A Denver Housing Activist Speaks Out Against 'Venezuelan Gangs'

Opinion for The Latino Newsletter

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DENVER — Hearing Donald Trump talk about the situation in Aurora was disorienting. Not only was it wrong, but it's amazing this story has reached a national fever pitch. This was a local story less than a month ago, one which already had coverage debunking the charges of gang activity at an apartment complex.

A property that had complaints about bug and rat infestations, lack of heat during winter, mold, repair requests being ignored for months, trash piling up, going back to 2020. The problems were nothing new, but the recent influx of migrants and the scapegoating of immigrants by local governments were. 

In October 2023, I was hired to work at one of the shelters the city government had established for the migrants who had been trafficked from Texas to Denver, as part of Texas Governor Greg Abbott's policy meant to punish so-called liberal “sanctuary cities.”

I worked one shift at this job, which was located in a hotel that had been converted to a shelter. I could only work one shift because the bitterness and vindictiveness of the government employees offended me. They spoke of the Venezuelan migrants in the shelter as though they were animals who were bringing drugs and crime to the shelter.

Because I spoke Spanish, I was tasked with inspecting the migrants’ rooms, going through their drawers, clothes, and personal belongings. The people staying there were forbidden to visit each other's rooms, have friends visit, and were confined to stay in their rooms except to leave for work or school.

The shelter operated more like a prison.

The final straw for me was when, after dinner, a supervisor and I were sent to the rooms to do another inspection, this time waking up families with small children so we could ensure that nobody in the room was unauthorized to be there. After making multiple children scream and cry with our intrusions, the supervisor apologized to me, saying, “This is fucked up,” but continuing our march around the shelter, yelling at people to go to their rooms, and then harassing them so we could inspect their rooms minutes after telling them to go to bed. 

This is the real Denver. Not the tourist-friendly “liberal” city, but the actual practices of its government.

The same city where a couple weeks ago, a local right-wing artist put racist signs up at bus stops around the city telling Black people to sit in the back of the bus and that Kamala Harris' immigrants would sit in the front.

Earlier this year, Mayor Mike Johnston announced that the city would be cutting DMV and Park & Recreation services because of the migrant presence, scapegoating the migrants for budget cuts and stoking racial resentment. And lo and behold, a few months later, the same migrants abused in Denver's shelters end up in a condemned building next door in Aurora. 

What I Saw

When I started as a campaign organizer in August at The Redress Movement, a national nonprofit dedicated to redressing the effects of redlining and racial segregation in housing, I was tasked with developing a campaign around tenants’ rights and protections.

Within days, the Aurora story dropped, and in my work, I collected evidence that the 10 properties owned by CBZ Management were almost universally in disrepair: boarded up windows, uncollected trash, structural damage, broken windows. The only property without structural damage, and in fact the only property with security, is one on Vine Street in the prestigious Cap Hill neighborhood. Based on my visits and inspections, that was the only property with majority-white residents. 

I attended the residents’ press conference, whose images have recently made the rounds in local and national news outlets. I was there to provide support to the organizers, the East Colfax Community Collective, and House Keys Action Network, as well as to observe. These two groups have been on the ground organizing the tenants at CBZ properties in Aurora, and Redress is now becoming involved, as the racial discrimination by CBZ becomes undeniable. 

At the news conference, tenants spoke of indifference from management about fixing the heating and cooling, repairing appliances, or fumigating apartments overrun with vermin, from rats and mice to cockroaches and bed bugs. One tenant brought out multiple mice he had caught in traps. Another tenant brought out a washcloth covered in bedbugs.

When asked by media outlets about gang activity, residents uniformly denied any gang presence, with one tenant stating that the only gang is the landlord. Other residents brought up Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman visiting the property with a police escort and refusing to speak with them. There was even a racist text message received by a tenant who had been doxxed, his information posted online, threatening his family and community.

Residents described white neighbors approaching them and telling them to go back to their home countries. 

This entire story was and always will be about CBZ Management. If gangs are the reason they can't access their buildings and fix them, then why are other properties on the other side of town experiencing the same conditions?

When my colleague Kevin and I visited the other apartments, we were told of trash piling up, bug and rodent infestations, and indifference from management. This building is majority Latino and hasn't yet been demonized with press coverage regarding gang activity, yet the same conditions exist. People of color are being neglected, abused, and suddenly at risk of having their own building condemned because of its association with CBZ Management. 

I am here to say, unequivocally and firmly, that the gang narrative is a racist dog whistle, and that Denver and Aurora's only real problem are city governments willing to scapegoat Latinos in order to protect developers and their own bottom line.

That is the story the media should be telling.

About the Author

Jon Marcantoni is a campaign organizer for The Redress Movement and founder of Flamboyán Theatre.

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_{The Latino Newsletter welcomes opinion pieces in English and/or Spanish from community voices. You can email them to our publisher, Julio Ricardo Varela. The views expressed by outside opinion contributors do not necessarily reflect the editorial views of this outlet.}