WIDESPREAD CORRUPTION IN JP COURTS CLOGS COURTS

By Juan Montoya
Indictments involving employees of local Justice of the Peace courts in Brownsville have revealed that at least one tape recording made by a defendants reveals widespread cash for favors and influence peddling in both JP 2-1 and JP 2-2 courts.
JP 2-1 is run by Linda Salazar. JP 2-2 was run by Erin Garcia Hernandez during the period covered in the indictments.
According to a timeline put together based on these cases, the trouble began soon after January 2013 when a couple paid a bribe to a clerk for JP Garcia in the expectation that she would rule favorably in their case against a relative. The case involved a money dispute between the couple – Jaime and Vanessa Mercado – and relative Griselda Mercado. At dispute was a small claim for $10,000, whittled down to $9,000 to come under the jurisdiction of the court.
The couple was under the impression that payments they had made on a $800 "arrangement" through go-between Maria Velia Silguero and sister Liliana Cantu, Garcia's clerk, would guarantee them a favorable judgement against Griselda Mercado, only to find out that Garcia – after reportedly having taken about $400 in separate payments, some of it in the form of payments for campaign BBQ tickets – backed out of the agreement when former DA Armando Villalobos appeared on the scene following a judgement she had made on the couple's behalf.
Instead, Garcia overturned her judgement on behalf of Jaime and Vanessa Mercado and issued a default judgment on behalf of Griselda Mercado, Villalobos' client.
Among the documents filed in the bribery case against Silguero by Cameron County District Attorney Luis V. Saenz is a translation of a tape recording made by the Mercados (Vanessa Mercado hid the tape recorder in her bosom) in a 15 minute, 45 second conversation with Silguero where they are demanding to know why the court did not live up to the arrangement. The translation was filed on April 1, 2015.
Already, Vanessa Mercado and Cantu are in the process of wrapping up their cases with plea agreements in Judge Janet Leal's 103 District Court. Silguero's case is continuing since the defrense is allowed 45 days to examine such translations before having to go to trial.
It was the Mercados' tape recording of a conversation they had court go-between Silguero and which was obtained by the DA's Office that lays bare the widespread fixing of traffic tickets and community service obligations in return for cash payments.
In one section, the two women recall the beginning:

VELIA: "Let's recall all the data from the beginning of all this problem. Ever since it started, she (JP Garcia) was in agreement because they were told you all were her (Liliana Cantu's) family, and she said yes, and there was a way to help you all. The whole problem was told to her just the way you all told us. And didn't she tell you there how to file the petition, and what she was going to do an everything? The Liliana said, when they told us how much it was going to be...You remember that?
VANESSA: "Eight hundred."
VELIA: "That we must pay them in full."
VANESSA: "But in the beginning they did not tell me that in full."

VANESSA: "So then Jaime asks me, 'Hey dude, so then ask Velia, I mean, what is going on, dude? Was the money given to her? Was it not given to her? I mean, what happened? Why does the judge..."
VELIA: "From the very beginning she said yes when we talked to her and I told you, 'Yes, she is in agreement with that...' but she wanted the money all together, and I told you."

VELIA: "Then we tried giving her half or a part, because aside from that, you were giving it in payments, friend. You gave one hundred and fifty, and then I don't remember if you gave another hundred and fifty and thst is how you went along. She was not going to take that from me...When the first time you won that she said you all had already won..."

Following her issuing of the judgement on behalf of the Mercados ordering Griselda Mercado to pay them $5,486, April 3, 2013, the court was contacted by former DA Villalobos the very next day who said he had not been notified of the order setting the hearing and asked for it to be reset.
That apparently caused Garcia to reconsider and the recording alludes to that:

VELIA: "The first conversation we had, I told you the money was in full. Then when the...whe we went to talk to her, that I gave Liliana the money because she was no longer going to talk to me...the judge. The judge no longer wanted to. When she found out the attorney was Villalobos, she no longer wanted to. After the first hearing that you all had already won because the other side didn't show up, and then Villalobos was sending her letters, she no longer wanted to take the money. The money stayed in a file underneath a drawer which Liliana showed me."

The Mercado's money was apparently mixed in and left with money that was being gathered from sales of BBQ tickets for a Garcia fundraiser, partly as a way to distance Garcia from the scheme and to giver he a plausible denial that she knew anything about the arrangement.
With Garcia backing out of the deal, Cantu apparently had no other recourse but to give extensions hoping Villalobos' legal woes would remove him from the scene. Her sister tells Vanessa Mercado in the tape:

VELIA: The only ting Liliana was doing was giving extensions and more extensions pushing the courts to see if this fucking idiot (Villalobos) would remove (lose) his license because the judge no longer wanted to help out. In other words, she no longer wanted to charge. She was going to help (Villalobos) on her own behalf...without charging..."
VANESSA: "She told me if I would have shown up this morning or not, she was still going to take their side."

Silguero also alerted JP 2-1 court clerk Cynthia Rodriguez, then in JP Linda Salazar's court, to come to her home and retrieve some of that court's documents relating tyo cases before the JP court just in case law enforcement searched her house.

VELIA: "And I told Cynthia, 'Cynthia, I have some of your documents here.' I said, 'Yours and your boss's.' I told her, 'I need to turn them in to you because if any kind of officer shows up or something, well I have to tear up everything I have here at the house. Because why do I have...? Why do I have documents belonging to other people? Why? What explanation regarding the documents am I going to have for so and so that comes from the city police or that comes from the courthouse? 
VANESSA: "Well, if you would like I can take Cynthia's or I can give them to the other idiot (Sylvia Rodriguez, Cynthia's sister-in-law).
VELIA: "I am going to turn them in to her. I need to give them to her in my house. Which I do not even feel like doing."