Hermandad Is Vindicated

* Question: How can we be reasonably assured that the Orange County Grand Jury’s failure to return indictments against officials of tainted Hermandad Mexicana Nacional really indicate the organization’s innocence?

Answer: When all those who lined up for the privilege of publicly casting the first stones now rally around Hermandad and mouth conciliatory platitudes about differences of opinion and the galvanization of the local community.

Where was such galvanization and acceptance of diversity in philosophy a year ago? Six months ago? One month ago? Yes, the local community has been galvanized, but it was a painful process in which the sobering realization that integrity was in rather short supply in many of those individuals who now tout the old fighting spirit was revealed.

Only now is it politically convenient to be associated with the “tainted.” But we remember vividly how, for months, many of these same individuals thought nothing of denying Hermandad the opportunity to participate in citizenship fairs on public property.

Others, while proclaiming the integrity of the outcome of the 46th Congressional District electoral results, still found Hermandad and its supporters to be a convenient scapegoat in congressional testimony.

Even local “community” officials and legal experts made it very clear early on that they did not wish to be associated in any way with the accused, despite the fact that these individuals certainly ought to understand and defend our nation’s principal legal tenet of presumption of innocence.

The “galvanization” that has occurred is a recognition that your friends are the people who were there when chips were down.

Happily, it has also proven a watershed for Orange County’s Latino residents, who can now have some hope to have a system of justice that is, indeed, colorblind.

The wiser community that has emerged must stand firm in remembering what has transpired so as to work to prevent it from happening again. We must work to hold our public servants accountable and to protect the new immigrant voter who fears the ugly spotlight of voter probes that, while purportedly seeking to protect the integrity of the ballot box, instead tarnish it with ugly character assassinations.

ART MONTEZ, Past president

League of United Latin American

Citizens, Santa Ana chapter

* Today is a great patriotic V-Day in Orange County and in America.

“V” is for vindication.

For the last 13 months, a disappointed candidate has been charging that foreign-born Americans caused his defeat through fraud and criminal conspiracy.

For the last 12 months, the Orange County Edition of the Los Angeles Times has tried to sell his complaints by sheer repetition.

For the last 11 months, the Orange County district attorney, the California secretary of state and the chairman of the California Republican Party sought desperately to create some basis for those complaints.

For just as long, Republican leaders in Congress in tandem with the Republican secretary of state have gone after every Orange County foreign-born American registered voter by massively violating their Immigration and Naturalization Service files.

In growing desperation, they all turned to the Orange County Grand Jury to save their faces--the faces of false accusers.

After thorough investigation and deliberation, the Orange County Grand Jury has found nothing to indict. V-Day! It is the day of vindication for the falsely accused!

There are Americans born in this country. There are Democrats, Republicans, independents born elsewhere who made a conscious commitment to be Americans.

Shame on politicians who think they can divide us for their own partisan purposes!

Shame on demagogues who paint some Americans as suspects because of where they were born!

It didn’t work in Orange County. Too many foreign-born and native Americans fought and died for this country for it to work anywhere in the United States of America.

AMIN DAVID

Chair

Los Amigos of Orange County

Anaheim

* Re “Lopez: Damage to Hermandad Bad, Not Fatal,” Dec. 5:

Surely the Orange County Republican Party officials must be running out of feet to shoot themselves in.

First they put guards at polling places in a blatant attempt to intimidate Latino voters. Now, they continue to do their best to alienate Latino voters by keeping up the attack on the Latino organization Hermandad Mexicana Nacional.

This, despite the fact that a recent UC Irvine poll showed the Latino voters do not all march to the tune of the Democratic Party, as Republicans fear they do, but vote along lines very similarly to other non-Latino Orange County voters.

Added to this, we now have state GOP Chairman Michael Schroeder publicly damning Orange County Dist. Atty. Michael Capizzi for “incompetence” for failing to get Hermandad officials indicted for election fraud (and sent off to jail, I presume).

And, on top of all this, we again hear from citizen Bob Dornan (at his home in Virginia, yet) still in his sour grapes tantrum mode, still screaming “fraud.”

One wonders if all those tens of millions of dollars being spent on the dozen or so Republican right-wing “think tanks” throughout our nation isn’t being wasted if their “thinking” is behind California Republican Party strategy.

JAMES GALLAGHER

Huntington Beach

* Dana Parson’s column on Dec. 5 concerns a woman who voted in the 46th Congressional District election because she thought she could do so, having passed all the examinations for citizenship, even though she had not yet been formally sworn in as a citizen.

Common sense suggests that most of any improper votes cast by immigrants in her situation would have been based on such misunderstandings.

The alternative, that a group of people who cared enough about being Americans to go all through the process of naturalization would risk all by engaging in a conspiracy to violate election laws, defies logic and common sense alike. Even to assume that immigrants seeking citizenship would be aware of the technicalities of U.S. election laws is foolish. How many of us who are native-born know them?

The real scandal of our elections is not that a few people vote illegally because they misunderstand the law, but that so very many citizens who are fully entitled to vote do not trouble to do so!

It is shameful that the percentage of registered voters who actually vote is so low in election after election. The almost-citizens who voted in last year’s election should be congratulated on having a better sense of the responsibilities of American citizens than so many citizens by birth.

DONALD SCHWARTZ

Santa Ana