Groups make clashing leadership claims over oldest Latino civil rights organization

Two groups are claiming leadership over the country’s oldest Latino civil rights organization, stretching out a conflict rooted in a botched national election in July.

Since that election for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a grassroots organization that’s a cornerstone of national Hispanic civic participation, the two groups have been fighting for control of the organization, each with its own national president.

One side is led by Domingo García, who held the post of national president ahead of the July election in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and says he still holds the post and has effective control over the organization.

The other is led by LULAC’s CEO leading into the failed election, Sindy Benavides, who leads a group of national board members who say they’ve impeached and removed García.

The Benavides camp has appointed a new national president, Ralina Cardona, who was formerly the group’s national vice president for the Northeast.

From García’s perspective, Cardona tops a list of LULAC board officials fired last month “following discovery of misconduct.”

“The internal conflict has pretty much been resolved. Two-thirds of the board met and voted to terminate the contract of our CEO and we removed her from office. The members that had been involved in taking dark money and attempting a hostile takeover of LULAC, they were defeated, and now they have been removed from office,” García told The Hill.

“It’s checkmate.”

García added that he controls the organization’s national headquarters building in Washington, as well as the group’s finances.

“At the end of the day, I’m here sitting at the national headquarters, I just had a meeting with our staff. We’re moving forward with the mission of LULAC. If they want to engage in a negative campaign, we’re not going to engage with them. We’re done. We’re moving forward,” said García.

But Benavides and her allies say they’re not going down without a fight.

“We have the constitution on our side, he can say he has a building,” said Cardona.

At the core of the Benavides camp’s argument is a board meeting held in Washington last month, where seven of the group’s eleven original board members voted on 77 articles of impeachment against García and declared him removed from office.

García’s camp held a parallel meeting in Dallas to fire Benavides and remove Cardona and four other board members who had opposed García.

“The gathering of several Board members and Domingo García in Dallas, Texas on the same weekend violated the LULAC Constitution, which mandates that the meeting site be in Washington, D.C. among other deficiencies,” wrote Cardona in a statement last week.

The two sides agree on very little, but they both pointed to the lawsuit that stopped July’s national election as a key step to end the conflict.

That lawsuit was filed with a local judge in Texas, who issued a temporary restraining order to stop the election in Puerto Rico.

Though it listed García as a defendant, Benavides’s supporters say García orchestrated the lawsuit to derail an election he was certain to lose.

The lawsuit alleged that outside groups were funneling money to create “paper councils,” or eligible voting groups at the national convention, in order to execute a hostile takeover of LULAC.

García has furthered that allegation, saying a local Puerto Rican political party, the New Progressive Party (PNP), wanted control of LULAC to further its mission of achieving statehood for the territory.

Adding to a longstanding personal rivalry between García and Benavides, LULAC’s foray into Puerto Rican status politics was the detonator for the group’s leadership controversy.

LULAC has openly supported statehood for Puerto Rico in recent decades, although the group originated as a Texas Mexican American common defense league more than 90 years ago.

LULAC has a broader grassroots membership than any other Hispanic civil rights organization, and its more than 130,000 members claim national origin from all over Latin America, including Mexico and Puerto Rico.

Since the botched election, official LULAC communications from García’s camp have included the phrase “serving the 66 million Latinos in the United States and Puerto Rico,” despite the fact that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and its residents are statutory U.S. citizens.

While it is likely that García’s opponent in that election, Juan Carlos Lizardi, would have won with the support of dozens of paper councils, there is debate among LULAC members as to whether the use of those councils runs counter to the group’s rules.

Lizardi, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, was likely to further the statehood issue as a LULAC priority if elected president.

Ahead of the election, García pumped the brakes on LULAC’s support for statehood, despite the fact that Benavides in 2018 had formally steered the group firmly into the statehood camp.

That controversy, and the accusations of a “hostile takeover,” threaten to split LULAC’s Mexican American and Puerto Rican constituencies, which together form the bulk of the group’s membership.

“The island of Puerto Rico has been in LULAC for 33 years, they have gone elbow to elbow with their brethren around the country fighting for immigration, fighting for education, fighting for health and housing, while they’re being treated as second class citizens on the island, while they’re getting bread crumbs,” said Cardona, who is of Puerto Rican descent.

For many Puerto Ricans, particularly supporters of the statehood push, the election in San Juan was an opportunity for LULAC to fully embrace Puerto Rico.

Still, the Texas lawsuit successfully derailed that election, leaving García in control.

Cardona says the lawsuit will be thrown out once the courts are convinced that the election was organized according to LULAC’s bylaws.

“Right now we are going to run the course of this Texas lawsuit. Because when it gets thrown out for [being] absolutely nothing, it will just resolve itself, because once [the courts] know, it all gets thrown out because it was baseless,” said Cardona.

While García also said the Texas lawsuit has to run its course, he said the controversy over LULAC’s leadership is a closed book until next summer’s national convention in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“We have launched a nationwide search for a new CEO and I’m not running for reelection in July of next year,” said García.

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