EL RRUN RRUN
http://rrunrrun.blogspot.com/
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CAMERON COUNTY LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS DISCUSS SPILLOVER VIOLENCE
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/49362274" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="500"></iframe> <a href="http://vimeo.com/49362274">Border Protection - Cameron County Texas</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/pinkape">Pink Ape Media</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6016803033174468094-216885688007498540?l=rrunrrun.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>
LINK: http://rrunrrun.blogspot.com/2012/09/cameron-county-law-enforcement.html
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DO NOT PASS GO. DO NOT COLLECT $15,000, OR $10,000
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By<strong> Juan Montoya</strong><br />Cameron County Auditor Martha Galarza had a bad day at the office today.<br />Armed with the approval by the generous district judges of the county who set her salary, she went before the county commissioners court and requested that her $94,500 base salary be upped by $15,000 to $109,500. The court, unable to give county employees a salary increase in the five years that Carlos Cascos has been in office, hemmed and hawed at the proposal, but delicately informed her that the budget just wouldn't permit it.<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFeYntbadCr0kR_yUbVbz5oY1Sj3fEryoI0G9Cr-fyuk2uEQjADzdcOLDnJ_6VJAkpqljRMwVEeSFJieB_fUHAM41r0MJH2C2rl1uJZQDuGk-Y_9Ld6IpK4Q4uqVb5Xbkm8PdsXZfvoYI/s1600/200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFeYntbadCr0kR_yUbVbz5oY1Sj3fEryoI0G9Cr-fyuk2uEQjADzdcOLDnJ_6VJAkpqljRMwVEeSFJieB_fUHAM41r0MJH2C2rl1uJZQDuGk-Y_9Ld6IpK4Q4uqVb5Xbkm8PdsXZfvoYI/s1600/200.jpg" /></a>The county auditor's salary, under Texas law, is set by the district judges in the county. However, if the county's budget doesn't have it to give, the commissioners aren't obligated to oblige to their dictum.<br />Now, we always thought that the county â€" according to Galarza herself â€" would have something like $187 left in the till if they gave the county workers a one-time stipend of $500 instead of a pay increase. Suddenly, the adroit county auditor said she had found some untapped funds that would make her raise possible. She even softened her request by lowering it to $10,000.<br />Now, we're not saying that perhaps Galarza doesn't merit a raise. But some commissioners were wary of raising her salary over Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio's, citing state law that prohibited such an occurrence.<br />What we do know is that in the past two years, external audits of her department have drawn admonishments in the reports that she had not followed "traditional auditing practices" and advised to adhere to them in the future. Apparently, she has not.<br />However, the voting on her raise also raised some eyebrows. Normally, fiscal conservatives like Pct. 3 commissioner David Garza and County Judge Carlos Cascos will be the ones voting against nay increase that does not apply to all employees countywide. In the case of the $3,000 raises given to Carmon County District Clerk Aurora de la Garza and County Clerk Joe Rivera, the money came from the salary of commissioner Dan Sanchez.<br />Even then, a question has arisen there about the propriety of doing that and then lowering their salary in thenext fiscal budget when the court is not obligated to pitch in the $6,000 that Sanchez â€"said to be eyeing a run at the county judge's seat â€" so generously awarded the duo.<br />Oh yeah, the voting.<br />Voting for the raise was Cascos and Garza. Voting against the raise was Pct. 1 Commissioner Sofia Benavides, Pct. 2 Commissioner Ernie Hernandez, and Pct. 3 Commissioner Dan Garza.<br />"Who would have figured?" asked a county insider. "Cascos, who's a Certified Public Accountant, despite the external audit problems, still voted for the raise as did Garza. And now the others â€" who are generally considered the tax-and-spend crowd voted against it. How do you figure."<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6016803033174468094-6692649678981622287?l=rrunrrun.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>
LINK: http://rrunrrun.blogspot.com/2012/09/go-do-not-collect-15000-or-even-10000.html
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NEWCOMERS INCREDULOUS OF RACISM, DISCRIMINATION AGAINST LOCAL HISPANICS
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By<strong> Juan Montoya</strong><br />Just the other day Son Numero Uno was telling me that his high school teacher (a recent arrival from the Midwest) didn't believe that Hispanics suffered discrimination in South Texas in recent years.<br /><div style="border: currentColor;">As he was telling me this, we were on our way to visit his grandparents along FM 802 on Weslaco Road. We had just gone under the overpass of US 77-83. There is a new digital billboard at that corner and coincidentally, it had been displaying an ad for the breakfast tacos (at 99 cents) sold at local Stripes stores. The billboards are state-of-the-art (locally anyway) and the photo showed the business end of a bacon-potato-and-egg taco pointed right at the viewer.</div><div style="border: currentColor;">I smiled to myself at his remarks and couldn't help but break out in a little laugh. He, of course, in his best high school teacher style, remarked: "What's so funny? Why don't you share your joke with us so we can all laugh?"</div><div style="border: currentColor;">I told him about when I had first attended the first grade in Olmito elementary. My dad was a foreman and also drove a tractor for one of the large cotton farms which at the time dominated local agriculture. When it came time for me to go to school, I jumped on a bus with my two older sisters and we traveled four or five miles to Olmito.</div><div style="border: currentColor;">I didn't speak a word of English, and neither did many of the first-time students whose parents also worked on the farms. At the time, cotton was still picked by hand as was the thinning of the rows. It was hard, back-breaking work and the only labor I ever saw in the fields were local Hispanics and Mexican nationals who were picked up by my Dad at the Lopez Supermarket in downtown Brownsville next to the Vally Transit terminal. In those days, the Border Patrol was very lenient with local farmers and would turn a blind eye to their use of illegal workers.<br /><div style="border: currentcolor;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWqtBKifOhKcvODHfwCWkLhAVuNh5mgt1VLatqfQP1d7u5XK2t3Gz_xx1gGmP7VzrrfJVuxO_zn7EBO6DrpejqmQpk6_Bx0mHpRxIuYFZHSodj1Nct_Je62PpIB_hGhIopsf_VsosxCEw/s1600/tacos_jpg.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; display: inline !important; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" hea="true" height="345" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWqtBKifOhKcvODHfwCWkLhAVuNh5mgt1VLatqfQP1d7u5XK2t3Gz_xx1gGmP7VzrrfJVuxO_zn7EBO6DrpejqmQpk6_Bx0mHpRxIuYFZHSodj1Nct_Je62PpIB_hGhIopsf_VsosxCEw/s400/tacos_jpg.JPG" width="400" /></a>If you think the picking of cotton in the hot sun was hard, the thinning was even harder. The men would wear leather knee pads and literally crawl down half a mile rows pulling two-inch plants to give the others room to grow so a crop could be picked later. The men would straighten up at the end of the day and walk half-bent to drink water or crawl back up onto the truck awaiting them to take them back to town where they would make their way back to Matamoros.</div></div><div style="border: currentColor;">When we went to school, my Mom sent us with flour tacos stuffed with our favorite filling. <em>Carne guisada</em> with beans was my favorite. My sisters also took their tacos with them. But soon there arose a problem, or rather, various problems.</div><div style="border: currentColor;">Spanish was prohibited in school and I was literally incommunicado for the better part of first grade. I didn't speak English and my teacher was in her 70s and didn't speak a lick of Spanish. To make matters worse, the white kids and the "townie" Hispanics in school laughed at us at lunchtime when we took out our tacos from our brown paper lunch bags to eat. They had sandwiches.</div><div style="border: currentColor;">When my Mom found out, she had our Dad buy us baloney and sliced bread, something we never ate at home. She did it to make the girls' social life a bit more bearable. I, who didn't understand, wasn't bothered.</div><div style="border: currentColor;">The other kids aboard the bus with us were also Mexican farm kids. They, too, took tacos their mothers sent for lunch. As soon as they found out I had baloney sandwiches we did what kids from time immemorial have done: we traded. The kid whom I traded with had a Mom who was a culinary artist and made soft flour tacos that wrapped exquisitely around a core of soft fried diced potatoes mixed with bacon bits and drippings. They were to kill for.</div><div style="border: currentColor;">And to make sure that there was no one laughing at us as we ate, we found a mesquite tree by the railroad tracks at the east side of the school yard to eat. There, in the shade of the tree, we ate and spoke Spanish in safety. That tree still stands today just inside the fence by the rialroad tracks.</div><div style="border: currentColor;">In the classroom, it was another story. Since I couldn't speak English, I sat at the rear of the reading groups. I didn't fit in the A group, the B group, the C, or for that matter, any group. When I spoke with other students and Miss Stroman (<em>Mis Trompas</em>) caught me, it meant standing facing a corner or with a penny pressed to my nose as punishment. Talk about "immersion."</div><div style="border: currentColor;">After a few months of this routine, I asked one of my mesquite lunchtime friends how to ask permission to use the bathroom. He told me something that sounded like "Maybescuz." </div><div style="border: currentColor;">That afternoon I tried it. I raised my hand and Miss Stroman looked up from reading to the A group and motioned me to approach. I uttered: "Maybescuz?"</div><div style="border: currentColor;">The poor woman nearly had a heart attack and the reading group fell silent. She motioned with her right hand to the hallway and I walked in the bath. All the kids in there, of course, were chattering away in Spanish and wanted to know how I had done it. From there on, a conspiracy of Spanish developed and I went on to the second grade.</div><div style="border: currentColor;">On the way to my parents house off 802 we also passed by a Taco Bell off Old Highway 77. I remember a joke told to me by a fellow Hispanic student in graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin, that a white friend of his was congratulating him for Hispanics having finally come on their own and achieving success by having their own phone company now: Taco Bell.</div><div style="border: currentColor;">It took a while for the kids to catch on to that one. But as for me, every time I go by that restaurant, I can't help but remember lunchtimes at Olmito elementary under that old mesquite tree and I break into the smile that makes my kids suspicious that I'm up to something. </div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6016803033174468094-5705761592892228122?l=rrunrrun.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>
LINK: http://rrunrrun.blogspot.com/2012/09/newcomers-incredulous-of-racism-gainst.html
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ORLANDO AND CABLER TRYING TO PUT THEIR FINGERS ON THE DIKE MUCH AS CAMERON COUNTY IS DOING
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By <strong>Juan Montoya</strong><br />Its' becoming obvious to media types and news organizations that the policy of the Brownsville Police Department and the City of Brownsville administration is to keep the lid on any news potentially embarrassing to the city and law enforcement from the public.<br />Whether it's withholding the video of the teen who was gunned down at Cumming Middle School while brandishing a pellet gun, the report of the two cops who did indeed get involved in a brawl over a <em>falda</em>, that a Brownsville cop's house was raided due to his alleged involvement with the Gulf Cartel, or that the name of the city health inspector who gunned down two people at a local night club was Willie Gonzalez, absolutely none of this would have been divulged if they had their druthers.<br />Chief Orlando Rodriguez and City Manager Charlie Cabler have made it plain that the less the public knows about these incidents, the better. Unfortunately, there are so many cracks in this dike that they may soon find they're running out of fingers.<br />(They're not much different in the City of Brownsville than they are in Cameron County where the misdeeds of Pct. 2 Commissioner Ernie Hernandez and Aurora De la Garza are common knowledge. What has been exposed during the Abel Limas debacle is but the tip of an iceberg of Titanic proportions.)<br /><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrcVhI0O4pDAFcBUwH1zevOKORoBKV84NMpjhP5VK8VTqavx982KN4fbixFTeHiTMH-Pcp58fHlT2LRP25ZrHG3knhA7grYvvSF79ilgfXIXBgOecYUajLbNR0KdAoMGthEHLl-L9H_UU/s1600/dike.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" hea="true" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrcVhI0O4pDAFcBUwH1zevOKORoBKV84NMpjhP5VK8VTqavx982KN4fbixFTeHiTMH-Pcp58fHlT2LRP25ZrHG3knhA7grYvvSF79ilgfXIXBgOecYUajLbNR0KdAoMGthEHLl-L9H_UU/s400/dike.jpg" width="390" /></a>But even though the local daily touts the fact that its coverage area includes ome 200,000, Brownsville still retains some little-town characteristics, notably one: that everyone knows what everyone is up to.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">That's why when we posted a story about the brawl involving officer Everardo Longoria and another brother officer, commenters to this blog fleshed out the incident with the names of the participants and some other sordid details that we would rather not repeat. </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">The fact is that people in the community know what happened despite the adminstrations's efforts to squelch the truth. When higher-ups engage in efforts to suppress the news, they not only lose credibility, but expose themselves to ridicule and the questioning of their motives.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Take for example the blackout of the incident at the Toucan Lounge involving city health inspector Willie Gonzalez where he sought a confrontation with a man and woman (a girlfriend?) and then shot them outside when they reacted to his aggressions. So far, even though everyone knows who he was, neither the PD nor the city administration have confirmed his involvement. All we know is that he was put on suspension with pay, probably until the heat dies down and his lawyers reach an agreement with those of the victims. <em>Hasta que se llegue a un arreglo.</em></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Lydia Gonzalez, his mother, and longtime city secretary, apparently was owed enough favors from the City Hall crowd that she cashed in her chips to cover for her boy. </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">We know, for example, (this is a little town) that the man he shot in the parking lot of Toucan Lounge at closing time remains hospitalized as of Wednesday and that he runs the risk of permanent paralysis because the bullet that Gonzalez fired from the handgun he was carrying in his glove box struck his spine after it perforated his belly.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">We also know that the victim has already engaged the services of an attorney, so sooner or later the lawsuit will lay bare the truth and the whole world will know what the cops and Cabler have trying to keep from us.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">And in the case of the cops brawling, the fact that Longoria is the bother of a city commissioner (Ricardo), apparently also comes into play since more than one independent source has confirmed that the incident did take place and that it was a fight <em>por faldas</em> (over a woman).</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">In the case of Jaime Gonzalez, the 15-year-old who was killed at Cummings (also, coincidentally, by Longoria), both the police department and now the Cameron County District Attorney's Office, are fighting its release. There are different versions of what happened there, and some of it is not very flattering of the law enforcement types involved. </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">In some accounts, it is said that the cops shot out the glass doors of the school to get a clear view of what was going on in the hallways and that the officers involved mistook that for the teen firing at them and opened up on him. Publicly, the story is that Gonzalez was either pointing the gun at the cops or threatening a student standing in a corner of the hallway. Which one is it? What is the truth?</div>As we said when we reported on the raid on a local police officers' home because of his suspected involvement with the Gulf Cartel; we have his name and his badge number. If we have it, you can rest assured that other people in town also know it. And yet, the powers that be continue to hold their fingers on the dike of information that has already seeped in and spread across town. <br />The local daily is no better. When a police commander (since retired, conveniently) was caught using his city-issued cell phone to send nude pictures of himself to a girlfriend from inside the PD, we posted the photos on this blog. So did other media, who, like us, covered his privates. The Herald, pushed at last to cover the story, chose not to publish a photo.<br />Instead, on the following day, they published a full front-face photo of a male transvestite arrested for soliciting sex for money in downtown Brownsville as a sort of redemption for not embarrassing the former commander, who in a way was also dong the same thing except that he was using public resources and was on the public payroll at the time.<br />As we said before. We're still a little town in many respects. News travels fast. We know. <em>Porque nos seguimos haciendo?</em><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6016803033174468094-8308401865912896886?l=rrunrrun.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>
LINK: http://rrunrrun.blogspot.com/2012/09/orlando-and-cabler-trying-to-put-their.html
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