The faces of corruption.

With the latest trial on the death of Mary Tipton favoring the killer Marisa Govea Hernandez, I had to stop and ask myself today over and over, “porque son tan vergeros?” meaning in Spanish, why is there so much blatant corruption, like as if they don’t care at all.  Seriously, the evidence is there on the video, I was one of the first to originally post it on the Mary Tipton story as she is walking down the street and gets struck by behind only to have the killer failing to stop and render aid.  Marisa Govea in the defense said “cerre los ojos” (I closed my eyes)…. seriously how are you not going to know that you hit a person, and okay let’s say I give you the benefit of the doubt, you stop immediately to find out what you hit because maybe just then, it could of been a person.  But I won’t get into the details of the case as really what I’m writing pertains to a bigger picture.  Quiet honestly, I wasn’t surprised the killer got away free, it was one of those things that sometimes you hope for the best knowing nothing is going to change.   Let’s start with a few people who are known to be corrupt in Brownsville.

El Marrano de Monte, what can be said about this guy. He’s sought every position possible from running to mayor,  to democratic county chair, bisd board member, and now as commissioner at large.  This guy is so desperate that he doesn’t care what position it is and what it it’s about as long as he’s elected. I actually met up with Erasmo a few months ago during early election when he ran for BISD Board and I asked him “Why did you run for Democratic County Chair, you don’t even attend any of their meetings?”   He responded “I don’t know, I just wanted to see what it was like to run for a county election” So as you can see, he just sees an upcoming election, looks to see if there’s more than one person running and if not he’ll just think in his head “Okay I’ll run for this” But most importantly he doesn’t even live in Brownsville, but if not in Austin and has been residing there since about 2009.  Most importantly his campaign is solely based on what he posts on Facebook.  I asked one of his followers the other day, “name one thing el marrano has done for the city that doesn’t involve copying/pasting on facebook” … and they couldn’t answer.

When you think of a District Attorney, you think prestige, after all you’re the person appointed to prosecute people for the State of Texas. I used to think this guy was clean as they come, I have a friend who is buddies with him and would tell me all sorts of good things but little by little that began to change.  One of the first red flags that went off was when I learned that back in the early 90’s when he was DA the first time around, he was the one in charge when Erasmo Castro was guilty of fraud and forgery.  Castro was forging signatures and notarizing titles on stolen vehicles and was caught. A jury found Castro guilty and was going to be sentenced to 10 years in the slammer however he was able to plead a deal with Luis Saenz to get probation.  Well Castro never completed probation and a warrant of his arrest should of been made, but that never happened,  for some odd reason the DA’s office doesn’t even know what happened on that and somehow “lost the files” pertaining to that case. But it gets even better, Luis Saenz has been contributing to Castro’s campaigns, no wonder why Erasmo Castro doesn’t post anything on Luis Saenz and erases people’s comments when it’s something negative, he has to help Saenz at all cost, after all, he got a get out of jail free card.   Another case that made headlines, was the case of Marco Antonio Gonzalez.    In the summer of 2014, Marco was involved in the murder of Ivan Reyes and had a hostage standoff with the police.  To summarize what happened, Marco was a Cameron Co. prison guard who worked with Ivan Reyes.  He was dating Monica Robles and the relationship took a sour note towards the end.  Ms. Robles who called the relationship off,  started dating Ivan Reyes (Marco’s co-worker) and when Marco found out, he killed Ivan Reyes.  After killing his co-worker in cold blood, he took Monica Robles for hostage and the police came, during the stand off Marco shot at the police several times and was finally subdued when SWAT was called.   Normally someone would get at least 20-30 years for shooting at the police, let alone killing someone, well since he knows the DA considering he worked for Cameron County, he was able to get a sweet deal and got 5 years worth of jail time, but wait he had already served some jail time because of not bailing out prior, so he only technically got a 2 year prison sentence…TWO FUCKING YEARS.  Hell if I get caught smoking some weed in Brownsville in front of a police officer, I’ll get a mandatory 5 year sentence, but if you kill someone and shoot at the police and if you know the DA, you only get two years.   Then there is the case of Tony Yzaguirre, about a year ago when Saenz was running for re-election and people maybe voting for Carlos Masso , all of a sudden the DA goes in hard after Tony Yzaguirre (long time cameron co. tax assessor) in an operation known as “Dirty Deeds”.  He accused Yzaguirre of taking cash bribes for title transfers and 10 other counts of abuse of power, but in the end Yzaguirre was found innocent after the DA failed to provide any credible evidence.  Pretty much the case was all for show for Saenz to use Yzaguirre as a scapegoat and tell people he was trying to “bring down corruption” only so he can win votes and get re-elected.   Then of course the nail that hits the coffin is the case of Mary Tipton which I already mentioned in the beginning.  

Then you have the mayor of Brownsville, Tony Martinez who is an attorney and a millionaire one at that through his law firm, real estate, and financial investments.  This guy goes behind the city commission and approves the purchase using city funds of an abandoned rotten building known as casa de nylon.  This building was owned by one of the mayor’s buddies and valued originally somewhere around $640,000.  The mayor then had another one of his buddies do an appraisal and somehow it was determined that the asbestos filled building had a value of $2.3 million dollars. You would think that the city would first go and inspect the building before forking out the money, but nope, the mayor already approved the sale and his buddy became 1.4 million dollars richer.  Then you have where he’s able to pull strings to have the City of Brownsville hire his personal secretary from his law office part time for $18/hour.   The City told him they couldn’t just hire one person directly but would have to open a position to allow other candidates to apply but for some odd reason, while every vacant position is managed directly by human resources, this position was going to be outsourced through a staffing agency and coincidentally the staffing agency determined that his personal secretary is the best available candidate and so the city went ahead and hired her.  Funny that nobody mentioned that the owner of the staffing agency is also buddies with Tony Martinez and they received a nice commission for the referral.  Just recently the mayor was able to buy an adjacent building that the city acquired after somebody forgot to pay their taxes and somehow instead of it going to the highest bidder, there was no bids other than the mayor and was able to buy a property with a 80% discount and expand his law firm’s parking lot.

Erasmo Castro who ran for mayor mentioned he wanted to take down Tony Martinez in 2015, but he came in third place and thus failed in his conquest.  Since Pat Ahumada made it to the run off as a second place, instead of supporting and rallying behind him,  Erasmo decided to support Tony Martinez.  Erasmo never had a chance in the election, he simply decided to run to take votes away from Pat Ahumada who would of had a very good chance of winning. It’s no surprise that Tony Martinez and Erasmo Castro are friends and while el marrano talks about defeating corruption, how can he do that when he can’t stop lying over and over.