RECYCLED ZAPATA STATUE ABOUT PAR FOR BROWNTOWN

By Juan Montoya
Despite the City of Brownsville, departing Mexican consul Rodolfo Quilantan, and a few onlookers ignoring the fact that they were unveiling a recycled statue of Emiliano Zapata as a "Mr. Charro" gift from a Mexican art studio, there is widespread acknowledgment that it was not the original one brought to Brownsville.
Putting their best face forward, all these fine folks unveiled the new and imporved Zapata minus his 30-30 bandoleers, a trasquilado moustache with accompanying cheek scars, and a fiberglass hat with holes and an amateurishly smeared paint job.
But we shouldn't belabor the point of the statue. Their hearts, like the statue's new vest buttons, are in the right place – near the chest cavity.
After all, we have become accustomed to being a place where mediocrity and second-best has become the accepted norm.
We are the capital of second-hand ropa usada stores.
Need to replace a tire? Well, there's probably a llantera near your neighborhood to serve you selling – you guessed it – used tires.
And next to the thriving thrift-store businesses, there is a proliferation of pawn shops where you can get someone else's "previously owned" possessions. Need a loan? Since banks are out of reach for a large majority of the population which doesn't meet their financial requirements, there is a proliferation of finance companies with their usurious rates where recycled money makes millions from the need of others. To our local Harvard grads: Is that called a secondary economic tier?
The Port of Brownsville is the major shipwrecker metal recycling center of the East Coast. We are willing to put up with the environmental hazards and the industrial accidents in return for next to minimum wages to recycle the metals that will make cars and bicycles in Mexico and elsewhere.
And if local workers can't cut the mustard and accept the low wages, well, we are willing to accept outsourced Mexican labor from Matamoros who will. Works both ways.
We even made former UTB-TSC president Juliet Garcia rich (to the tune of $311,000 a year) for running a second-hand university and community college amalgam and called it a "partnership," much like Charlie Clark calls his repos "gently used" automobiles and ropa usada stores use such euphemisms as "previously owned," and other synonyms for second-hand hand-me-downs.
After the "partnership" yielded all the blood it could from the TSC district turnip, Juliet was farmed out to something called the "Institute of the Americas," and finally, as the well is drying up, recycled that into an advisory position where she can use her vast experience in higher education to advice the UT Chancellor in engagement at the local, state, and "global," level.
Our love for the previously used has extended to politics, where recycled politicians reappear periodically to seek votes so they can occupy the seat of power and give them a second – or third – go-round at the public through.
In Brownsville we tend to take things a mite farther than in most places.
We have a city mayor and city commission that have been content to abdicate their responsibilities under representative government by transferring their duties to such dubious entities as United Brownsville and its United Brownsville Coordinating Board, the new OP.10.33 group, and other inventions that govern and relocate public assets at their whim.
In the latest "State of the City," Da Mayor Tony Martinez said he was going to establish three new committees to steer the city toward greatness. One would deal with higher education. The other would address job and economic development, and the other will revitalize the downtown area.
But those committees will not be filled with Joe Q. Public. He will ask the denizens of United Brownsville to fill them and advice the commission on what to do with the public's resources so that their plans can be fulfilled.
This is second-hand government at its best. United Brownsville will not only be given the authority to guide the development of the city, but will also direct the future of the city. And they will do this without having one ounce of accountability to the public which funds it.
How about Garcia for higher education, Marin for economic and job development, and Ramiro Gonzalez for downtown revitalization? Reduce, reuse, recycle. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Some would go as far as to say we are a Third World City filled with second-class citizens.
Need an example?
Former IBC President Fred Rusteberg at one time loaned his old school mate Juliet $150,000 to buy the old PanAm University president's house on Jacaranda Street after the boys in the legislature (Rene Oliveira and Eddie Lucio)  passed a bill to allow the state to sell it to her as surplus, an unheard of occurrence in Texas.
Rusteberg, along with his former school chum Juliet and banker Irv Downing (recycled from city planning) make up the United Brownsville Coordinating Board.

United Brownsville was formed after Ambiotec's Carlos Marin invented Imagine Brownsville as a plan to garner federal bucks for a park. It failed.
But out of the ashes of defeat – and the $1 million of city funds he was paid to produce it – Marin was able to wrest a mechanism and recycle it into a domestic nonprofit corporation whose Coordinating Board is made up of the formerly named non-elected members.
This self-styled "coordinating board" directs how the pie is cut using – not their money – but the money they have managed to hoodwink elected bodies and other publicly-funded entities to fork over as $25,000 "memberships" to be part of United Brownsville.
These entities – as we have pointed out before – are: the City of Brownsville, the Greater Brownsville Incentives Corporation (GBIC), the Brownsville Independent School District, the Brownsville Navigation District, the Brownsville Public Utilities Board, the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation (BCIC) and the University of Texas-Brownsville/Texas Southmost College.
Since 2009, this group and their willingly co-opted public officials have gone to the public-treasury well to strong-arm the eight public entities for their $25,000 "annual membership" payment.
From 2009 to 2012 the public had shelled out $810,000. That doesn't include the $200,00 from 2013 and the $200,000 to be collected for 2014. All told, the taxpayers of Brownsville will have shelled out more than $1,210,000 to United Brownsville for the privilege of having a troika accountable to no one "implement" their dubious "plan."
So far, this cash has produces zero jobs, except if you count the $450,000 paid for yet another "comprehensive plan" performed by a consultant to United Brownsville director Mike Gonzalez (at a $85,000 salary) when he was mayor of Kyle, Texas, and the $185,000 follow-up "small area group" plan by Oscar Garciaq Jr., Juliet's son. The barrio or city gets zilch. Would this be called financial incest and nepotism using the public's bucks?
Rusteberg was also on the board of the Brownsville Rio Grande Railroad who signed off on the 30-year franchise agreement that virtually gave the Brode Group's OmniTrax control of a profitable working railroad before it is required to plunk down any money on a promised Industrial Park and "small-business incubator." The company wanted – and got – lease to 1,200 acres from the port and use 227 acres for the incubator.
Psst, buddy. Wanna buy a good, used, trailroad?
Compared to that, the Zapata snafu seems like small potatoes.
We are lucky that the Mexican government – it its dubious wisdom – has reassigned Quilantán to head the Mexican consulate in Little Rock, Ark., and leaves Brownsville in two months.
He said that Tuesday’s ceremony that the unveiling of the emasculated Zapata is a gratifying way to end his six-year tenure here.

“Today is one of the most memorable days for me here in Brownsville, with the ceremony and the unveiling of Mr. Charro,” Quilantán said.
With any luck, the Mexican government won't follow this city's lead and recycle him to Brownsville as a consulado usado in the future.