From rage to vigilance

Until recently, Enrique Iniquez thought of Bell as a perfect little American town.

The 45-year-old carpenter owns a four-bedroom home on a street lined with jacaranda trees, well-tended lawns and not a trace of graffiti.

He knew many of the people running his city and was on a first-name basis with some. Most of these leaders spoke Spanish, his native language, and seemed to be honest, he said. Listening to him, it’s clear that he thought of the Spanish-speakers in City Hall as a kind of a reflection of his own achievements as a Mexican immigrant.

Then Bell’s secrets were revealed to him. Four council members were earning obscene, six-figure salaries for part-time work. The city manager was earning twice the salary of President Obama. Local officials were getting raises while simultaneously upping his property taxes to among the highest levels in L.A. County.

“I couldn’t sleep I was so angry,” Iniquez said. A year ago, budget cuts caused him to lose his job with the city of Los Angeles. He’s been surviving on his unemployment check, he said, scrimping pennies to pay a tax bill that’s helping fund those lavish salaries. “I had this night of insomnia where I kept asking myself how this could happen.”

Bell is home to about 40,000 people, but the community of registered voters is less than a quarter that size. Many of these voters are immigrants who’ve worked most of their lives in humbly paid jobs. They’ve saved money, raised families, bought property and become U.S. citizens. They’ve played by the rules and believed the rules to be good and fair.

All of that makes the revelations of the last month an especially stinging slap in the face.

Iniquez pulled out two chairs onto his porch so we could talk, and we sat underneath a small U.S. flag. We began in English but then switched to Spanish, because it seemed the language in which he could best express his outrage.

He told me he came to California from Mexico City as a teenager, and with his wife has raised four kids in Bell. He’s been a U.S. citizen since 1994.

“I thought that in a city in the United States, someone would find out something like this was going on,” he said.

Like a lot of people in Bell, he believed Jeffersonian good government was somehow engrained in U.S. culture. That our democracy’s famous checks and balances, our good accounting practices, what’s known in Mexico as transparencia, made it impossible for a few public officials to live high at the expense of their poor constituents.

He was wrong.

“In Mexico, it doesn’t matter what your qualifications are — you can get a government job if you’re the friend of the compadre of the neighbor of some official,” he said. “Now I can see that we’re in the same tangled-up ball of corruption over here.”

In Bell, they’ve pulled off a scheme that seems worthy of the most cynical Latin American politico — or the sleaziest American ward boss.

Corruption is a virus that always lingers around a democracy, no matter the language and culture in which that democracy operates. It’s a disease that can attack any body politic when it’s out of shape and neglected.

One of the things that’s always kept American democracy more fit than many others is what the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the New England townships he visited nearly 180years ago: a unique obsession with the institutions and minutiae of local government.

In Bell, not enough people were obsessed with their City Council. Apathy allowed the council to pull off the sleight of hand of a 2005 special election in which it gained the power to escape limits on city salaries on the basis of fewer than 400 votes cast.

When I asked Rogelio Jimenez, Iniquez’s neighbor, what lesson he’d learned from the Bell fiasco, he answered quickly: “Get involved.”

All of a sudden, a lot of people in Bell want to get involved. After talking to Iniquez and Jimenez, I wandered over to Bell City Hall and found about 50 people waiting in line two hours before Monday’s council meeting was scheduled to begin.

So many different L.A. trades were represented in that line, it was like a labor convention. There was Manuel Enriquez, a cardboard-factory worker; Olivia Torres, a retired garment worker; and Gloria Platero, a native of El Salvador and a housekeeper. All were naturalized U.S. citizens. And all were very angry.

Platero told me she was at her boss’ house in Beverly Hills when she picked up a copy of The Times and saw the story showing Bell’s residents were paying a significantly higher property-tax rate than people in Beverly Hills.

“I saw those numbers and thought, this is ridiculous,” she said. “How could they do that to poor people?”

As the line outside City Hall grew to 300 people, a few couldn’t contain their rage. They launched into a series of Spanish epithets on a bullhorn, including ladrones, thieves, and one of my personal favorites, rateros, which is applied to thieves so petty and conniving, they resemble rats.

All that yelling was cathartic, no doubt. It was also very colorful for the television cameras. But previous experience in the cities of southeast L.A. County suggests such unconstrained anger can lead to the replacement of one band of corrupt officials with another, more careful band of corrupt officials.

A healthy civic life comes not from rage, or a desire for revenge, but from reason and commitment to community. It requires the daily patience of staying informed and being a good citizen. To have the city they want, the people of Bell have to swallow their humiliation, learn from it and vow not to get fooled again.

This is precisely what Iniquez said he wants.

“It will be a long process, but it will be for good,” he said. “We have to make sure that if we were victimized, no one else is. And if we were asleep, we have to show others to be awake.”

hector.tobar@latimes.com