La vida Utah: Bias a painful part of life for Hispanics
Rafael Gomez was working in his office, on yet another 20-hour day. It was the kind of hard work that had transformed his once-tiny bakery from a dream and $20 worth of flour, vanilla and sugar into a prosperous business with 20 employees and countless loyal customers, mostly Latinos living in area neighborhoods.
That's when Gomez heard the screaming and yelling and the gunshots. And he saw the men, all dressed in black, carrying automatic weapons and ordering everyone to the floor. One woman tried to run but was tackled by a gunman and dragged by her hair to where 60 other customers — men, women, children — had been forced to lie face down, red laser sights trained on their heads.
The men in black said they were police, but they wore no identifying marks. Who knew for sure?
They tore apart sacks of flour and dumped chilies on the floor. They pored through every nook and cranny of the business. One officer destroyed an icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe hanging on the wall, thinking a safe with cash and contraband might be hidden behind it.
There was no safe.
At the time of the April 25, 1997, raid, law enforcement officers — all part of what was reported at the time to be the largest coordinated federal, state and local anti-narcotics raid in Utah history — boasted they had shut down a major drug-dealing enterprise, confiscated large quantities of drugs and arrested scores of illegal immigrants. Newspaper headlines and television broadcasts uncritically echoed the police accusations.
As was demonstrated later at trial, none of the 80 people handcuffed and detained for four hours that day at Panadaria La Diana was in the country illegally. Officers recovered no documents of a criminal enterprise and no guns, and the only drugs that were confiscated were some antibiotics and 24 Darvon tablets, a prescription drug Gomez had purchased in Mexico where they are sold over the counter.
It also came out at trial that undercover officers had never purchased illegal drugs inside the business, nor had they witnessed anyone else doing so.
And while the search warrant specified the raid would occur in the middle of the night when there would be fewer people in the line of fire, instead, it was executed at the bakery's busiest time of day.
"There was an assumption made that because the employees and the customers all spoke Spanish, and that because drug dealers selling on the streets (near the bakery) spoke Spanish, that drugs were being sold out of the restaurant," says Mike Martinez, the attorney representing Gomez, his employees and customers in a civil rights lawsuit against a virtual who's who of law enforcement agencies from the FBI to SWAT-trained Bountiful city paramedics.
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