Maywood-a study in civic corruption

In the Line of Duty - L.A. Burb Mired in Guns, Gangs and South of the Border Politicos

Maywood, CA, is a tiny municipality located a half-dozen miles southeast of DWTN Los Angeles. It is literally surrounded by East/SE LA's large grimy industrial district and railroads, some of the grittiest drab districts in America.

The surrounding municipalities of Bell, Bell Gardens, Huntington Park,and Cudahy are some of the poorest, densest, heavily immigrant latino districts in US. Maywood is 96% latino, and 1/4 of its population is likely illegal. It has long been known that Maywood civic government is corrupt, a trait it shares with other cities along the Alameda railroad corridor such as South Gate, Vernon, Bell, Compton. ect.

There is plenty of info on google on Maywoods past/current civic corruption so i will not waste time repeating the details. Suffice to say that the very fact of having a large poor latino immigrant population base makes it easier for city politicians to practice civic corruption, mainly because the folks of Maywood are not firmly rooted in the community, most being recent transient immigrants. Besides, there seems to be a level of corruption tolerated by recent 3rd world incoming immigrants, maybe because they know no other system of governance, coming from 3th world corrupt authoritarian/dictatorship countries.

Lots of these small heavily immigrant cites in SE LA are infected by civic corruption, and even in some cases influenced/controlled by prominent LA gangs such as 18th street. A decade back there was a long LA TIMES article about the influence of narco/criminal syndicate gangs on Maywood/Cudahy/Bell city governments, and that city decisions were being exercised out of a few saloons and businesses owned/financed by cartel groups. I cannot find link to that article but have dug up a link to another 2007 article by LA Weekly on the massive civic/narco corruption of nearby Cudahy, which has the exact same demographics and is identical in nearly every respect to Maywood.

Not at all surprising as entire South LA County region has become so predominantly recent Hispanic immigrant( up to 50% illegals in some districts) that the city councils are likely drawn direct from the population, and bring with them the cultural traits of the foreign 3rd world immigrants: tolerance for civic corruption, bribery, payola, kickbacks, influence peddling, extortions, nepotism. These traits are not entirely unknown in cities run by native homegrown politicians(think Chicago), but it seems that there is an epidemic of rampant civic corruption in these small SE LA municipalities , which has been brought to light by Maywood dismantling it's entire city payroll and basically surrendering it's city operations to it's equally corrupt sister city, Bell.

I posted a link above to a long article by the liberal LA Weekly on the influence of gangs, drug cartels, poverty, illegal's, and 3rd world civic corruption on Cudahy, a small, gritty, declining industrial strip 1 mile south of Maywood. Everything written about Cudahy applies to the now defunct City of Maywood.