El Paso just doesn’t get it. It is simple but the El Paso hierarchy wants you to stay placated. It is actually very sad, hardworking El Pasoans are decimated by the corrupt elite.
El Paso does not deserve a boxing match! That’s it. Forget the indignant attitude and the allegations of collusion. It comes down to a simple truth; El Paso officials are not to be trusted to safeguard the taxpayers of the community.
I know many of you are rallying around the cry of “it’s not fair” and “it’s about the money another city will make off this event”, but stop for a moment and think about the facts surrounding the city and the event.
Not only are El Paso’s public officials embroiled in an ever growing public corruption scandal but El Paso is also in the middle, and I argue complicit in the ongoing drug cartel wars. The ongoing corruption scandal did not start with the investigation of NCED in 2005 and will not end with the pending court cases.
I’ve been doing research on the current scandal and the very same people being implicated and whispered about are the very same people who were involved in corruption scandals in the 80’s and the 90’s. Remember Maury Kemp, El Paso Electric’s Evern Wall and Tad Smith who were indicted in 1991? Former El Paso Mayor Raymond Telles, Jr. was also indicted, in 1990, based on the Kemp investigations that had started in 1987. The same law firms and people were also quietly whispered about back then as they are today.
In doing my research for my upcoming book; Narco War; The Rise and Fall of the Mexican Drug Cartels – a pattern is starting to develop that puts El Paso squarely in the middle of the ongoing cartel wars. Do you remember Jimmy Chagra?
The Juarez Cartel, coincidently, or maybe not so coincidently, began to assert itself at about the same time the Chagra case became public knowledge. The rise of the Juarez Cartel correlates closely to El Paso’s economy.
Remember George De Angelis who alleged cartel influence in Carlos Leon’s police department in the 90’s?
The city’s political establishment quietly whispered but no one stood up and demanded accountability. In the end, George De Angelis was exonerated even though the city’s political machine tried to marginalize him and Carlos Leon was reprimanded by then Carlos Ramirez, the city’s mayor. But no investigation was ever conducted publically or transparently into the drug cartel influence alleged by De Angelis.
The same department involved in the fiasco with the same figure heads is the same department that gets its drug lab decertified. Who benefits from a decertified drug lab? This is also the same police department embroiled in the ticket fixing scandal that is seeing, rank-and-file police officers prosecuted for offenses that could not possibly have been conducted in a vacuum without upper echelon involvement. It is a continued pattern of feeding the populace something to chew on while the management continues to be insulated.
Meanwhile, all indications suggest that El Paso continues to be a major transit point for drugs, as it was back in the days of the cartel rise to challenge the Mexican state.
As if that wasn’t enough, look at the names of the people implicated, jailed or awaiting trial in the latest scandal. LKG Enterprises was incorporated in 1991. Robert Jones takes control of NCED in 1995 and begins manufacturing chemical suits for the military in 1997, under the Javits-Wagner-O’Day Act. Cirilio Madrid forms New Beginnings of Texas in 1996. In 1999, Carlos Leon is appointed Police Chief and almost immediately it is alleged that there is drug cartel influence within his immediate hierarchy while NISH has serious concerns about NCED.
In 2003, EPISD started to unload the Blue Flame building, a taxpayer debacle. Look at the names involved in that transaction. Does Access Administrators, Mena, Roark and Tafoya sound familiar? How about Robert Jones?
Bob Jones didn’t just appear on the El Paso scene out of the blue in the early 90’s. He had been chased out of Houston for malfeasance, but the El Paso elite was so eager for money to be doled out to them that they either didn’t care or kept it quiet. They even named Robert Jones, the “Entrepreneur of the Year” in 2005. Is the timeline starting to make sense now?
That’s just ten percent of the timeline I’ve developed so far!
El Paso’s modus operandi has and continues to be to marginalize or outright threaten people when they dare question the obvious. El Paso’s elite even goes so far as to embrace the crooks as long as the monies continue to flow into their pockets.
Remember Hector Villa and Villafam? Convicted right across the border in New Mexico and immediately embraced in El Paso. The El Paso Housing Authority is involved in scandal after scandal with the State threatening to step in. Yet, not one serious local investigation is initiated. The local school districts spend the local taxpayer’s money in one scam after another and the only thing that goes up, are the taxes.
I haven’t even mentioned the debacle of Shrode, the former medical examiner, and the numerous payouts of taxpayer monies to settle citizen demands for a better police force and the cases of drug trafficking levied against political and security forces. Does former police officer Alberto Madrid and former County Commissioner Willie Gandara ring a bell?
Madrid is hired to provide security for a wedding party and then allegedly steals the wedding gifts? What kind of police department employs someone willing to steal wedding gifts? Gandara, on the other hand, is alleged to be dealing drugs while a sitting county commissioner. What kind of community elects someone to office that is alleged to be a drug dealer? Is it the same community that elects Susie Byrd and Beto O’Rourke, whose own mother pleads guilty on behalf of her company to money laundering, to office while they publicly condone drug legalization?
And now the city, the very same people involved in protecting those dolling out money to them, are the same people once again floating the idea of a taxpayer funded sports arena? Guess who gets to fund that? And guess who stands to make millions from it?
It’s a revolving door; the taxpayers fund the playgrounds of the elite.
Now ask yourself, do you trust your city officials to safeguard and secure your home while the fight is on? Allowing the fight to happen at UTEP is putting the citizens of the community in the hands of the same people who can’t keep their own house in order and also have a history of looking out only for themselves instead of the community.
Anything that happens at the event will ultimately be paid for by the taxpayers of El Paso.
Remember the One-percent Doctrine? If there is even a one percent chance that something may go wrong then it is incumbent upon those who are tasked to protect the community against the danger.
The truth is, if something were to happen, the very same people demanding that UTEP hold the fight will be the very same people asking for someone’s head on a platter, not from among the elite, but from the everyday grunts that work in the community. The power elite have conditioned El Paso to blame everyone else except themselves. And that is exactly what is happening today. So stop the whining already and do something for yourselves.
The economic nexus for El Paso is clear; corruption and drugs. A boxing match is only a publicity stunt to placate the masses and give the elites something else to play with.
You want change El Paso? Rise up and demand accountability, not from Austin, but from your own official’s malfeasance. Until then, El Paso will just remain the same, a transit point for drugs heading north and guns heading south. That’s the simple truth of why El Paso does not deserve the boxing match.
