Federal judge dismisses lawsuit over Flamin' Hot Cheetos origin story
A federal judge this week dismissed a lawsuit filed by the man who says he invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
Richard Montañez had sued Frito-Lay and its parent company PepsiCo last year, alleging they defamed him and hurt his career by denying his role in creating the popular snack.
Federal Judge John W. Holcomb of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles wrote in his Wednesday ruling that Montañez's accusations of fraud and defamation were insufficient or lacked "factual support."
But the battle over the origin story of the spicy junk food will remain in play for now.
Montañez will have the opportunity to amend his lawsuit because "he may be able to cure the deficiencies in his pleading by alleging additional facts," the judge wrote.
Montañez will have until June 13 to submit an amended complaint.
His lawsuit came in the aftermath of a 2021 Los Angeles Times investigation that questioned his rags-to-riches story that had long circulated the internet and captured the hearts of fans of the snack and immigrant communities.
The story goes that Montañez was working as a janitor at Frito-Lay's Rancho Cucamonga plant when he dreamed up a version of the Cheeto that would appeal to the Latino community and had the gumption to pitch his idea to an executive.
The Times article cited chronological inconsistencies in Montañez's story, archival proof of the release of test products and comments by Frito-Lay executives.
According to Montañez's lawsuit, he grew up in a Southern California migrant labor camp sharing an 800-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment with his parents and 10 siblings. He got the janitor job in the mid-1970s, and a decade later he and his wife experimented in their kitchen to create the new snack.
In his lawsuit, he explained that he met resistance working with the research and development team while creating a spicy seasoning for mass production.
"Dissatisfied that Mr. Montañez - a poor, uneducated Mexican plant worker and janitor - had successfully developed a new product, Frito-Lay's R&D personnel completely shut out Mr. Montañez from the development process," the lawsuit said.
Montañez climbed PepsiCo's ranks, becoming the company's vice president of multicultural marketing and sales before retiring in 2019.
In his lawsuit, Montañez said that the companies had sent him touring the country delivering inspiring talks in elite academic and business settings, and that as a result PepsiCo had "reaped tremendous benefits by affirmatively holding (Montañez) out as the inventor of Flamin' Hot Cheetos."
But Holcomb, the judge, wrote that Montañez could not argue that PepsiCo and Frito-Lay's profiting off the premise that he invented the snack was unjust since Montañez "mutually benefitted from Defendants' decades-long support."
Montañez's attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Los Angeles Times staff writer Sandra McDonald contributed to this report.)
Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
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Los Angeles Times
6 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
A gang bullet cut him down. How the worst day of his life began a journey of faith, forgiveness
At St. Francis Medical Center, a Lynwood trauma hospital serving poor, mostly Latino parts of southeast Los Angeles, Father Cesar Galan begins his shift as chaplain in the intensive care unit. Moving from bedside to bedside, he listens to patients' fears, prays with them and, if they are Catholic, as most are, offers to hear their confessions. Many eagerly unburden themselves, but some say they are beyond forgiveness. My sins are too bad, they tell him. God could not want anything to do with a person like me. In these moments, Galan might be tempted to pour out his own life story. He might say he knows they are wrong — not from doctrine or Scripture alone, but from the .38-caliber bullets he carries inside his body, the tattoos hidden under his clerical garb, the gravestone in Orange County and the face he envisions when he raises the communion chalice at Mass. He might tell them that it was in this very hospital, in this same ICU, that he experienced the lowest moment of his life and found the grace to change. Galan says none of this, though. He dislikes talking about himself and says he would never want to steal the spotlight, especially in what might be the last meaningful conversation of another person's life. Instead, he delivers a message he once needed to hear: 'The only sin that can't be forgiven is a sin that you're not sorry for.' Galan's own sins began in a rough corner of Artesia known as Chivas. The neighborhood took its name — Spanish for female goats — from the livestock residents once raised in their yards for slaughter. By the 1980s, when Galan was finishing grade school, the word had become synonymous with a gang that operated on its streets. As L.A. criminal organizations went, Chivas was small — about 150 members, many of them related, with territory that amounted to a few blocks of tract homes against the walls of the 91 Freeway. The gang had an outsize reputation from drug trafficking, connections to the leadership of the Mexican Mafia prison gang and bloody attacks on larger rivals from Norwalk and Hawaiian Gardens. 'Every street had a dead end,' said Galan's sister Gabriela. It might have made some people claustrophobic, but the children of the neighborhood realized at a young age that it also provided protection. When other gangs came into the neighborhood to commit drive-by shootings, she said, 'it was hard for them to get out.' Galan grew up in the heart of Chivas, one of eight children in a two-bedroom house on 169th Street. Unlike many other neighborhood families, his parents had no connection to the gang. His father, a Mexican immigrant, was a janitor. His mother, the daughter of Texas farmworkers, worked at a factory. In junior high, kids the Galan children had known their whole lives started associating with the gang. The older siblings in the family steered clear. Galan, the youngest boy, was an observant, savvy teenager, and he remembers taking stock of his choices. His father, who worked two jobs and prayed daily on his knees, 'looked tired all the time. He didn't have any money in his pockets,' he said. The Chivas drug dealers had 'nice cars, women, [were] nicely dressed, and all they do is hang out all day.' He chose the gang. He brawled his way through four junior highs and two high schools, beating up rival gang members and any other comers in the name of Chivas. In a ninth-grade ceramics class, he met Catalina Garcia Hirsh, an honor roll student who lived with her mother in Cerritos and had no gang ties. 'He was all confidence and charisma,' she recalled. Though short and scrawny, Galan had what Hirsh remembered as 'a big walk' that reminded her of John Travolta in 'Saturday Night Fever,' she said. She joined Chivas, and they began dating. L.A. was at that time gripped by gang violence. The Sheriff's Department reported the deaths of 31 innocent bystanders in 1989 alone. Clashes with law enforcement were a routine part of life in Chivas. Decades later, Galan can still mimic the officers' shouted commands: 'Back up, back up, kneel, kneel, lay down, spread your arms, spread your legs.' He was arrested repeatedly, often in a 1978 Oldsmobile he had bought with wages from an after-school warehouse job. Neither he nor any of the friends hanging out in the vehicle were old enough for a license. Some who rode in the car had weapons and drugs, but he said he never carried a gun or used or sold drugs. In those years, Chivas struck him as less a life of crime than 'an adventure.' That changed in 1990 when his best friend, Jesus Diaz, a 17-year-old Chivas member, was shot dead by gang members from Norwalk. Grief drew Galan closer to the gang, he said, but it also made him question the life he was living. One night, a Chivas elder recently released from prison took him aside and, knowing about his warehouse job, asked to borrow $30. Galan, then 16, was stunned. Gang leaders had seemed so rich and powerful when he was a boy. But now, on the cusp of adulthood, he saw them as weak and helpless. 'This could be me, asking somebody for money,' he recalled thinking. 'It was like an epiphany.' If I live to 18, he told himself, 'I'm getting out of here.' On a Tuesday morning this spring, Galan, 52, ran his finger down a list of patients recently admitted to St. Francis. Its 354 beds can seem like an X-ray of underprivileged L.A. The busy emergency room on Imperial Boulevard treats shootings, stabbings and suicide attempts. The hospital's upper floors are filled with people suffering from diabetes, cardiac disease, sepsis and strokes. The maternity ward, where Galan is summoned only on rare and very sad occasions, delivered 2,789 babies last year. Now owned by a for-profit hospital chain, St. Francis retains aspects of its Catholic history. Galan and other priests celebrate daily Mass in the first-floor chapel, and every patient is visited by a chaplain within 24 hours of admission. Traveling from room to room, Galan announced himself with a knock and sometimes: 'It's Father Cesar.' In one room, an elderly woman reached out to him and began to cry. On another floor, a 31-year-old woman with terminal cancer told him how badly she wanted to live. Down the hall, a man with tattoos covering his chest and arms lowered his eyes as Galan anointed his hands with holy oil. Being a hospital chaplain means frequent confrontations with what Galan and his supervisor, Brother Richard Hirbe, called 'bad theology.' What did I do to deserve this cancer? I'm a bad mother because my son was shot. If I walk all the way to the basilica on my knees, will my daughter recover? One day in March, an alcoholic patient told Galan that God had given him cirrhosis of the liver as a punishment for his sins. Galan strives to meet people on their own spiritual terms, but when it comes to bad theology, he sometimes pushes back. 'God is not punishing you,' he told the man. 'You are bearing the consequences of your own choices.' On his 18th birthday, Galan quit school and got a job delivering furniture. He and Hirsh moved to Anaheim and had a son, Jonathan, in 1994. They married in a 1996 civil ceremony and had a second son, Abel, in 1997. Tattoos on their hands still advertised their gang ties — a gothic CHIVAS on hers, three dots for 'mi vida loca,' my crazy life, on his — but they were living a different kind of life. He made $500 a week and they lived in a safe area close enough to Disneyland for their boys to watch the fireworks every night. 'We are really doing it,' Hirsh remembered thinking of their life. Then they made a decision Hirsh came to see as 'the downfall.' They moved back to Artesia to be closer to her family. The streets and friends Galan had left behind as a teenager were now two minutes away, making it easier for him, Galan said, 'to drive through, to be a little bit more involved … to not change too much.' Galan started spending more and more time in Chivas, according to Hirsh, drinking after his trucking shifts and seeing less of the kids. Her own father had gone to prison and died young. She wanted something better for their boys. She filed for divorce in 1998, writing in an affidavit, 'When he's drinking, he scares me. I don't know what he's capable of at those times.' They reconciled, but in January 2001 she alleged in a restraining order application that he had punched, kicked and pushed her and passed out while caring for the boys. A judge ordered Galan to avoid alcohol while with the children and to vacate the family home. He was 'still struggling with that' when he drove to 169th Street on April 3, 2001, with his brother Hector. The gang was in a garage converted to a man cave. One man was celebrating his release from the supermax prison at Tehachapi. There was beer, darts, guys playing guitars and a tattoo artist. Around 8:30 p.m., Galan heard gunshots and walked toward the street to investigate. In the driveway, he saw the man who'd been released from prison running directly at him. 'He pulled the gun from his waistband, and I thought to myself, 'Move or you are going to die.' And so I went for the gun,' he said. It was too late. A bullet spun him down to the ground on his stomach. As he lay there, he heard a second pop. Someone called 911, but in what is perhaps a testament to the crime rate in L.A. in those years, it took an hour before the ambulance got him to the hospital. That was enough time for Galan to borrow a phone and leave a voicemail Hirsh can still recite by heart: 'If I die, I am sorry for the life I gave you.' And it was enough time for him to register that Hector, who had watched over him since they were children on this very street, was nowhere to be seen. At St. Francis, the go-to hospital for gang casualties, doctors stabilized Galan and moved him to the ICU. Whenever he roused from the fog of morphine, he asked for his brother. They were just 21 months apart, and Hector had always shadowed his younger brother 'like a body guard,' their sister Gabriela recalled. As teens, they both joined Chivas and got the gang's name tattooed across their abdomens. As adults, they worked for the same trucking company. Each delivery vehicle had two positions — a driver and a helper who was paid slightly less. Galan started as Hector's helper and chose to remain in the role so they could spend the day together. None of the relatives sitting vigil could bear to tell Galan the truth: The man just out of Techahapi had shot Hector twice in the head, rendering him brain dead. He was two doors down from Galan in the ICU, kept alive by machines. Galan was already dealing with a lot. A bullet had severed his spinal cord at the fourth vertebra, news delivered by a doctor who, Galan recalled, didn't even take the time to sit down. ''You are paralyzed from your chest down. You are going to be like that for the rest of your life,'' he recalled the physician telling him. 'And then he walked out.' Hirbe, the hospital chaplain, was no stranger to gang tragedies after 14 years as a St. Francis chaplain, but something about the scene playing out in the ICU gripped him profoundly. He had been on duty when the Galan brothers arrived and remembers the offhand remark of a sheriff's patrol deputy in the ER: 'Slow down, brother. It's an NHI.' The initials stand for 'No humans involved' — an epithet sometimes used by law enforcement to describe gang-on-gang violence. In the ICU, Hirbe told the family it was never going to be the right time to tell Galan his brother was dead. Eventually the chaplain agreed to do it. A devastated Galan asked, 'Can you take me to say goodbye?' The chaplain arranged for nurses to push Galan's gurney into Hector's room. With the beds side-by-side, Galan reached out and clutched Hector's hand. The family watched in tears as he told the brother who never left his side that they would be together in the next life. 'When I close my eyes,' Galan whispered. 'I know you'll be there waiting for me.' While Galan lay bleeding in the Chivas driveway, a sheriff's deputy had asked, 'Who did this to you?' Though well aware of the shooter's identity, Galan refused to answer. A police canvass of 169th Street, where dozens had witnessed the shootings and their aftermath, also went nowhere. 'Most everyone claimed to have heard the shots, but not to have seen the incident or any possible suspects,' according to a Superior Court filing. When homicide detectives tracked Hirsh to her mother's house, she told them, 'Don't ever come here again.' It was par for the course, said the lead case investigator. Jim Gates. Now retired from the Sheriff's Department, he had led more than 100 homicide investigations in his career and said he quickly learned, 'Most gang cases, no one's going to talk.' He eventually identified the shooter as one of the gang's own, Daniel Borja, 22, who had grown up next door to Galan. Borja was illiterate and a habitual user of drugs including methamphetamine, PCP, crack and heroin. Arrested for shooting the Galan brothers, he blurted out to a deputy, 'I guess it's 'cause I 187'd someone' — a reference to the penal code statute for murder, according to testimony at his preliminary hearing. On the day Borja's murder trial was to begin, the prosecutor announced that Galan would not get on the witness stand. 'We have a problem of a victim who clearly knows what happened refusing to testify,' the judge summarized. Borja, who had been facing life in prison, was allowed to plead to the lesser charge of manslaughter and was sentenced to 21 years. Asked recently about his refusal to cooperate with law enforcement, Galan shrugged and said, 'That is just how I grew up.' There was also the fact that Chivas' own justice system had already dealt with the matter. On the day before Hector was to be buried in Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Orange, while detectives were still flailing for information, a delegation from the gang came to Galan's ICU room. Hirsh was in a chair by Galan's bed and said she remembered two men explaining that they had Borja in a hotel room, his hands and feet bound with duct tape. Galan said he recalls them only saying that they knew where Borja was hiding. Both agree that the men were going to kill Borja. 'They weren't saying, 'Should we?' They were just asking [Galan] to sign off on it,' Hirsh said. 'All he had to do was nod.' But, flat on his back in the hospital bed, Galan answered in a way that surprised everyone in the room. 'No,' he told the men. 'Just let it go.' 'That's not fair,' Hirsh recalled erupting in shock and anger. 'He gets to just keep living?' But Galan would not change his mind. It's hard to fathom why he spared Borja's life when his own wounds and grief were so fresh and when 'an eye for an eye' was the law of the world in which he was raised. Looking back on a recent morning, he saw several good reasons not to retaliate: the safety of a brother who still lived in Chivas, the possibility of prison, the anxiety of always looking over his shoulder. But as to how the person he was back then did not take revenge, he acknowledges, 'I don't understand that decision myself.' Galan's view of the events leading up to the moment that changed his life are complicated. He accepts some of the blame, but he also disputes the account laid out in court proceedings and parole hearing transcripts. Those records describe a motive that is heartbreaking in its stupidity and unflattering to everyone involved. Borja had finished a prison stint for burglary two days before the garage gathering. He testified in his parole hearing that he went around greeting the other men in Chivas with a handshake. He neglected to offer his hand to the Galan brothers, according to testimony at the pretrial hearing. It was an accidental oversight by Borja's account, but one that prosecutors say left the brothers 'incensed.' 'Cesar approached him and asked him if he was too good to shake his hand,' Det. Gates testified at the hearing. 'Mr. Borja declined to fight initially, stating, 'Hey, we're home boys, I don't want to fight.'' Hector, who weighed 357 pounds, according to the coroner's report, joined the confrontation and started choking and taunting the smaller Borja, according to the detective's testimony. By the time the fracas was over, Borja was on the ground, his clothing ripped, he told a parole board in 2021. He felt deep humiliation. Chivas was his identity, he told the board, and now the other gang members were staring at him with pity and disgust. 'How are you going to be hardcore or solid gang member after they just beat you up? Nobody's going to respect you,' he recalled thinking. Borja had three children, a girlfriend and parents he loved. He could've just stood up and walked away, he acknowledged to the board. He could have made a life in a different part of the city, forgotten about the entire evening. But at that moment, he could not think of anything beyond Chivas. When another gang member leaned down and asked if he wanted a gun, he said yes. 'I had to be a man and take care of this,' he told the parole board. Galan did not attend all the legal proceedings to hear the accounts about the events leading up to the shooting. He grew uncomfortable when some of the transcripts were read to him on a recent morning and said the testimony was not accurate. 'He was on drugs,' he said of Borja. 'He picked a fight with Hector for some odd reason. It wasn't over a handshake. Somebody had said something about him … and one thing led to another.' What was true, he said, was that some fault for what happened rested with him: 'I put myself in that situation, and there were a million places I could have been that night, and yet I chose that night to be there.' In the months after he was released from the hospital, Galan's last thought at night and first in the morning was that he hated being paralyzed. 'Seeing my wheelchair there, I wanted to kick it over,' he said. He was just 28, but the monologue that ran through his head all day told him his life was over, 'You are never going to be complete. You are never going to be normal again.' He worried constantly about how he would care for his boys, then 4 and 6, asking himself, 'How do I get them not to live a life that I lived?' Hirbe, the St. Francis chaplain, had stayed in touch with him as he moved to rehab and then to an apartment. He would visit Galan and talk to him daily by phone. His interest initially confused Galan. 'The way I grew up was [asking], 'What's this person's angle,'' Galan said. Over time, he realized Hirbe wasn't trying to get anything from him. Later, after he had spent a lot more time reading the Bible, he came to see that 'at that point in my life, he was Jesus for me.' A year after the shooting, in April 2002, Hirbe told Galan he'd gotten him a job as a chaplain trainee at St. Francis. 'He had a credential that nobody else had here — his chair. His ability to turn suffering into joy,' Hirbe said. Galan wasn't sure. He didn't know very much about the faith. He hadn't been to Mass regularly since he was young. Still, he said yes. Initially, he stumbled. In the training sessions, other prospective chaplains who were Protestant asked questions about Catholicism he couldn't answer. In the hospital, he was overcome with fear before entering a patient's room. How could he possibly help, he worried. 'Some of the trauma I was seeing, I had been through that trauma myself,' he recalled. This was especially true on the eighth floor where patients were often recovering from shootings and stabbings. Some looked familiar, maybe members of Chivas' old enemies from Norwalk and Hawaiian Gardens, but he didn't ask or volunteer his own background. Watching his new employee, Hirbe saw how the wheelchair opened patients up, 'Immediately there was a recognition. 'He's where I am.'' It turned out that a lot of being an effective chaplain was just listening. He did not need the perfect words to help. He just needed to be present. 'I enjoy serving,' he realized one day. He started attending daily Mass in the hospital chapel and reading the Bible. He had always believed in God, but he began to sense Jesus in his life. He thought constantly of Hector and prayed that anything positive he did would accrue to his brother too. Those close to him saw the changes Galan was making as deeply connected to guilt he felt about Hector. 'If he had just lost his legs, maybe he would have wallowed and maybe he would have gone down a darker path,' Hirsh said. Though they did not reconcile, the former spouses remained close as they co-parented their boys. 'Because of Hector dying that night, it made him feel like he had to do good.' The midday Mass at St. Francis typically included a prayer that God might inspire more men and women to become priests and nuns. Galan said he had listened to the prayer 'a million times' when one day about a decade into his chaplain work, the words took on a different frequency and 'kind of rung in my ears.' When it happened a second time, he told Hirbe he thought he might be receiving a call to the priesthood. His boss recommended he put it to the side for a bit. Six months later, Galan told him, 'It's still there.' People in the hospital wanted to confess their sins, and he was constantly having to explain to them that only a priest could perform that sacrament. Sometimes the available priests did not speak Spanish or English well or understand the particular challenges of life in neighborhoods like Chivas. Patients 'just don't want to confess their sins. Sometimes they want to explain themselves,' Galan said. 'I think it's important to just hear them out.' In his family, the reaction to his vocation was shock, not because of his pursuit of religious life, which by then was not surprising at all, but because becoming a priest meant going to college. He had been a terrible high school student before dropping out. Now, he was signing up for what was functionally a seven-year master's program with required courses in Greek, Latin, church history and the writing of Plato and Aristotle alongside classmates who already had degrees in physics and philosophy. With only a GED, Galan struggled. It was so bad that his sons, then in their late teens and early 20s, raised the possibility of him dropping out, telling him, his son Abel recalled, 'it wouldn't be the end of the world if this isn't meant for him.' He kept at it. As the years passed, he got better at studying. He started reading for pleasure and stopped speaking in slang. His children teased him, 'Look at him! Smart guy!' Both boys and Hirsh were at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in 2023 when Archbishop José Gomez ordained Galan a priest. There was no question about his assignment. He was sent back to St. Francis. People made sense of that trajectory in various ways. His sister Janet said she believed Hector died so Cesar would become a priest, explaining, 'He was only here temporarily to help Cesar get to that point.' Galan had a different view. 'God did not send that bullet to my spinal cord,' he said. 'God that. He's there picking up the pieces with me and putting things back together.' While still in the seminary, Galan got a voicemail informing him that the man who killed his brother was up for parole. The message startled him and, after some thought, he decided not to attend the hearing. Borja had been behind bars for two decades. Early on, he had affiliated with the Mexican Mafia and carried out two brutal assaults on other inmates that he said were ordered by the prison gang. He told the parole board he had since disassociated from the gang, converted to Christianity and taught himself to read and write. 'I'm here in prison for 20 years … because I didn't shake someone's hand,' he told the parole board in 2021. A commissioner cut him off: 'You're here because you shot two people.' The board found him unsuitable for release and made the same decision two years later. Asked in the first hearing about the pain he'd caused, Borja said he could scarcely imagine how Galan managed to get through each day in a wheelchair. 'It's depression. It's misery,' he said. 'How can you live?' In a phone call from prison, Borja said that he had not had any visitors since 2010. All three of his children have served time in prison. He said he expects to be released next year and to move back in with his elderly parents on 169th Street. 'Where else am I going to go?' he asked. Told that Galan had become a priest, he said, 'That's weird,' and then, after a pause asked, 'He's not mad at me or what?' At the mention of Borja's name, Galan's open expression and easy smile disappear. He seems to fold in on himself, closing his eyes and sighing. 'There's been times when I've said, 'Yeah, absolutely, I've forgiven, yes,'' he said. 'Because for me to be the person I am, to preach what I preach, and to do what I do, I can't have that in my life.' But he said, 'There's still work to be done on my part.' On his rounds at St. Francis ICU, Galan sometimes finds himself in 3122, the room where he said goodbye to his brother. The flooring and the curtains are the same, and on occasion a nurse who tended to Hector is on duty. 'A lot of things I do, I give him purpose through it,' he said. One is bringing Hector to mind when he lifts the chalice to consecrate the wine at Mass. He wishes his brother were still alive, he said, but he has no regrets about the course of his own life. 'I would do it all over again,' he said. 'I've just found a peace and a joy that I never would have found except this way.' Times staff writers Ruben Vives and Matthew Ormseth contributed to this report.
Miami Herald
7 hours ago
- Miami Herald
‘It's an honor': Miami's own Tom Llamas on taking over a national nightly newscast
Tom Llamas is more than ready for his closeup. When the Miami native takes over 'NBC Nightly News' Monday evening, he brings 30 years of experience to the anchor desk. Did we mention he's only 45? A good chunk of that experience came from logging many hours at local TV stations, where he started at the tender age of 15. First job: Interning for Telemundo 51 in Hialeah. 'I walked in with a blue blazer and they told me to take that off immediately,' Llamas told the Miami Herald when he was in town earlier this month for a promo tour. Duties ranged from the mundane, like answering calls on the assignment desk, to the terrifying, like going out to cover crime scenes. 'I saw my first dead body when I was 16,' he stated calmly. 'It was a really serious job for a teenager, but I loved it. It put me on a path to where I am at today.' About that path, it's pretty stratospheric, and not lost on him. Llamas is just the fifth lead anchor in the last almost 60 years of 'Nightly News' weekday history and the first Latino. His Cuban immigrant parents — constantly consuming newspapers and TV to know what was happening on the island — get a hat tip for that one. 'I remember waking up in the morning smelling Cuban coffee and my dad reading the Miami Herald cover to cover,' recalled the fellow news junkie. 'My mom was the same way.' The butterfly effect Llamas landed the Telemundo gig soon after a serendipitous career day at Belen Jesuit Prep when local anchor Louis Aguirre, then with Channel 10, returned to his alma mater. The starstruck freshman told Aguirre he had an interest in current events and writing; Aguirre recommended going into broadcasting. 'Because he took the time out to speak to us, it changed my life,' Llamas said. Aguirre didn't realize the impact he'd had on Llamas until the fall of 2015 when the two men reconnected at the GOP debate in Simi Valley, California. At the time, Llamas was with 'ABC World News Tonight' and Aguirre with 'The Insider.' 'He came up to me and said, 'You may not know this, but you made such an impression on me,'' Aguirre told the Miami Herald. 'He'd already hit it big in New York, so I thought that was so generous and gracious to tell me that anecdote. It's a testament to what kind of person he is, not to mention a hell of a journalist.' Now with WLPG Local 10, Aguirre thinks it's a bonus that they're both graduates of Belen's 'hallowed halls.' Founded in 1800s Havana, the all boys school was re-established in Miami in 1961 after Castro (an alumnus) confiscated the property and expelled the Jesuits. 'I'm proud to be an alum,' said Llamas. 'It has such a rich history. It has grown to this incredible institution that is educating young men and has never lost its focus or its roots. It also teaches every student the importance of being Hispanic and why you need to love this country.' A true Miamian Llamas, who now resides in Westchester County with his wife and three kids will always have a soft spot for his hometown. When he was born his family was living in Little Havana, then moved for a brief, 'freezing' three-year stint to Flint, Mich., for his father's pediatric dentist residency. They then returned to South Florida and lived in the South Miami area. 'It was a great life. Little League... roasting pigs in the backyard, a very typical life in Miami. An amazing experience. You could play sports year round. You could be at the beach year round,' said the avid fisherman. 'I am 305 through and through. It's in my DNA.' The 305's weather isn't too shabby either: 'Right when February rolls around and there's still snow on the ground in New York and you don't see the sun, I'm going, 'What is going on here? How did I leave!?'' Favorite old-school (and now defunct) hangouts included the Bakery Centre (the site of Shops at Sunset Place); Specs records store; the original CocoWalk; and — going way back to the archives — Whirlyball. 'It was like this concept of bumper cars and wiffle ball and jai alai,' Llamas explained. 'It sounds like a Miami fever dream.' These days, you'll catch the media superstar with his wife and three kids at iconic spots like Versailles ('a classic'), Pinecrest Bakery ('the best pastelitos'), Joe's Stone Crab (for the colossals) and Faena (their kids love the 'blinged out fossil.') As for local sports? Llamas is still all about the U, aka the University of Miami's Hurricanes, which won five national championships in the 1980s and '90s. 'Some of my best memories with my dad are going to the Orange Bowl and watching them just dominate,' he said, adding he still catches Marlins and Dolphins games every now and again. 'Those were great teams and great years for a very long time.' His brilliant career Shortly after graduating from Loyola University in New Orleans, Llamas began cutting his teeth with the NBC family in various behind the scenes roles. His first on-air position was at NBC 6 South Florida, with his folks cheering him on from their living room a few miles away. 'I was really green when I started and made a lot of mistakes, especially when I was live,' Llamas admitted, laughing. 'I called my mom and I'd say, 'How'd I do?' And she'd say, 'You did you did great.' I knew I was terrible!' Llamas got better, way better. He went on to win multiple awards, including an Emmy for his report on human smuggling while embedded at sea with the U.S. Coast Guard. Among the vastly fascinating stories in his highlight reel, some stick out more than others, namely natural disasters. He's covered all the big storms, from Katrina and Irene to Sandy, and lived through Andrew as a kid. 'Hurricanes remind us we're not in control,' he said. 'When you have no power and you have no food and you're just trying to get by, and you're trying to help each other out, it's hard, even in a modern world.' In 2014, Llamas was hired as a correspondent at 'ABC Nightly News,' where he eventually moved onto the weekend anchor desk filling in for David Muir. A few years in, he went viral when President Donald Trump insulted him during a press conference for questioning his donations to veteran groups. OK, that snippet won't go in the highlight reel, though he did eventually score an exclusive sitdown with the first lady in in Nairobi, Kenya. Without discussing politics in general, Llamas will allow that the country is divided, a topic he hopes to eventually delve into in the future. 'We're at a time right now ... I mean, people are split up, and that's OK. It's happened throughout history, right? I don't think this is unique, but I do want to remind our viewers that we're all Americans, and there's certain things we can all agree on.' Since rejoining NBC network in 2021, Llamas has reported across the globe on major breaking news, including the New Orleans terror attack, the war in Ukraine, the deadly Baltimore bridge collapse as well as the Tokyo and Paris Olympics. Full circle moment Lester Holt's reins were handed down in March, while the 66-year-old TV vet pivots his focus to 'Dateline.' 'Tom has the winning combination of journalistic excellence, passionate storytelling and unyielding integrity,' said Janelle Rodriguez, NBC News' executive vice president, in a release at the time. For Llamas, it's literally a dream come true, but not without challenges. 'It's an honor; there's a lot of pressure, but I do think pressure is a privilege,' he said, adding he'll look to Holt, who is both a friend and mentor, for guidance. 'Literally, his brand is the most trusted journalist in America,' he continued. 'I want to make sure once I take that seat the viewers know that I'm working for them. I work for NBC, but I really work for them. It's a public service.' When that camera goes on at 6:30 p.m. Monday how does one prepare for that full circle moment? What would the kid walking into the newsroom in Hialeah say? 'Everything that brought me here, I'm going to use,' he said, getting emotional. 'You don't get to the top of the mountain by stumbling. There's a reason why you're there. I've worked really hard.'
10 hours ago
Mexico's first judicial elections stir controversy and confusion among voters
MEXICO CITY -- Mexico is holding its first ever judicial elections on Sunday, stirring controversy and sowing confusion among voters still struggling to understand a process set to transform the country's court system. Mexico's ruling party, Morena, overhauled the court system late last year, fueling protests and criticism that the reform is an attempt by those in power to seize on their political popularity to gain control of the branch of government until now out of their reach. 'It's an effort to control the court system, which has been a sort of thorn in the side" of those in power, said Laurence Patin, director of the legal organization Juicio Justo in Mexico. 'But it's a counter-balance, which exists in every healthy democracy.' Now, instead of judges being appointed on a system of merit and experience, Mexican voters will choose between some 7,700 candidates vying for more than 2,600 judicial positions. Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum and party allies have said the elections are a way to purge the court system of corruption in a country that has long faced high levels of impunity. Critics say the vote could damage democracy and open the judicial system up further to organized crime and other corrupt actors hoping to get a grip on power. That process has only grown more chaotic in the run-up to the vote. Civil society organizations like Defensorxs have raised red flags about a range of candidates running for election, including lawyers who represented some of Mexico's most feared cartel leaders and local officials who were forced to resign from their positions due to corruption scandals. Also among those putting themselves forward are ex-convicts imprisoned for years for drug-trafficking to the United States and a slate of candidates with ties to a religious group whose spiritual leader is behind bars in California after pleading guilty to sexually abusing minors. At the same time, voters have been plagued by confusion over a voting process that Patin warned has been hastily thrown together. Voters often have to choose from sometimes more than a hundred candidates who are not permitted to clearly voice their party affiliation or carry out widespread campaigning. As a result, many Mexicans say they're going into the vote blind. Mexico's electoral authority has investigated voter guides being handed out across the country, in what critics say is a blatant move by political parties to stack the vote in their favor. 'Political parties weren't just going to sit with their arms crossed,' Patin said. Miguel Garcia, a 78-year-old former construction worker, stood in front of the country's Supreme Court on Friday peering at a set of posters, voter guides with the faces and numbers of candidates. He was fiercely scribbling down their names on a small scrap of paper and said that he had traveled across Mexico City to try to inform himself ahead of the vote, but he couldn't find any information other than outside the courthouse. 'In the neighborhood where I live, there's no information for us," he said. 'I'm confused, because they're telling us to go out and vote but we don't know who to vote for.'
