Fake ID Lands Trib in Hot Water
The story led the July 17 edition of Exito, the Tribune Company’s Spanish-language weekly in Chicago. A much shorter version ran the same day in the Tribune’s Metro section. The subject was the matricula consular, a plastic-coated ID card that the Mexican government, through its consulates in the U.S., issues to Mexican immigrants, including those who are otherwise undocumented.
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On July 14 Marquette District police arrested three men in their Cicero apartment, where they allegedly were producing forged documents that they peddled in Little Village. Gerardo Cardenas, an Exito reporter, was watching videotape of the press conference announcing the raid and noted that one of the manila folders into which evidence had been sorted was labeled “matriculas.” He got on the phone. The cop he talked to at the Marquette District said, yes, those were matriculas that had been confiscated. He indicated that a janitor inside the consulate had smuggled them out.
It would have been a good idea at that point for the two papers to have called Prieto themselves. But all Romero would get for his efforts was a line or two in the July 17 story saying the consulate denied the allegations. “It used to be the consulate was not a very trusted source, but on this date we were right,” he says ruefully. “We let them know before they published the story, but they decided to stay with their source. And their source was wrong.”
On July 19, two days after the original story appeared, the Tribune ran a correction. “The premise of the story was incorrect,” said the Tribune, acknowledging that no matriculas had been recovered in the raid and that the janitor in question had worked for a U.S. government agency. “The incorrect information had been provided by a Chicago police officer investigating the case.”
Says Solomon, “They’ve asked for several things. During our first go-round they wanted an apology and retraction. We told them we’d effectively done that. They escalated their demands, and they demanded we publish a picture of a matricula and say, ‘This is real.’ We pointed out that besides their trying to tell us what to do, we weren’t sure it was real.” Solomon says he’s seen a couple of recent news stories that suggest fake matriculas might actually be in circulation in Los Angeles.
It might be that other media have ignored the story because they don’t think it’s worth reporting (though Exito’s competition, La Raza, has been on top of it). After all, what harm did Exito’s mistake actually do? I ask Pelayo this.
