County Commissioner Guilty of Manufacturing and Conspiracy

Guillermo “Willie” Gandara Jr. was the County Commissioner in El Paso county, a former mayor and hopeful candidate for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives.

Friday, 08/17/2012 Gandara plead guilty to the charges of conspiracy to distribute marijuana and establishment of manufacturing operations to distribute marijuana.

According to evidence gathered by surveillance and informants, Gandara bragged about running a drug organization with a pipeline from El Paso County to Oklahoma and Chicago. He also bragged about making $1,200 per pound of marijuana sold in Chicago, and typically running 150 pounds of marijuana per trip. ($1,200 per pound is really not very much, by the way)

I’m personally a bit torn about the former county commissioner’s case. I don’t believe marijuana should be illegal, but I also don’t believe politicians should act outside the law.

The fact that this happened in El Paso county, a stone’s throw from the Mexican border, makes me a little extra nervous. If Gandara was caught with a large growing and distributing operation, chances are it began as a distribution point for operations that already came through El Paso, such as trucks full of the nasty brown brick weed that we experienced smokers know came from Mexican cartels.

I’m glad that this man was arrested, because who knows who his associates were, and politicians make enough money without having to circumvent the rules.

This man was either incredibly greedy and over-confident, or he was under orders of people that would have used whatever threats were necessary to both make him run this operation and quietly take the fall for it. I only hope there isn’t much more of this going on, and I’m comforted by the fact that this perceived cartel involvement could very well be a figment of my imagination.