Cudahy: The City We the People Rising Remembered

Ten years ago, LA Weekly reported on the rampant, Mexican-style gangster thuggery that ran Cudahy, specifically through the former city manager

An extended article with frequent references to the pay-for-play schemes which dominated third-world countries, it's no surprise that Weekly called Cudahy "The City the Law Forgot":

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.

Sounds like a third-world thug-ocracy to me.

Death threats to candidates, gun shots out of windows.

A former city councilmember who turns into a corrupt and wealthy city manager.

And yet nothing has happened in the city yet?

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.

How serious does it get with local politics?

Mario Beltran was very busy in this area before:

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.

Beltran is a thug, and a compa of John Noguez, who was ripping off taxpayers in Huntington Park, only to give kick-baks and rake-offs for campaign donors when he was elected Los Angeles County Assessor.

He's also a convicted felon.

“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.

Wow, sounds like Huntington Park, too? Corrupt contracts with towing companies? My goodness, doesn't anyone have a real job in that town?

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.

I submit that homicide is rare because no one wants to report the shooting deaths.

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.

Cudahy has turned into a cartel town:

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.

It looks like that dynamic has not change. Illegal immigration must cease, and We the People will not sit back and do nothing while the entire region descends into an unholy hell of corruption, illegal immigration, and death.

I do not want this corrupt ghetto in my state or my country.

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.

Well, well, well. A city that is run by its city manager instead of the city council, and even then the city council just votes a straight 5-0 vote in favor of giving away more power and money to the city manager instead of the citizens.

This was ten years ago. Today, the city manager--Jose Pulido--is paid more than the governor of California. The four boys on the city council just go along with teh corrupt special interests, even though they advertise themselves as young reformers.

Nope!

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.”

It does not mean that a crime was committed. They just could not prove it. The public integrity office has faced a number of challenge over the past three years.

Of course, no one should assume that the residents in Cudahy are not noticing the crime and corruption, or that they have not spoken out against it.

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.”

10 years later, it's still the same. This is terrible. They need to wake up and fight against illegal immigration and crime.

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.

Donald Trump ran on a platform to "Make America Great Again."

Part of making America Great Again includes a focus on bringing back jobs and cracking down on crime.

We need to secure our borders and enforce our immigration laws, too.

Of course, like some of the activists in Cudahy, city residents are focused on stopping corruption, but they will do nothing to attack this perversity at its core--the rampant illegal immigration which has brought in a record number of illegals--men and women who cannot vote (nor should they) and who have no power to seek police protection, either.

LA Weekly is generally pro-illegal, so they refuse to distinguish between legal residents and illegal aliens. Are they talking about poor legal residents or illegal aliens? Which is it?

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.

Nope! The answer is "No, they do not care!"

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.

That needs to change.

Who is actually responding to that? Local cities’ law enforcers have their hands full with violent street crime. 

The street crime has gone from bad to worse because of the public integrity crimes in city hall. It's too bad that the conscientious residents have been unable to find good elected officials to represent their best interests.

Unbelievable. So much crime. So much drug-trafficking. This must stop!

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.

There you have it. This destructive demographic shift describes Huntington Park and Maywood, too.

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's Mexico. At least now the LA County sheriff has taken over the Maywood and Cudahy police departments. The crime has gone down in some areas, but has also skyrocketed for other crimes because of Prop 47 and AB 109.

“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.

I might have to pay a visit to the Potrero Club when I get a chance.

A few other remarks stood out to me in the LA Weekly article:

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.

This kind of talk is not an excuse

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.”

It's amazing that a Republican even made into onto the Cudahy City Council in the first place!

The city is corrupt and dysfunctional all at the same time.

Instead of putting our feet down to stop this insanity, California residents in other parts of the state did nothing. That has to change. This rampant criminality must cease.

Stop the drugs. Stop the corruption. Stop the illegal immigration.

Then came We the People Rising ...

Check out this incredible video:

Check out our photos here:

When we showed up January 11, 2016, the Cudahy Kids were not ready for us!

Garcia tried to shame We the People Rising as racists.

He took pictures of us!

The rest of us pressured them to stop shutting us down. They had denied little girls the opportunity to perform for their families.

They were misspending city funds, they were awarding contracts to their friends, and they continued hiking up fees and taxes on the residents.

Instead of balancing their budgets, they are taxing the citizens even more!

In 2016, Guerrero signalled the economic predicament of the little city.

Click here.

Check out this video, when all hell broke loose in the city council meeting in January:

I can't thing of another time when residents in a SELA Community were so happy, and as they watched Corrupto Chris Garcia walk out of the meeting:

Here's another video of the same night:

From this angle, you can see Chris Garcia telling me that my zipper is open.

Funny!

You can see the rest of what happened in this link.

Click here.

A year later, Garcia would call We the People Rising "White Supremacists"

Let everyone remember that We the People Rising have been here for the last 12 months protesting these corrupt little children:

Maybe the law forgot Cudahy--but We the People Rising did not forget.

In fact, we are making Cudahy famous because of its corrupt councilmembers who insist on sanctuary city dishonesty instead of representing the real needs of American citizens and respect our Constitution and federal laws.

The Second Civil Rights Movement has begun here--and We the People Rising are not afraid to represent for the best of all American citizens!