Trial Reveals Drug Corruption in Texas Border County
Melissa del Bosque:
“The home invasion had been brazen, carried out in the middle of the day in a busy neighborhood in Pharr, and it had been sloppily executed. Later while surveying the damage, Perez’s wife found a 9mm Luger under a pile of clothes.
Perez and his wife recounted the bizarre, frightening robbery and kidnapping to a sympathetic female officer at the police station. A security camera in Perez’s home had recorded the entire incident, he told her. Two internal affairs officers from the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Department arrived and asked to see the video. As the video rolled and the armed men came into the camera’s view, the color drained from the officers’ faces. “I know who that is,” one of them said. “That’s Jonathan Treviño. The sheriff’s son.”
“…The Panama Unit, the Guerras and the other law enforcement agents indicted, preyed on drug dealers trying to move large loads of marijuana, cocaine and other drugs past the immigration checkpoint—75 miles north of McAllen—where the drugs could be sold in Austin and other cities for exorbitant profits. The corrupt cops ripped off the drugs and the Guerras sold the drugs locally at near wholesale prices, then they split the profits.
One by one over the past six months, the indicted members in the scheme plead guilty avoiding a trial. They are still awaiting sentencing. The 65-year old Sheriff Treviño, a powerful elected official and an adviser on border security to the Department of Homeland Security, had escaped the scandal.
But Jorge Garza, a former sheriff’s deputy, had different plans. His trial began a week ago in federal court in McAllen and will resume on Monday. The Panama Unit and police corruption in Hidalgo County is front-page news again. The trial testimony is being tweeted in real time on the front page of the McAllen Monitor’s site. The trial is providing a fascinating yet disturbing look at the enticing effect so much drug money can have on law enforcement and how it leads to police corruption.”
Read more, at: texasobserver.org
McAllen Monitor live updates:
http://www.themonitor.com/news/local/html_bd028b7c-f937-11e2-aaf2-0019bb30f31a.html
In March, the Observer reported that former deputies alleged corruption, cronyism and campaign-finance fraud at the sheriff’s office. Treviño strongly denied the accusations. But multiple testimonies under oath over the past week have revealed damning evidence of campaign-finance fraud and corruption and of the sheriff’s direct knowledge of his son’s rogue drug task force, which terrorized Hidalgo County residents for years.