In Sheriff’s Office for 10 Years?

By Gregg Wendorf
Advance News Journal

Admittedly, bad news sells better than good news. People would rather read about a corrupt cop than they would “Sally’s bake sale to benefit vets.”

Or in the case of Hidalgo County, make it plural — corrupt cops, sheriffs. Seldom is there just one bad apple in the mix.

Still, I was trying to figure out what to write for this week’s editorial, and sometimes I get help by looking at old copy I’ve written. The Word files are all there on my Mac, going back to at least 2009. For stories older than that, I have to look through the hard-copy versions of The Advance.

This week, it dawned on me that it’s been 10 years (April 2014) since former Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño pled guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering. Three months later, Federal Judge Micaela Alvarez sentenced him to five years in federal prison.

That same year, Treviño’s son, Jonathan, and 10 other defendants, eight of them former law enforcement, were also sentenced to federal prison, all related to drug charges.

Past history. Why drag all of that up again?

Because it just dawned on me that Hidalgo County has gone a decade now with a clean sheriff’s department devoid of scandal. That hasn’t made the news. Or been written about to my knowledge.

In April 2014, the Hidalgo County Commissioners Court appointed J.E. “Eddie” Guerra to replace Treviño as interim sheriff, and after that, he won outright election to office and has won each subsequent reelection ever since.

If you include all four counties that comprise the Rio Grande Valley, between the mid-1990s and approximately 2014, no fewer than five sheriffs were convicted of crimes tied to either graft, drugs, or both, often with one or more girlfriends tied to the stories. Probably more than that, but I just can’t name them off the top of my head.

So, to go 10 years with no scandal inside the SO, for Hidalgo County, that’s a big deal, I think; and something to celebrate.

Now, being a politician, which you have to be to get elected sheriff, Guerra isn’t without his detractors. But in terms of drug scandals, affording special privileges to alleged jailed felons awaiting trial (conjugal visits with both the wife and girlfriend), there has never been any hint of that tied to Eddie Guerra. The people I know who work for him, with him, say he’s an honest guy, and I believe them.

By the way, I’m not writing this because the guy runs ads in The Advance. He ran one political ad for this year’s primary, and he runs an ad each year for Christmas and New Year’s, as do many other elected officials. So I’m not getting rich by supporting Sheriff Guerra. It’s just that by looking at all the past stories I’ve written about corrupt cops, dirty sheriffs, I thought, hey, why not write an editorial about an honest one for a change. Give him and his department a shoutout for a job well done.

For too long, Hidalgo County has suffered from bad news tied to dirty cops, sheriffs. It’s nice to know that the good really do outnumber the bad, based on my count. They just don’t get as much press.