One year ago today, a gunman drove over 600 miles to kill Mexicans at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The gunman, Patrick Wood Crusius, sits in jail today waiting for his day in court. Meanwhile many families look at today as a day of anguish. The why and the how has been pieced together… Read More One-Year Ago Today Mexicans Were Attacked
It didn’t take long after I first arrived in El Paso that I realized something was different about the city. It was very Mexican but not Mexican at all. I know, it doesn’t make sense and it didn’t make sense at first. Cd. Juárez dominates El Paso in population and in its economy but most… Read More What A 1964 Book Teaches Us About the Origins of the Glass Beach Study
When I first started my blog around 2000, I soon began to focus on El Paso corruption. Corruption is the underlining issue/problem on the border. This is true for both sides of the border. Most focus on the Mexican side forgetting that for corruption to be successful there must be willing participants. Without a complicit… Read More The El Paso Crisis
I apologize that there have been no posts in the last two days. All is well, I have just been terribly busy, believe it or not considering the pandemic. I am not complaining because I have some exciting projects I am working on. One of them is continuing to write about border politics here. But… Read More A Quick Update On What Is Up
Who Rules El Paso? has recently been making the rounds through social media as the primer on El Paso political power, namely arguing that money buys control of the city. Unfortunately, the book glosses over many important details, leaves many out and offers little to no concrete facts from which to prove their central thesis.… Read More A Critical Review of Who Rules El Paso?
For most El Paso readers it should come as no surprise that the city’s water utility is looking to raise water bills soon. Along with taxes, the water bills go up to shore up a bureaucracy trying to make the city successful by creating a fake utopia by imposing oppressive taxes on the city’s population.… Read More El Paso Desperate For Money
As much as I try to leave El Paso corruption behind the more it seems to rear its ugly head. Last Sunday I received a seemingly innocuous email imploring me to donate to yet another non-profit scheme. It came into my business email address and like many similar ones it is targeted at me because… Read More Steve Yellen And El Paso Corruption
Over the last few weeks, I have received several phone calls and emails asking me to find out if Eddie Holguin is going to run for the Texas seat being vacated by César Blanco. Blanco left open his seat because he is running for the seat vacated by José Rodriguez. (Note the seat changing shenanigans)… Read More Abeytia Holguin and The Texas House of Representatives
It was a mistake to make the murders of 22 Latinos in El Paso about gun control. The El Paso killer targeted Mexicans and Mexican Americans to kill. The murderer used a gun, but his motive was clearly to instill fear in Hispanic communities. The knee-jerk reaction to make the El Paso murders about gun… Read More Why Tying Gun Control To The Murders In El Paso Was A Mistake
There are some that argue that Donald Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants is simply a call to protect the country from outside dangers. They’ll argue that Trump is not a racist. When Donald Trump came to El Paso to unite the country against the murder of Hispanics at the hands of a domestic terrorist it was… Read More Dee Margo Insulted by Trump
This is America under Donald Trump.
Walmart has a choice to make. It needs to decide what to do with the store where 22 individuals were killed because they happen to be Hispanic/Mexicans. There were 13 U.S. citizens, eight Mexican citizens and one German among the dead. They were killed at one of El Paso’s Walmarts. It is likely one of… Read More What Will Walmart Do?
The individual – who has no right to be referred by their name – personifies the very definition of a coward. As El Paso and Dayton residents mourn their lost loved ones today, one of the murderers sits in a jail cell. This individual personifies the very definition of a coward. Not only did they… Read More The Personification of a Coward
(I edited this post on 07aug19 at 10:46ET to correct a term I should not have used.) So, Donald Trump has decided to visit El Paso today even though most elected officials from El Paso have told him he is not welcome. Almost all, but not Dee Margo. Why not Margo? Because Margo is a… Read More Trump Not Welcome in El Paso
Gun control is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. There are many homicides committed by gun toting thugs every day. These are criminal acts. What happened in El Paso is a criminal act but also something much worse, it was a terrorist act designed to instill fear in the Mexican/Hispanic community. Gun control… Read More Stop Making El Paso About Gun Control
On Saturday at least 20 people were murdered by a terrorist. The terrorist drove over nine miles from his home city to a city on the border made up of over 80% American Hispanics. Clearly the terrorist was targeting Hispanics. Why? The debate has centered around gun control, which is an important discussion to have.… Read More Donald Trump Is To Blame For El Paso
Yesterday I was interviewed by a reporter for a national publication. The reporter asked me a question that I had never been asked before. It made me pause to formulate my answer. I had to think about the answer because although I’ve alluded to it before I had never addressed it in such a way… Read More El Paso and Immigration
If you a long-time reader of my blog then you probably remember Jane Shang, the former El Paso deputy city manager fired by Joyce Wilson. Shang is now the city manager for Deltona, Florida. Shang and her former boss, Joyce Wilson, were looking to fill the Deltona city manager position after the controversy in El… Read More Former El Paso Deputy City Manager Doing Community Service
On September 3, 2009, a man living in Horizon City returned home to find three armed men in their home. The family was duct-taped. The wife and the children were left in the home and Sergio, the father, was forcefully taken to Juárez. About a week later, the family heard that Sergio had been found… Read More The Silent Voices of Juárez
There is something very important that everyone is missing in the debate over The Wall aka the border fence in El Paso. I’m actually pretty surprised that no one else has thought about this. It clearly ends the debate over walls keeping America safe from drugs. When Donald Trump argued that the border fence (The… Read More What Everyone Has Wrong About the El Paso Border Fence
Monday night’s Donald Trump visit reinforced something for me that I have known for some time now, but it has been hard for me to prove to people. El Paso is anti-Mexican and many times anti-immigrant. I know what many of you are thinking, but El Paso is 80% Hispanic, how can it be anti-Mexican.… Read More El Paso Is Anti-Mexican
Donald Trump was in El Paso last night. I can’t tell you much because the coverage was lackluster on national television. I had to sit through Fox News to watch Trump’s remarks. Obviously, The Wall reared its ugly head again. Not only is the fence NOT a wall, but Trump had the audacity to say… Read More Trump Does El Paso
Donald Trump is going to hold a rally in El Paso next Monday. There are so many things I could write about this, some of which would get me in trouble with you guys. But I’ll do my best to focus on the obvious things. Remember that the fence, which Trump calls a wall, although… Read More Trump Going to El Paso, Will El Paso Disappoint?
This week’s podcast is now up. Welcome to episode three of the Border Mic. In this episode I share with you the story of when a bar in El Paso, Texas – Aceitunas, would not let me enter with my friends because I was too Mexican. I wasn’t discriminated against because of my brown skin,… Read More Border Mic – Episode 3 – I Was Too Mexican for Aceitunas in El Paso
Once corrupt always corrupt seems to be the way it is. Just look at two old El Paso controversies to get a sense of how corruption seems to continue to blossom. Remember Victor Bieganowski and Jane Shang? The Bieganowski brothers, two of El Paso’s finest (in jest) continue to practice law and deliver medical services.… Read More Revisiting El Paso Related Corruption
Many readers do not realize that the Chapo Guzman trial is ongoing in New York. The trial has now had 23 days of testimony. This is because the government shutdown and the “border security” noise has overwhelmed the news cycles. El Paso has always played a crucial role for the success of the narcos. The… Read More Chapo and El Paso
Growing up in México in the late 1980’s the drug traffickers were part of the landscape – visible, yet officially invisible. They were hard to miss, all decked out in cowboy boots and hats with ostentatious gold chains around their necks and shiny huge belt buckles. Cocaine was the novelty, as marihuana was the drug… Read More The El Paso Dirty Secret
For many months now, long time readers have been telling me how much they miss my El Paso politics posts. I’ve posted before and told my friends that El Paso politics is just a big “yawn” for me. The truth of the matter is that nothing has changed in the 18 or so years since… Read More El Paso Politics
In 2008, Cd. Juárez was the murder capital of the world because of a drug war between Chapo Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel and the Juárez cartel. By 2010, over 3,700 homicides were committed in that year alone. In March of 2010, a U.S. Consulate employee and her husband, a detention officer at the County Jail of… Read More DEA Knew 80 Mexicans Were Going to Die and Did Nothing About It
There has been an ongoing debate in El Paso County over the jailing of immigrants at the County jail for some time now. This is even more significant under Donald Trump ‘zero tolerance policy’ on immigration. The sheriff is on one side of the debate and County Commissioner Vince Perez is on the other side.… Read More El Paso County Proves My Point About the Democrats and Immigration
Some of you are about to get your wish, well, most of it, anyway. I’m going to devote this week to El Paso elections. Some of you have been asking – some have demanded – that I get back to writing about El Paso politics. It’s not that I’m back on El Paso issues, but… Read More Some of You Will Get Your Wish
I know that politics is a dirty business. As much as I try to understand the nature of politics, I invariably come back to the fact that politics is a dirty business. But understanding that unpleasant fact does not explain the mindset of the U.S. voter. The U.S. voter mindset is a contradiction – two… Read More The El Paso Dedazo for Veronica Escobar
Big Data is the next evolution of predictive analysis for achieving a result. Complex and voluminous data sets have been credited with recent election successes. The idea being that if you build a dataset of voter histories and voter profiles you can apply predictive analysis to determine the likelihood of how a voter may vote… Read More Big Data Comes to El Paso Politics
Technology has been creeping into the strategy employed by politicos to get elected since the 2008 Barack Obama campaign demonstrated how data analytics can be used to mobilize voters. Although technology in elections has been used for many years, the Obama campaign proved that voter data analytics mobilizes voters towards a candidate. The data modeling… Read More Technology to Dominate El Paso Elections
[Author’s note: The name of Michael Pleters was corrected on December 19, 2017 @ 09:31ET] Any talk of the 2016 election will likely touch on the Russians meddling in the election. Whether on the right or the left, most, if not all voters, would agree that the vote is sacrosanct to any election. Thus, any… Read More Veronica Escobar, Corruption and Election Meddling
El Paso politics never change. The El Paso politicos remain entrenched in the notion that they represent a growing and vibrant community able to compete with cities that the rest of the nation takes seriously. They remain oblivious to the reality that when people mention El Paso around the country, at most people in other… Read More Provincial El Paso Politics
There is widespread outrage across the nation because of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse of others and the accusations again Ben Affleck, Kevin Spacey and even George H.W. Bush, among others, one would expect that a sitting judge with multiple accusations of sexual harassment and other inappropriate activities would be held to account. But not in… Read More Luis Aguilar, Sexual Harassment and El Paso Corruption
The talking heads have been so focused on the Paul Manafort indictments that the true danger to Donald Trump has been scantily discussed. When the indictments and prosecutions in the massive El Paso public corruption cases were made publicly available, it became quickly evident that much of the cases hinged on people who wore wires… Read More Dolores Briones Lessons and George Papadopoulos
In 2006, the City of El Paso paid $100,000 to a dubious research firm to create the Glass Beach Study presumably to rebrand the future for El Paso. The study created much controversy in the El Paso community because it suggested that El Paso would be better off if it was de-Mexicanized. The study depicted… Read More The El Paso Glass Beach Study in the Trump White House
Politicians are driven by the need to be reelected. A politico will perform at the minimum threshold needed to be reelected. That is the nature of the political beast. Accepting this inconvenient reality, then it makes perfect sense on why the new County Judge for El Paso is Ruben Vogt, Escobar’s Chief of Staff. El… Read More Political Cronyism and Veronica Escobar