollars in the middle of the 2010 Republican sweep, it's buenas
noches, muchachos.
Coulter is, of course, right – but she only dare hint at the
real problem. The fact is that halting illegal migration will do nothing to
forestall the socialist electoral shift to which she refers.
Question: Do you really think the demographic earthquake
that turned the Golden State blue was mainly the result of illegal migration?
Or do you think that the legal variety might have had
something to do with it?
There certainly are a few differences between legal
immigration and illegal migration. For instance, we can’t know if someone
sneaking into our country is a criminal, a terrorist or is carrying a disease.
But the reality is that in most respects illegal migration is not a separate
and distinct problem.
It is an exacerbation of the problem.
Because demographically speaking, legal immigration and
illegal migration are virtually identical. Most all illegal migrants hail from
the Third World and Asia, and – owing to the Immigration Act of 1965 (Ted
Kennedy’s handiwork) – 85 percent of legal immigrants do as well.
In other words, yes, adding illegal migrants into the mix
will help the statists take their California dreamin’ nationwide more quickly,
but it will happen regardless unless we change our suicidal immigration model. So it really doesn’t matter if we
“capitulate” on illegal migration or not, because we capitulated on the
legalized version of it a long time ago. Now we’re only deciding whether
Western civilization in the U.S. will get a death by 100 demographic cuts or
1000.
To be fair, Ann Coulter at least made passing mention of
this reality when she slipped into her piece that “Massive legal and
illegal immigration has already so changed the California electorate [emphasis
added]….” Yet with the exception of Pat Buchanan, yours truly and a few others,
this is an area where you’re more likely to hear the truth from leftist
commentators – when they’re licking their chops over how successful they’ve
been at importing their voters. Just consider, for instance, a 2011 NPR piece
in which Mara Liasson cites a study by Ruy Teixeira at liberal feel tank Center
for American Progress and writes:
Recent
surges in the number of Hispanics in Arizona and Georgia could make those
states potentially friendlier to Democratic candidates as well next year
[2012]. Teixeira thinks similar population shifts could make holding on to
Pennsylvania, where the president campaigned Wednesday, a little bit easier.
And if you think it’ll be a bit easier in 2012, wait till
you see 2022.
And 2032 and 2042? Well, Orwell’s calling.
The fact is that upon being naturalized, our modern-day immigrants
generally vote Democrat by wide margins – irrespective of whether upon arrival
they were labeled legal or illegal.
And this isn’t hard to understand. Would you expect a devout
Muslim to relinquish his faith upon setting foot on American terra firma? Would
you suppose that mere passage across a border could magically transform a
committed communist into a fan of free markets? My point is that ideology is
much like religion: It is something deep-seated. It becomes part of a person’s
self-image and gives his life meaning. And whether or not America is still the
land of the free, it’s certainly not the land of the free from harsh realities.
And the reality is this: Most of today’s immigrants’ native
lands have socialist-type governments because their peoples support socialist
politicians. This is why Democrats import them: so these new arrivals can
support socialist politicians here. They’re casting the votes Americans won’t
cast.
Unfortunately, though, the closest we come to discussing
this is when statists write banal election-analysis pieces. Otherwise,
immigration is framed as purely an economic issue. Are immigrants supplanting
Americans or merely doing jobs natives won’t? Are they contributing more in
taxes than they use in services? In a nutshell, we just argue about money.
But what does it profit a nation to absorb the world but to
lose its soul?
The fact is that the immigration debate is nothing less than
a discussion about what kind of civilization we’re going to be. For the people
make the culture – not the other way around – and the culture makes the
government. In just the way that the Islamic invasion of Egypt in the seventh
century turned it into a Muslim and Arab land when it had been neither, if you
replace America’s population with a Mexican or Muslim one, you no longer have a
Western civilization. You have Mexico Norte or Iran West.
It’s the culture, stupid.
But don’t expect a serious discussion about this anytime
soon. For we are in the grip of Immigrationism,
the belief that immigration is always good and must be the one constant in an
ever-changing universe of policy. It really is one of the most effective
brainwashing con-jobs in history: Statists have made talk of what ensures their
ultimate victory taboo. And Americans have been conditioned to accept as
axiomatic a policy that guarantees the destruction of Western civilization in
the U.S.
So if to you immigration is just a matter workers and labor
costs, hospitals and services, and dollars and cents, then, hey, pesos and dinars
can fill a bank account just as well. But if you’re concerned about the entire
country having a Golden State electorate and San Francisco values, you cannot
separate legal immigration from illegal migration. It’s all or nothing.
To only argue against amnesty is to fight for a half-measure
– one that, ultimately, will still leave your children America dreamin’ on a
California day.
Selwyn Duke is a writer, columnist and
public speaker whose work has been published widely online and in print, on
both the local and national levels. He has been featured on the Rush Limbaugh
Show and has been a regular guest on the award-winning Michael Savage Show. His
work has appeared in Pat Buchanan's magazine, The American Conservative, and he
writes regularly for The New American, and Christian Music Perspective.
E-Mail: SelwynDuke@optonline.net
Website: selwynduke.com
*
Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, February 11, 2008
In California, League of United Latin American Citizens has adopted a
resolution to declare "California Del Norte" a sanctuary zone for
immigrants. The declaration urges the Mexican government to invoke its rights
under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo "to seek third‑nation neutral
arbitration of disputes concerning immigration laws and their
enforcement." We’ll have the story.
*
Mexico’s
previous president, Vicente Fox,
has boasted that Mexicans who speak Spanish in the U.S. are doing their
patriotic duty (to Mexico, of course) and complained about
Anglo-Saxons not getting with the globalization program fast enough.
Well, in the 1990s, the organization's longtime
president Raul Yzaguirre declared that "US English [the organization] is to Hispanics as the Ku
Klux Klan is to blacks."
Lou Dobbs Tonight
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
In his first state of
the union speech since becoming president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon criticized
the U.S. government and its efforts to shut down illegal immigration. During
the speech Calderon proclaimed that “Mexico
does not end at its borders” and that “where there is a Mexican, there is a
Mexico.” Tune in for a full report on Calderon’s vigorous fight to protect
Mexican interests in the United States—even when they’re built on illegal
immigration.
Lou Dobbs' commentary
appears weekly on CNN.com.
*
TIJUANA —
The two police forces eyed each other across the narrow downtown street. On one
side of 8th Street, city cops formed a line in front of their headquarters. On
the other, 30 masked state police officers dressed in black faced them, holding
weapons. City police had detained two state agents for allegedly threatening
the mayor's bodyguards. The state police had come to free the two. They marched
forward and tried to shoulder their way inside the building. The standoff last
year, which ended when city police released the agents, was one of several
incidents that have pitted police force against police force in a conflict that
seems to have deepened with each car chase and raid. Armed confrontations
between law enforcement agencies are nothing new in Mexico, where police often
take the sides of rival drug cartels. But in Tijuana the friction is at least
partly a political fight between the National Action Party, also known as PAN,
and the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.A period of relative harmony
was broken when Jorge Hank Rhon, the PRI candidate, took office as mayor in
late 2004 and hired his own police chief to run the 2,750-member municipal
department, which the PAN had controlled for more than a decade. Baja
California Gov. Eugenio Elorduy Walther of the PAN remained in charge of
Tijuana's state police force, which includes 450 investigators and a highly
trained rapid-response team.The opposing parties have said they are a unified
front against criminal drug cartels, but the police rivalry has exposed a
troubling level of disarray. Both police forces have been heavy-handed. In
March 2005, city police surrounded state police headquarters and at gunpoint
freed two of their officers who had been detained in a homicide investigation. Last
month, city cops again surrounded the state police building after agents
detained a city cop. And over the last year and a half, there have been at
least half a dozen confrontations between state agents and city police assigned
as bodyguards to Rhon. The police infighting couldn't have come at a worse
time. In the city of about 1.5 million people, drug cartels are fighting for
control of lucrative trafficking routes. Many upper and middle-class residents
are moving out to avoid being targeted by kidnap-for-ransom rings. Rampant drug
addiction is fueling a surge of car thefts and robberies. Because public safety
remains the most important issue for residents, perceptions of police can shape
political destinies, causing agencies to try to outdo or embarrass each other.
"Each police force tries to show progress and achievements while
attempting to criticize and embarrass the other force ¼ and the only groups
benefiting from this situation are the crime rings," said Jose Maria
Ramos, the director of the school of public administration at Tijuana's College
of the Northern Frontier. After Rhon's municipal police chief took over, the
agencies' areas of responsibility began to blur. State authorities are in
charge of investigations, but municipal cops started expanding their turf and
pursuing their own investigations in an effort to win over public opinion. They
said they had to be more aggressive in a city overrun by crime. The feuding
flared on busy thoroughfares when state agents started intercepting the mayor's
motorcade of SUVs, which were filled with heavily armed bodyguards. The mayor's
supporters called it harassment, but state police said the cars weren't
registered. They said they had to watch such convoys closely because they fit
the profile of organized-crime hit squads that carry out kidnappings and
assassinations throughout the city. Each confrontation between the forces
received ample coverage in local newspapers, and some PRI politicians called
the stops an orchestrated campaign to embarrass the mayor. Police relations
worsened in January when Mexican President Felipe Calderon dispatched thousands
of soldiers and federal agents to the city. The general in charge of
"Operation Tijuana" ordered city police to turn in their weapons
while the officers were inspected for links to organized crime. City cops
protested by patrolling with slingshots hanging from their holsters,
complaining that the anti-corruption inspections should be extended to the
state police. Rhon stepped down as mayor in February, ending his tense
cross-town motorcades — and things have calmed down since, said Victor Manuel
Zatarain, the city police chief. He and other law enforcement officials say
that cooperation and coordination between the agencies have improved,
especially in emergency situations. But some experts say deep divisions still
undermine efforts to thwart organized crime. When several gunmen attacked
Tijuana's General Hospital in April to free a wounded ally, for example, most
of them escaped, despite a supposed joint operation by state and municipal
police.With the state gubernatorial campaign set to start this summer, experts
say police relations are likely to become more strained. Minor incidents still
flare into tense confrontations, as was evident last month when state agents detained
a city cop for allegedly carrying an unlicensed weapon. When Zatarain showed up
at the state police building to clear things up, he brought seven bodyguards.
About two dozen other city police officers surrounded the building and blocked
off streets around the area, state police said. Soon after city police took up
their positions, about 50 state police reinforcements arrived, and the two
heavily armed forces ended up staring each other down for about one hour
outside the headquarters.