INDICTED POLITIQUERAS PAID BY HIDALGO DA CANDIDATE

By Jacob Fischler

The Monitor

Two of the three Donna women under federal indictment for bribing voters in the 2012 election worked on Ricardo Rodriguez’s campaign for Hidalgo County District Attorney, campaign finance reports show.
Guadalupe “Lupita” Escamilla received $200 on Nov. 2 and $250 on Nov. 21 for “contract labor and services,” according to the semi-annual report Rodriguez filed Jan. 15. Rebecca Gonzalez received $100 on Oct. 2 for the same services.
Reached by phone Saturday morning while campaigning door-to-door in Pharr, Rodriguez said the two women did general campaign work — and did it well.
“They were campaign workers. They were doing a little bit of everything,” he said. Their duties included canvassing and telephoning voters, he added. “They were doing good work.”
FBI agents arrested the women in December at the conclusion of an investigation into vote-buying in the Donna school board election the previous year. The women — and a third accomplice, Diana Castañeda — told an FBI agent they’d paid voters between $3 and $10 to cast their ballots for their candidates, according to court records.
Some witnesses told investigators the women also gave them food, cigarettes and drugs in return for their votes. The women all told FBI agents they received cash directly from campaign managers for the purpose of bribing voters.
Rodriguez said he had been unaware of the allegations against the women when he hired them.
“If we knew anything about any illegal things that were going on, then they wouldn’t have been on the campaign payroll,” he said.
But ignorance is no excuse, incumbent DA Rene Guerra said.
“I think that it exercises wrong judgment in associating yourself with people who you should know about better,” he said by phone Saturday from the Mission Citrus Fiesta.

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