I feared the worst for Jack Guerrero, the lone Republican on the Cudahy City Council.
Jack Guerrero
The big money pouring into the district in favor of corrupt Chris Garcia worried me. Would he be able to fool enough residents so that they would re-elect him and throw out the one honest councilman in Cudahy?
Then there was Valentin Amezquita, the only member who rejected the appointment of two illegal aliens to city commissions in Huntington Park. Would he have the resources to take on the corruption throughout the region and set Huntington Park on a proper path?
There was a lot of anticipation and excitement leading up to March 7. 2017.
The pro-Chris, anti-lawlessness phalanx invaded the Cudahy City Council on February 27.
They tried to shame Guerrero.
Teachers even belittled this Ivy-league educated account executive!
It was unbelievable to see the level of hatred manifested in the room.
Here are some scenes of what happened in the city council chambers that evening.
The level of animus reached a pretty fevered pitch:
Guerrero announces his stern opposition to corruption:
When a teacher shamed his extensive academic background, Guerrero responded in turn:
In spite of nasty Trump attacks, race-baiting, and big money from outside of the city, Guerrero was the top vote getter!
Then there's Valentin Amezquita in Huntington Park.
He spoke out many times on the corruption in the city and the need for attention to serious matters. The financial picture for Huntington Park is abysmal for example. There is no code enforcement on the streets.
It's a huge mess of lawlessness, nacro-thuggery, and outright corruption.
Valentin spoke out in meetings many times.
He received massive support from charter school organizations and individual residents in the city, too.
So, how did such different outcomes emerge?
Guerrero, the conservative Republican in the bluest city of the bluest county of the blue state in the union won re-election.
Valentin, who had advocated for amnesty for illegal alien youth (whom he called "DREAMers) and connected intimately with the voting public on his opposition to marijuana dispensaries and moratoria on charter schools, lost.
Let's focus on a few principles.
1. A team of volunteers/activists
Before he had run for office, activists had been pounding the corrupt city council prior. Two of them ended up in jail, along with the city manager.
The mood was very strong in the region to reform local government.
And a group of activists had already coalesced to fight back and take down the wicked people running the city government into the ground:
and
In contrast, Valentin did not have a solid and vocal team of activists from Day One supporting him in office.
To the best of my knowledge, he had run for office in 2013 following the John Noguez scandal, and the city was rife for change in the area.
This is an important lesson for anyone who runs for office--if there is no team of volunteers and activists behind you--it's not going to work out very well.
2. Interventions/warnings from federal and state officials
Huntington Park has received a number of complaints regarding Brown Act violations
The state controller and federal authorities have put pressure on Cudahy to get their finances in order.
The federal pressure and warnings alarmed residents more effectively.
Valentin Amezquita
3. A base of PRINCIPLED support from outsider the district.
From records I have read, Guerrero received some support from GROW Elect--- a Republican group that helps local Latinos get elected to office. Guerrero did not rely on special vendors and special interests to fund his campaign.
Guerrero is an open conservative Republican and worked with a network of fellow Latinos--both Republican and Democrat--who were fed up with the corruption.
In contrast, Valentin is a Democrat who had rebuked the party for their collusion of corruption within the Southeastern LA County cities.
4. Guerrero and his team used earned media better.
Following a massive complaint from the district attorney's office regarding numerous Brown Act violations and heavy fees and taxes on residents, La Opinion reported on the abuse and demanded answers from the city leaders.
Guerrero also received positive press on Univision when he talked about federal and state policy, especially focusing on the destructive elements of the Affordable Care Act.
In contrast, Valentin Amezquita, who served as an informant to the FBI for the bribery scam enacted by HP Tow, made little out of this announcement. When the Los Angeles County Public Integrity Division announced their own investigation into pay-for-play influence peddling from Karina Macias, that disturbing headline also received little attention from residents.
Guerrero
5. Guerrero's messaging was consistent. Amezquita's not as much.
The Cudahy city councilman never wavered on the rule of law, and he was emphatic on enforcement of our laws. He openly shared his contacts with state leaders about the financial mismanagement of the city, too.
Amezquita opposed the appointment of two illegals, but then he supported immigration "reform." It seems a little confusing.
He was a Democrat seated with fellow Democrats, and yet he vocally opposed their actions. Perhaps this public disconnect did not resonate well with voters.
6. Guerrero was a "guerrero" -- while Amezquita was more of a "boy scout."
Newt Gingrich was spot-on when it comes to politics:
I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican
Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat,
obedient, loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be
great around a campfire but are lousy in politics.
Ironically enough, the Republican was more "nasty" than the Democrat.
At every meeting, Guerrero had no problem calling out the corruption of his colleagues. He frequently interrupted them when their motions and rulings were out of order.
He routinely informed the audience what bills and proposed amendments would do to the residents of his city. He had no problem re-iterating a point about the corruption of his colleagues.
Too many city councilmembers go to great lengths to present a field of congeniality to the public. City council members do not sit in elected office to make nice with their peers. They get elected to do what is best for the citizens of their cities.
7. Voter fraud.
I received at least three statements from people in and around Huntington Park vocally alleging voter fraud. That's pretty disturbing, to say the least.
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.
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!
