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Latinos and politics


Pancho

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12 minutes ago, Nivek said:

It is slightly more complicated than that.  Many people fleeing from autocratic regimes affiliate them with the left-wing and thus have a visceral knee-jerk reaction to the part without any messaging being involved.  They see the left as a path to the Maduro/Castro/Chavez regimes and so they will just vote for the right by default.  

I knew a lady who grew up in the USSR but became a Republican, and thought the Left would lead to socialism/authoritarianism because the right fought against them.   She knew a bit about history but it was not all factual.  Coming here she didn't bother to relearn history, she had morons who talked like they were informed to share things with her.  

Yeah, this explains the Cubans and other groups that fled authoritarian regimes. They are initially biased very right, but unless they were wealthy in their home country, pretty studiously ignorant of the realities and gullible. 

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Posted (edited)
On 3/8/2024 at 11:42 AM, YChang said:

It truly is facinating. Classmate from Edinburgh is a small business owner. And as you imagine, votes GOP on everything. But rails on racism, lack of opportunities for people in the valley, wants better education and medical care. Tells me his parents came to the US the right way. In my head, I'm thinking your parents took advantage of an official policy welcoming immigrants back in the day. It's not like they did anything special to apply for citizenship. So proud that his area is turning purple and how they now have Republican representation. But tells me it's politics that's preventing positive policy changes. When I asked him about the infrastructure bill signed by Biden, his reponse was so what, it's never going to reach the valley. Maddening, especially when you remove political beliefs, he's seems genuinely a very kind and caring person. I think GOP voters like him have this weird dichotomy going on all the time in their heads that they don't know how to resolve or choose to ignore right now. 

I think part of the purple tilt is also partly due to both parties’ increased ideological internal convergence, South Texas Dems have always been more like the “Blue dogs” and those are an endangered species nationally. 
 

I am always remembering the “Joe Six Pack” talk and thinking— do people not realize who is actually Joe Six Pack in Texas?  This shouldn’t be hard. The Valley is an aggressively normal place.  Dems still do have an advantage because they can be normal now; the path to success in the RGV and South Texas is to talk about and deliver normal people stuff like good schools, good jobs, safe communities, competent city governance. Add a dash of solid retail politics and eating a shit ton of chicken quarters with Dallas Cowboy fans.  Importing any sort of polarized ideological rhetoric won’t play well and will more likely blow up in your face.  And don’t call people “Latinx” (seriously). 

Edited by 956 Worldwide
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Just a reminder, there's a long history of corrupt right-wing autocrats in Latin America, too, from whom folks have been running. This matters to millions of Hondurans who sought asylum here during his near-decade-long reign, but it's just a blip on the American news media radar.

 

Ex-Honduras President Found Guilty in Drug Trafficking Trial
Juan Orlando Hernández had been accused of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and working with notorious drug traffickers like El Chapo.

For more than a decade, Juan Orlando Hernández wielded power in Honduras, first as a member of Congress, then as that body’s leader and finally as the nation’s president.

On Friday, an American jury in Federal District Court found Mr. Hernández guilty of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and of possessing and conspiring to possess “destructive devices,” including machine guns.

After the verdict was delivered, Mr. Hernández, who faces a mandatory prison term of at least 40 years and is scheduled to be sentenced on June 26, rose to his feet and stood quietly with folded hands as the jurors filed from the courtroom.

During his first presidential campaign in 2013, Mr. Hernández, a member of the right-wing Honduran National Party, portrayed himself as a law-and-order candidate who could stem the epidemic of drugs and crime that had suffused the country.

But according to prosecutors in the United States, Mr. Hernández was allied with the same forces he purported to oppose. A string of witnesses testified during a conspiracy trial in Manhattan that Mr. Hernández’s political success was fueled by drug proceeds funneled to him by cocaine traffickers whom he treated as business partners.

Prosecutors have said that Mr. Hernández received millions of dollars from trafficking organizations in Honduras, Mexico and elsewhere, including from Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, who was a Mexican drug lord and the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. In return, prosecutors added, Mr. Hernández allowed vast amounts of cocaine to pass through Honduras on its way to the United States.

He boasted that he would “stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,” according to U.S. prosecutors.

 

cont'd

Spoiler

Evidence and testimony presented during Mr. Hernández’s trial painted a dismal picture of a country where drugs and politics had long been intertwined and people working in politics routinely demanded and accepted bribes.

Rows of benches in the trial courtroom were filled each day with Hondurans who said they had come to watch Mr. Hernández face a judicial process of the sort some doubted could have taken place in his home country.

Some of those spectators laughed derisively when Mr. Hernández, wearing a businesslike dark suit, testified near the end of the trial, insisting that he had no connection to drug trafficking and that the witnesses who had testified to the contrary were “professional liars.”

A defense lawyer expanded upon that idea during his summation, running through a list of crimes — including a total of 224 murders — associated with several former traffickers who took the stand as government witnesses.

“This was a cast of characters you have never seen before and the likes of which you will never see again as long as you live,” the lawyer, Renato Stabile, said. “Through the trial these people have told you they were liars. They have told you they were murderers.”

But a prosecutor, Jacob H. Gutwillig, told jurors that Mr. Hernández had accepted “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels and “protected their drugs with the full power and strength of the state — military, police and justice system.”

Although former foreign leaders sometimes go to trial in the United States, they are not often prosecuted for drug-related offenses. The closest parallel to Mr. Hernández is Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, the former leader of Panama, who in 1992 was found guilty in federal court in Miami of allowing the Medellín drug cartel to ship cocaine through his country to the United States in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes.

By the time Mr. Hernández stepped down from the presidency in 2022, he was a deeply unpopular figure in Honduras. His administration had done little to blunt the effects of crime or to create a stable economy, leading many citizens to leave the country. Mr. Hernández’s successor as president, Xiomara Castro, accused him of having turned the nation into a “narco-dictatorship,” and thousands of Hondurans celebrated when he was extradited to New York three months after leaving office.

There were celebrations outside the courthouse in Lower Manhattan, too, after the guilty verdict was announced. Dozens of people waved Honduran flags and chanted in Spanish. One woman held aloft a sign that read: “No clemency for narcopolitics.”

Photographs of people who were said to be victims of cartel violence were displayed along with an orange prison jumpsuit with handcuffs connected by a long chain.

Standing in the middle of the crowd, Carlos Hernandez, 32, said he had left Honduras while he was still a teenager to escape the violence and poverty there.

“This is historical,” he said of the verdict. “This brings the Honduran people a sense of justice they have been fighting for for a long time.”

Mr. Hernández’s trial was relatively straightforward, based mainly on testimony from witnesses, including a Honduran drug investigator and the former traffickers, including two men who said they had pleaded guilty to grave crimes and are facing potential life sentences in American prisons.

The investigator, Miguel Reynoso, testified that he was present when the Honduran authorities stopped a group of vehicles with hidden compartments and found firearms, grenades and nearly $200,000 in U.S. currency wrapped in plastic. The authorities also found notebooks with Mr. Hernández’s initials that prosecutors in Manhattan said detailed drug transactions.

Mr. Reynoso testified that the notebooks were placed into sealed plastic bags and that he brought those, seals intact, to prosecutors in the United States in 2019.

Among the former traffickers who took the stand was Amilcar Alexander Ardon Soriano, who testified that he had served as the mayor of the municipality of El Paraíso while running drugs, participated in torture and murdered two people, and that he was responsible for the deaths of more than 50 others. He said that he had asked lawmakers whom he had previously bribed to vote for Mr. Hernández as the president of the Honduran Congress. In return, Mr. Ardon said, Mr. Hernández promised to protect him from prosecutors.

Mr. Ardon added that he gave $500,000 in drug proceeds to Mr. Hernández’s presidential campaign in 2013 and had bribed people in El Paraíso to vote for him. He also said it was his understanding that El Chapo had agreed to provide that campaign with $1 million.

Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, a former leader of the brutal Honduran gang Los Cachiros, was probably the most notorious witness to take the stand. He began secretly working with American authorities a decade ago and admitted to being involved in the deaths of 78 people, including two journalists and an official who was serving as Honduras’s antidrug czar.

In 2012, Mr. Rivera testified, he had bribed Mr. Hernández with $250,000 delivered to his sister, Hilda, in exchange for protection of the Cachiros.

Asked by a defense lawyer whether he felt any remorse over the people he had harmed, Mr. Rivera replied that he was sorry for everything he did as a member of what he called “a dangerous gang,” including his payment of bribes to “corrupt” police officers and politicians.

“They should have tried to catch us,” he said, adding that instead “they allied with us.”

 

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23 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

The only Christians in the United States are the ones serving the poor soup on a cold morning. Everyone else is just playing dress up. 

Right. Because only Christians do that. Not Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or Sikhs or people with no faith at all. That’s a purely “Christian” act.

You should rethink that. Good people are good people and the religions they follow, or don’t feel the need to follow, has nothing to do with it.

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1 hour ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Right. Because only Christians do that. Not Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or Sikhs or people with no faith at all. That’s a purely “Christian” act.

You should rethink that. Good people are good people and the religions they follow, or don’t feel the need to follow, has nothing to do with it.

Dude.

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2 hours ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Right. Because only Christians do that. Not Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or Sikhs or people with no faith at all. That’s a purely “Christian” act.

You should rethink that. Good people are good people and the religions they follow, or don’t feel the need to follow, has nothing to do with it.

Swing and a miss.

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Friend recently told me about an experience he had while visiting his very successful immigrant neighbor. While helping himself to the buffet at poolside, noticed most of the immigrant Latinos rushing inside as the national anthem was playing in advance of the sporting event they had gathered to watch. With his plate, he followed them inside, only to find all of them standing, with hand over heart looking intently at the TV. He and several others looked on in amazement , wondering under their breaths what the hell was going on.

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Posted (edited)

Hispanics in America are going to be considered white in a few generations (much like how Italians and Irish and Jews are considered white, generally).

Also, *generally speaking* besides having a different skin color, a lot of the hispanic Americans espouse and share the same values as the lower/middle class white person. Family oriented, blue collar, superficially religious, hierarchical/patriarchal, etc.

It's been posted before, but there was a case study in business school when NASCAR as an organization was trying to transform their business and hired McK to come in and consult and what they found was that to double their growth they oughta market to the growing hispanics and immigrants, because they shared the same traits as the core demographic of white dudes who got NASCAR to where it was at the time (up to and including being big beer drinkers, on the whole).

Edited by BeardIP
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Posted (edited)
On 3/10/2024 at 9:30 AM, WhatTheBuck said:

Right. Because only Christians do that. Not Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or Sikhs or people with no faith at all. That’s a purely “Christian” act.

You should rethink that. Good people are good people and the religions they follow, or don’t feel the need to follow, has nothing to do with it.

Jesus wept.

Edited by TwiceHorn
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On 3/10/2024 at 9:30 AM, WhatTheBuck said:

Right. Because only Christians do that. Not Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or Sikhs or people with no faith at all. That’s a purely “Christian” act.

You should rethink that. Good people are good people and the religions they follow, or don’t feel the need to follow, has nothing to do with it.

Did you ever figure out how terrible this response was? I mean it makes sense sort of if you completely missed the conveniently capitalized first word of his post. 

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