What the Heck? Radio show promotes “Operation Cuca Gotcha”

An FM radio station in New Jersey is encouraging its listening audience to report suspected “illegal aliens” to their radio station known as New Jersey radio station or to the federal Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE). The two radio jocks who run the radio show call themselves the “Jersey Guys.”  They call their effort “Operation Cuca Gotcha”. “Cuca” is another name for the insect cucaracha. New Jersey area political and community leaders are concerned about the show because it may encourage racial profiling and other bias incidents against Latinos as similar radio programming has done in the Los Angeles area. Similar anti-Mexican radio hate programming at a Los Angeles station against an elementary school that serves children of Mexican descent caused an arson threat and a bomb threat to be left on the school’s telephone recorder. The racist “Operation Cuca Gotcha” campaign has mobilized many New Jersey Latino organizations and elected officials. Assemblyman Wilfredo Caraballo of Newark ( http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/members/Carabal.asp ) said, “It’s a despicable campaign and clearly slanted at Hispanics. The campaign describes us as bugs that have to be stamped out.” Assemblyman Caraballo added that the campaign “encourages a vigilante movement against illegal immigrants, or people who look different.”

The Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting Website (here) reports the following about the radio promotion:

Proclaiming their “Jersey Guys” to be “America’s most listened-to FM afternoon show,” the radio station that defended its deejays attacking “damn Orientals and Indians” in 2005 recently faxed newspapers about their new “La Cuca Gotcha” feature, timed “to coincide with Cinco de Mayo.” A derogatory pun of the folk song title La Cucaracha—which means cockroach in Spanish—the event encourages listeners to notify the station and immigration authorities about people they perceive to be undocumented immigrants. Even an editor who thinks his state has “a real problem with illegal immigrants” knows that “something as stupid and offensive as ‘Operation La Cuca Gotcha’ will do absolutely nothing to solve it.” The object of this program is apparently to get the day laborers waiting in the cold for work… arrested and sent back to where they came from. And in order to make that happen, the station wants their listeners to become snitches and stoolies for the feds…. It will not make us one bit “safer” as the station suggests. It only feeds from the vein of ugly racism that lies much too close to the surface… and provides both affirmation and expression for that bigotry and lynch mob mentality.

KJ