IS CORTEZ RUNNING FOR FBI DIRECTOR, OR COUNTY SHERIFF?

By Juan Montoya
Sometimes, when local candidates first makes a run for an elected position, they tend to overstate their case in convincing the voters they should fill the oval for them.
When former U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza was first running for local office as county judge, some of us met him at a get together organized by the Apostoles, an all-male club of St. Joe graduates at the old Ringgold Park Pavilion.
Now, Garza was running for county judge as a Republican, and few people thought he had a chance at the time. As we spoke with him, he started to lay out his platform which included, among other things, lowering the national budget deficit, term limits, etc.
We stopped him dead in his tracks and told him that that spiel wasn't going to excite any of the crossover Democratic vote he needed to carry the day.
"The vote in Cameron county is 85 percent emotional," we told him. "People want to know who your father and mother were, where they worked, who you're related to, that sort of thing."
Garza listened and a few weeks later, he told us that he had gone door to door and then when he mentioned that his mom was Lita Garza and his father Antonio Jr., who had once owned a Texaco gas station near Gateway Bridge, the connection was immediate.
"I was surprised at hoe many people knew my mother," he said. "People remembered her and it opened a lot of doors."
That advice could come in handy to at least one GOP candidate for Cameron County Sheriff.
Victor Cortez, the former chief under Cameron County District Attorney Luis V. Saenz, doesn't let a chance slip to regale his listeners (and FB page readers) that he is a former D.E.A. supervisor, that he is a Vietnam Veteran, a former Border Patrol agents and that he advised State Department diplomats and military officers at the highest levels.
He also posted (which he for some unexplained reason took down shortly thereafter), that he favored covering the county with military-style surveillance cameras, establishing a system of neighborhood watches to inform law enforcement a la DEA, and prohibiting sheriff department supervisors from patrol duties.
If this sounds Big Brotherish to you, it is.
The county sheriff is not the same as the director of the FBI, with surveillance powers over all the county basing prosecutions on a system of paid confidential informants and James Bondsian intrigue. To base – as Cortez first posted and then took down – county law enforcement on creating a county of paid snitches and secret surveillance seems a bit heavy handed for a county sheriff. You'd think he's want to people feel safe, not that he's watching your every move.
Cortez makes the same mistake that Republicans up north do. They think that both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border are filled with narcotraffickers and that every barrio dweller is just dying to be  snitch to the government.
That might well apply to Colombia or some other country, but South Texas is a far cry from that assessment. What South Texas is, is a poverty-stricken region where families have tried to eke out a living and teach their children to avoid the temptation of easy money promised by the drug trade.
In other words, this is an extended community that is seeking to rid itself of the tag that everyone here is involved with illegal drugs and is dying to turn in their neighbors for some government money. Sure, a small percentage of the population is tied in to the cartels, but most local residents just run afoul of the law for economic and social reasons that similar criminals run in other parts of the country.
What we need are law enforcement officials who will keep our families safe without the state's intrusion into their daily lives and liberties. Having peace officers skirting the law with borderline tactics that might just spill over into the illegal gives lie to his slogan that "No One Is Above the Law."
It's, as one wag said, DEA-lag.
We already have the governor and former governor placing national guard and DPS officers arm-to-arm all along the border. The last thing we need is to turn this county into a police state by having a system of widespread informants and surveillance that intrude into the civil rights of the population.