As part of this effort, ABC’s Houston affiliate KTRK-TV (email it) is literally refusing to name names in a story about Hispanic corruption in South Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. Seventeen names in particular.
When journalists, people ostensibly paid to make news intelligible, neglect critical information, you know they are hiding something.
Instead of the facts, we get an unbylined May 4 report with the Orwellian title South Texas corruption scandals spur reflection
An updated version in the Washington Times, May 5, 2014[Correction: South Texas Corruption story,] is bylined Christopher Sherman.
What’s in a name? Sometimes, everything.
Remember, the first “w” of journalism is “who?” If a story about people, let alone convicted criminals, won’t give the “who,” it’s not a proper story, and it’s probably unintelligible. Naming names is also a moral imperative in a crime story. If you won’t do that, why bother with the rest—except to fill space between ads?
But this Politically Correct template is spreading within the MSM. For example, in the Chicago Tribune’s crime stories about shootings, its writers studiously refuse to give the mostbasic information about heinous crimes. The writers let you know that they have plenty of information, but refuse to give names of victims, suspects, gangs, gang slogans used, witness statements, etc. All the reader learns is the intersection where one raceless, nameless, unaffiliated man shot another raceless, nameless, unaffiliated man. (Curiously, reporting gender is seems still to be permissible).
Corruption is rampant in South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, along the American-Mexican border, according to the ABC News story. It cites at least 18 law enforcement officers and criminal justice officials who have been convicted on corruption charges over the past year in Hidalgo and Cameron counties.
However, the 901-word story names only one convicted official—and only in the 12th paragraph, after most readers will have moved on.
That convicted official: former Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Trevino, a Hispanic. And his mention is offset by dragging in a completely irrelevant non local, non-Hispanic white bogeyman, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is accused of being insensitive:
Some blasted Republican gubernatorial candidate and Attorney General Greg Abbott earlier this year when in reference to that scandal, he said, "This creeping corruption resembles third-world country practices that erode the social fabric of our communities." He later emphasized that the corruption was not unique to South Texas.There’s also a Hispanic “good guy,” Sheriff Trevino’s interim replacement, Eddie Guerra. He’s included so readers don’t get the wrong idea. (Sheriff Guerra is not to be confused with non-law enforcement drug runners Fernando Guerra Sr. and Fernando Guerra Jr., who were also convicted in the case.)
Third World corruption? Border area? Crooked Hispanic sheriff and son? Raceless cops stealing drugs and drug money? White bogeyman?
For Americans who didn’t just return from a 40-year-long visit to Mars, and who know the MSM, those are all clues to a typical MSM cover-up.
The first case cited, of the Panama Drug Interdiction Unit, which partnered the Hidalgo County town of Mission’s Police Department and the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office, saw nine lawmen convicted—every single one of them a Hispanic.
Who’d a thunk it???!!
These Hispanic police officers would rob drug dealers of drugs, and resell them. If the dealers were out, the cops would force them to order drugs, so the cops could steal them!
In both cases, the MSM suppressed the diversity dimension of the corruption, and implied the problem was a white thing.
Hidalgo County sheriff Lupe Trevino, Jonathan’s father, was convicted onApril 14 of “laundering drug money,” and faces a maximum of 20 years in federal prison. [Former Sheriff Awaits Sentencing , KRGV.com, April 29, 2014]
Sheriff Trevino’s henchmen, Cmdr. Jose Padilla (bribery) and chief of staff Maria Patricia Medina (“covering up a felony”) were likewise convicted. All three await sentencing on July 17.
Sheriff Trevino and his crime partners served drug kingpin Tomas “El Gallo” Gonzalez. [Weslaco-based drug trafficker El Gallo admits to vast drug distribution network, NewsOK, April 23, 2014.] El Gallo, though only 36, is the subject of many fawning narcocorridos, drug-kingpin anthems, including some written and sung by the late Chuy Quintanilla, who was murdered last year (by areally tough music critic) in Mission. [Analysis: Chuy Quintanilla, US first Narco-Singer Murder by John Sullivan and Robert Bunker, Small Wars Journal/Borderland Beat, May 19, 2013
The ABC News story mentions “Progreso, [where] a father and his two sons - one the mayor, the other the school board president…”
That would be Jose Guadalupe Vela, and his sons Mayor Omar Vela and Progreso ISD school board President Michael “Mikey” Vela, who were arrested last August “on a federal indictment with 10 counts of bribery and conspiracy in a ‘pay to play’ scheme that included cash bribes, liquor bottles and trips with mistresses that were paid by those looking to do business with the school district and the city, court records show.”
Mayor Omar Vela “pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy and bribery charges … and is free on bond pending his [July 25] sentencing hearing.” He faces a possible max of 15 years. [Progreso mayor Omar Vela pleads guilty to bribery by Ildefonso Ortiz, Mid-Valley Town Crier/The Monitor, April 8, 2014.]
Later in the Mid-Valley Town Crier story, we learn that Progresso [sic] Mayor Pro Tem Orlando Vela was charged with embezzling “at least $5,000” from the school district. But no word in whether Orlando Vela was related to the other three Velas.
However, it turns out that he is a member of the same family. What a surprise! [Texas Mayor Pleads Guilty to Bribery Charges for Role in Corruption Schemeby Twanna Harps, Liberty Voice, April 9, 2014.]
Then comes the final corruption case cited by ABC News:
In neighboring Cameron County, a state judge, the district attorney and a handful of lawyers, including a former state lawmaker, were taken down in a bribery investigation for selling justice on the cheap.On January 1, Valley Morning Star reporter Emma Perez-Treviño wrote,
An extensive federal investigation found corruption in the Cameron County’s legal system and judiciary to be so pervasive that most people probably wouldn’t believe it — “unless they heard it themselves,” U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen said in [December 3] 2013.One of the Cameron County crooks was 404th state District Judge Abel C. Limas who began serving a six-year stretch in federal prison on December 3.[Judge: Hard to believe depths of Cameron County corruption by Emma Perez-Treviño, The Monitor, January 1, 2014.]
Limas, who served as district judge from January 2001 through the end of 2008, admitted to soliciting and accepting bribes from persons with cases in his court, their attorneys and representatives, in exchange for favorable rulings to enrich himself and others.In order to get only six years at Club Fed, Judge Limas had to spend two years cooperating with federal prosecutors. He was also forced to pay $6.5 million in restitution. That’s a lot of fixed traffic tickets.[Limas begins 6-year prison sentence by Emma Perez-Treviño Valley Morning Star, December 3, 2013.]
And on February 11, Cameron County DA Armando Villalobos was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison, to be followed by supervised release for three years, and $369,000 in restitution and fines for bribery and extortion. [Former Cameron County District Attorney Armando Villalobos Sentenced to Federal Prison in Connection with South Texas Bribery Scheme, FBI San Antonio Division/U.S. Attorney’s Office Western District of Texas, February 11, 2014.]
A low-level yet pivotal figure in the scandal was Jaime Munivez, who connected Judge Limas and DA Villalobos. Munivez had been a bailiff for the judge, and an investigator for the DA. On May 30, 2012, Munivez was sentenced to one year and one day in prison for his part in the bribery scheme. [Former Cameron County DA Investigator Sentenced, KRGV, May 30, 2012.]
It’s all reminiscent of the LAPD Ramparts Scandal, in which a group of mostly black and Hispanic cops got themselves an elite narcotics detail with no supervision, and committed the same sorts of crimes as the Panama Unit—only the Ramparts crew graduated to murder for hire (and did minimal time).
Now comes the rationalization, the phony “why” of the ABC story.
The anonymous “reporter” quotes Trevino voter Walt Oesterle, 78, as blaming poverty and “drug money”—“It's just tempting, I guess.”
The ABC story then cites tenured University of Maryland “expert” Eric Uslaner, [email him] who
said corruption is rooted in economic inequality. The Rio Grande Valley is one of the poorest areas in the nation.The only original point here: Uslaner’s acknowledgement that (imported) diversity is making corruption possible. Otherwise, Marxists have been repeating this poverty canard for generations, and even brain-dead Republicans now go along with it. But it turns cause and effect upside down. As American Renaissance’s The Color of Crime demonstrated, it is crime that causes poverty."That leads to corruption because people are willing to tolerate corruption among leaders that they see as defending their interests against other leaders who might exploit them from other groups," he said. That only yields more inequality and less trust in strangers. It feeds on itself, he said.
Besides, none of the people involved in the Rio Grande Valley corruption scandals was poor, and there’s drug money all over the country.
Many of the convicted Hispanic players in these cases—drug kingpins and lawmen alike—were fathers and sons. We’re talking criminality deeply rooted in Mexican culture. One of the most important terms for understanding Hispanic culture, on either side of the Rio Grande is “mordida”—bribery. Nowhere will you find any reference to mordida, in Spanish or English, in the ABC News story, or for that mention, any of the other stories I cited. Instead, we get the usual Marxist boilerplate.
While you could argue that ABC News might not have space for all of the names, this is the Web, not a newspaper. If ABC could devote 901 words to an online crime story, it could devote another 100 words to naming names—not to mention linking to related stories, which ABC’s editors also declined to do. They were afraid that readers might Notice a pattern.
The ABC story is a perfect example of burgeoning field Senseless Reporting. Alleged crime reporters routinely show people decrying “senseless violence”—but the violence is not senseless, if you have the necessary information that reporters are supposed to provide (“Who? What? When? Where? How? and “Why?”). Violence and so much else today only appears “senseless,” when interested parties and reporters suppress the facts.
Life for the rest us increasingly becomes a morass of chaos and confusion, which is one of the goals of the pushers of the “Senseless” talking point.
But let’s Notice, and make Sense of the situation.
The common sense solution to a foreign presence developing through legal and illegal immigration and bringing with it rampant crime and corruption is: keep it out!
But even if “economic inequality” does cause corruption, the solution then would likewise be: stop importing more poverty—and “economic inequality”!
In virtually every newsroom and college faculty lounge in America, openly following the logical consequences of these fairy tales is professional suicide.
But at VDARE.com patterns, logic and, yes, reflection, are your friends.
