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Under the headline, “Bribe Culture Seeps Into South Texas,” the Houston Chronicle described how payoffs have become common, everywhere from school districts to building inspections to municipal courts. The bribe—la mordida—as a way of life is moving north. Anthony Knopp, who teaches border history at the University of Texas at Brownsville, said that as America becomes more Hispanic, “corruption will show up here, naturally.”
The same thing is happening in California. Small towns south of Los Angeles, such as South Gate, Lynwood, Bell Gardens, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Vernon were once white suburbs but have become largely Hispanic. They have also become notorious for thieving, bribe-taking politicians. Mayors, city council members, and treasurers have paraded off to jail. “When new groups come to power, and become entrenched … then they tend to rule it as a fiefdom,” explained Jaime Regalado, of California State University, Los Angeles.
Maywood, which was 96 percent Hispanic by 2010, was so badly run it lost insurance coverage and had to lay off all its employees. The California Joint Powers Insurance Authority (JPIA), composed of more than 120 cities and other public agencies to share insurance costs, declared the Maywood government too risky to insure. It was the first time in its 32-year history that the JPIA had ever terminated a member.
It has been reported that black elected officials are 5.3 times more likely to be arrested for crimes than white elected officials. Comparative arrest figures for Hispanic officials are not available. Hispanics may be especially susceptible to corruption if they work along the US-Mexico border. There are no comprehensive data on this problem, but incidents reported in just one year —2005 are disturbing. Operation Lively Green was an FBI drug smuggling sting that led to 33 guilty pleas. Twenty-four of the guilty were Hispanic and most of the rest were black. All were police officers, port inspectors, prison guards, or soldiers. They waved drug shipments through ports, prevented seizures by the Border Patrol, and sold fake citizenship documents.
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