Carlos Gimenez will return donation from publisher of racist and anti-Semitic content
Miami-Dade mayor and Republican congressional candidate Carlos Gimenez will return $5,600 in campaign donations from Demetrio Perez Jr., the publisher of the Spanish-language newspaper LIBRE that printed columns containing racist and anti-Semitic content.
Perez is a controversial former politician, felon and businessman who has become wealthy running a chain of private schools and a network of government-funded non-profit programs across Miami-Dade County.
He’s also a frequent GOP donor, though Gimenez is the only federal, state or county-level candidate to receive money from Perez so far during the 2020 election cycle through July 29, according to a Miami Herald review of campaign finance records. Perez and his son each donated $5,600 to Gimenez’s congressional campaign in March, the maximum allowed by federal law.
“The racist and antisemitic comments made by the columnists in LIBRE are unacceptable and divisive and have no place in the public debate,” Gimenez spokesperson Nicole Rapanos said in an email. “It’s disappointing that LIBRE and the Miami Herald allowed this to go on for so long. While we do not believe the personal views of LIBRE or Miami Herald publishers reflect the abhorrent views of the columnists in question, we do believe it shows bad judgment and we are returning contributions from Mr. Perez.”
Gimenez is running against incumbent Democratic Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell to represent Florida’s 26th Congressional District, which includes most of western and southern Miami-Dade County along with the Florida Keys. The race is expected to be close.
Perez has donated thousands of dollars every two-year election cycle to Republicans. During the 2018 cycle, former congressional candidate and Miami-Dade commissioner Bruno Barreiro, former Rep. Carlos Curbelo and Sen. Marco Rubio, among others, received campaign contributions from Perez ranging from $1,000 to $2,700.
Perez’s LIBRE newspaper, which has been published since 1966, was circulated in El Nuevo Herald as a paid insert from January 2020 until Sept. 11, when a reader complained about anti-Semitic content in a column by Roberto Luque Escalona. A subsequent review of LIBRE content found objectionable material routinely appeared in LIBRE for the last nine months, when it appeared alongside El Nuevo Herald’s print edition.
After ending the relationship with LIBRE last week, Herald newsroom leaders said they had been unaware the company was distributing it as an advertising supplement since January, and the company promised an investigation into how they overlooked it.
Though still incomplete, the investigation has found “significant lapses” in the handling of the supplement, according to a statement released on Saturday by McClatchy, the Herald’s parent company. There was no “formal content review” of LIBRE in the advertising department and no one in the newsroom was alerted to it, the McClatchy statement said.
Also in every issue was a half-page column by Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, with his photo at the top, on topics related to public education. On Friday, a spokeswoman for Carvalho said the school district advised LIBRE it would no longer provide the Carvalho material after news of the racist and anti-Semitic content broke. Miami-Dade Schools did not pay for or receive payment for the Carvalho material, Chief Communications Officer Daisy Gonzalez-Diego said.
Luque Escalona’s columns included content calling American Jews “cowards” after U.S. Jewish organizations issued a letter of support for Black Lives Matter and the protests over George Floyd’s death.
“What kind of people are these Jews?” Luque Escalona wrote. “They are always talking about the Holocaust, but have they already forgotten the Night of Broken Glass, when Nazi killers razed Jewish businesses across Germany? The same is being done by B.L.M. and Antifa, only the Nazis did not rob; they only destroyed.”
The Miami Herald’s content review of LIBRE found abundant objectionable material in every issue of LIBRE.
In an interview with the Miami Herald, Pérez declined to say who is responsible for LIBRE’s content and declined to say whether he was aware of the language used in the columns. Perez added that LIBRE is not responsible for the individual opinions of its columnists, who have a First Amendment right to free expression.
Miami Herald staff writers Andres Viglucci and David Smiley contributed to this report. El Nuevo Herald staff writer Nora Gamez Torres contributed to this report.
This story was originally published September 21, 2020 at 2:47 PM.