Tonight, a resident of San Pedro Town is accusing Minister Andre Perez of political victimization. Jose Hernandez claims that he was directed to a piece of land by former area rep Manuel Heredia and he was paying towards that land but he says it was taken from him by the PUP.
When he raised a stink about this last week at a UDP press conference, he claims that the next day he lost his job as a bus driver for the Town Council, and now he has no way to feed his five children. Here's how he put it in Spanish:
Jose Hernandez, Says He Lost Land, Lost Job
"I'm here now to see if anyone can help me because I used to work for the town council. And Minister Andre Perez took away the land where I've lived for eleven years, and now I don't have land, I don't have the house because I've lived there for eleven years, I don't have land anymore, I don't have a job because Minister Andres, the Minister of San Pedro, took my job. Yesterday they called me early and the supervisor asked if "I have the key." He told me I wasn't going to drive for them anymore, and Mr. Andres wanted the key. And I said, "Okay, fine, I brought him the key, just tell the supervisor." So today I don't have a job. I have five children, and they go to school, and I need twenty dollars to give them, twenty dollars each, but since I'm not working, I don't have any money now either, and I think maybe they won't go to school for a week or two because they need twenty dollars to eat at school."
We reached out to Minister and Area Rep Perez who described Hernandez as a "blatant liar" and says he does have a property which he requested to be placed in his wife's name. He said, quote, "He never told us that he had an expired lease on another one. If he had told us back then about it we would have been more than happy to assist him. The issue starts from many years ago he was squatting on a property that was not his. We found that it had been titled to someone else. This was from the previous administration. He told us he already had a structure on it but there was nothing we could do. Luckily in our research we found out that the parcel next to where he was squatting was available. I explained to him that was the best we could do and moving his structure to the next parcel adjacent to it would be the best we could and he agreed." End quote.
