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Community Board Chair Eduardo Vera's hostile statements to Ricardo Guerrero

Ricardo Guerrero produces a World Music show for KOOP and is a member of the Programming Committee. He has been tireless in his efforts to get the Board of Trustees to operate democratically and to consider the wishes of volunteer staff, and as a result, he's been the object of attack by Eduardo Vera, chair of the Community Board, who has been a vocal supporter of the anti-democratic initiatives. Below is an email Eduardo sent to the KOOP email list slamming Ricardo.

This email by Eduardo is so ridiculous that we're not going to waste time providing a point-by-point response. Instead, here are some highlights (or you can skip straight to Eduardo's email):

• Eduardo usually speaks in vague terms. For example, although the title of his email is "Ricardo insults Gay & Latino Community", he fails to ever mention how Ricardo supposedly did that! Eduardo also frequently accuses Ricardo of lying, but again, never produces any concrete examples.
  
  
• When Eduardo portrays himself as a martyr by describing how unselfish he is, remember that for such an "unselfish" person he has acted to consolidate his power at the station as much as possible, for example, by engineering an election of the Programming Committee in which he would be able to vote three or more times!
  
  
• Eduardo says that "all of KOOP" was supposedly offended by Ricardo, but I've only seen ONE person outside of the board publicly say they were offended by Ricardo. (That person being Eduardo's partner on the Community Board, Paul Odekirk.) And how did Ricardo supposedly offend anybody anyway? Eduardo is not very specific about that.
  
  
• Eduardo's suggestion that Ricardo bring his issues to the BoT is laughable. Eduardo's wife, Teresa Taylor sits on the BoT, and the BoT has been content to blow off the overwhelming majority of volunteer staff who have opposed their policies. And Ricardo *has* religiously attended BoT meetings trying to get accountability from the Board, and the Board has repeatedly ignored him.
  
  
• Eduardo refers to Friends of KOOP members as "a few fanatics", trying to belittle our concerns by falsely stating that our support is not widespread. In point of fact, we represent the overwhelming majority of active volunteer members. It's actually Eduardo's camp which is the minority.
  
  
• When Eduardo posted this to the mailing list, nobody supported his opinions. On the other hand, several people came to Ricardo's defense and refuted the charges (especially the one about Ricardo supposedly trying to get KKK programming onto KOOP, which is of course completely untrue).
  

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Subject: Ricardo insults Gay & Latino Community
Date: 11/12/97 8:56 AM
From: Eduardo Vera, evera@igc.apc.org
To: programmers@koop.org

Ricardo,

Who told you not to talk of anybody if you don't have something nice to say. She mus be really disappointed. [Oh, the irony!]

How many lies and cowardice it takes for you to get what you may want. You have no sense of what a cooperative is and much less what a community is.

You tried to be the leader of the Latino Collective and have meetings in your home Sunday, meetings in the morning. I guess you don't know that the Latino programming gets very bussy on Sundays and members of the collective were bussy preparing their programs. Finally, Latino collective members had it with your attempt to usurp the name of the collective. You were happy being the king of the 2 or 3 people that showed up at your Sunday breakfasts at your home. You were invited to come to meetings with the Latino collective, but I don't know if you could stand being in a meeting where you were cut to size, where you were invited to co-coordinate and collaborate, but your sore little ego did not allow you to participate with the plebeyans. So you moved to the programming committee where your racist, sexist, homophofic, and power hunger desires are satisfied. Besides, being chair of the programming committee is nice in your career-motivated resume.

[Do we need any further proof of why Eduardo was so eager to restructure the Programming Committee in order to get Ricardo off of it?]

Now that we have cleared this business of the lies about the Latino collective, lets talk about cowardice. You keep spewing lies and attacks against me in this e-mail list, where much of the Latino community does not know of how low you get. Where you expect the greater Anglo of this audience to applaud your filth. You did not dare bring this out at the general membership meeting. People would have responded to your garbage like they responded to the attack on Aida.

This is not only a cooperative radio station but also a community radio station. It means that whatever we do is not only what the membership wants but that whatever we do is for the benefit of somebody else, not for our selfish reazons.

I know this is hard to understand for you. Everything for everybody, nothing for us. This is not a food coop or a housing coop. And yes, by the way coops like unions have been racist and sexist institutions to protect the priviledge position of those who are members and to keep outsiders from benefitting. Perhaps, you can do some research about farmers cooperatives or labor unions.

But not, you think you know everything about coops because you lived in a housing coop. Where you can get all the members in one meeting and motivate, force or manipulate a decision. That is what you would like. The general meeting came and went and all you could do was to seat isolated and to offend the community by your reference of what "nebulous" community we are supposed to serve. You should know by now that everytime you say "I am not trying to offend anybody" you already offended several communities like you just offended the Queer Collective in your most recent message to them. And in offending the Queer Collective you have offended all of KOOP.

I asked you in the Board of Trustees meeting whether you have read the Strategic Plan document which was distributed at the general meeting. You said no. That is most of the problem. You are not here to learn anything. You come to KOOP thinking that you are going to teach us what a cooperative is and you bring the "principles of cooperatives", and you said "I've given you the first lesson on cooperatives" and then you go and place a poster about these principles in the wall of KOOP. Of course, you place it in a wall covering the responses of a survey being done by other programmers. You had to impose your poster and cover the work being done by somebody else. In other words you think you are teaching respect by offending everybody at KOOP.

If you wanted to learn and respect, you can start by respecting what community is in KOOP, by respecting the Board of Trustees and the Community Board. But you seem to choose the storm troop "brown shirt" approach of reactionary politics.

You are organizing to figure out how get rid of community in KOOP. How to make a "real cooperative", where power is decided by "friends of KOOP", the "good old boy" network. I have already experienced such KOOP and it has not been nice to anybody. You continue posting lies and virtual filth and you would like to figure out how to destroy me. You think that weekly attacks and lies against me are the way to go. I'll let you know that every week I get more support thanks to your attacks and like people responded to Aida, people are responding and understanding the racism, the sexism, the homophofia and the classism you are spousing and the destructiveness you are proposing.

We are here to build not to destroy. understand that. I don't care to make you a right wing martyr. If you have a problem with me and the Latino collective, why don't you bring it to the Latino collective or even to the Board of Trustees.

The fact is that your lies will not get you anywhere but closer to a few fanatics who think candy has been taken away form them.

And yes, you do not have any idea about what respect or cooperation is.

Next time sign your messages: KKK Kooperatively yours, since your idea of diversity is to include skinhead programming. [This is an utterly untrue, and obviously very offensive.]

If you want to apologize to the Queer Collective, all you have to do is write the apology and sign it. Don't write anything else. It you write anything else it will only show how little you understand anything and as it has been proven you will only be insulting again.

I will ask of all people to provide support for Mac and the Queer Collective, and to demand of Ricardo the respect which is due to the gay and lesbian community of Austin. Ricardo keeps insulting one community of KOOP after another and it is time to tell him that this is unacceptable.

Eduardo Vera

Remember that the person spewing this invective is one of your station leaders! Does Eduardo really have the diplomacy skills necessary for an elected official of a cooperative organization?

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