BETHLEHEM, Pa. — A recent mailer from the Pennsylvania Democratic Party features a Kamala Harris endorsement from a local Hispanic radio host who has a history of making wildly racist comments.
The host is also the star of a Harris campaign ad running in Philadelphia, Allentown and Reading.
The mailer shows Victor Martinez, owner of La Mega radio in the majority-Latino city of Allentown, offering his support for Harris as a candidate who “listens.”
But Martinez’s own listeners will remember his May 2021 on-air tirade about black tourists visiting Puerto Rico.
Speaking in Spanish to his audience on the El Relajo de la Mañana morning show, Martinez claimed a “wave of African Americans” had descended on the island.
“When I got [on] the plane, I thought I was flying to Jamaica,” Martinez said, suggesting the tourists also must have thought they were going to Jamaica or New Orleans. “The plane was full of African [Americans]!”
Martinez’s rant — which reached thousands in Pennsylvania’s Latino belt of Allentown, Reading and Hazleton — decried female tourists for “acting up” in various ways.
According to Martinez, the women’s behavior included: “walking almost naked,” “fighting with police,” “jumping [on] the roof of cars,” “destroying the [hotel] rooms” and smoking marijuana and drinking Hennessy in the street.
“[It] is not like is a cheap vacation for them,” he continued. “Then they buy the Hennessy, put it in their purse, and in the street they start drinking.”
“They rent a car with a sunroof, and three or four of them out the sunroof that don’t even fit,” Martinez added.
The conversation took a darker turn when Martinez’s co-host, Luis “Diamond Boy” Torres, implied black tourists are apes.
“We should be thanking them since the last monkey we had was Yuyo,” Torres responded to Martinez’s sunroof comments — prompting both men to laugh loudly. (Yuyo was a chimpanzee, not a monkey, who escaped from a Puerto Rico zoo in the 1980s, becoming a folk hero and even garnering election write-in votes.)
When Torres suggested the women engaging in unruly behavior were “not pretty to look at,” Martinez responded creepily: “If they looked good, I would [have] recorded them.”
Torres proceeded to mock the tourists’ supposed support for the Black Lives Matter movement, leading to more boisterous laughter.
“I think they started a new protest called Black Ass Matters,” Torres quipped.
As he notes in the mailer, Martinez has interviewed many Democratic candidates — including Tim Walz during the vice-presidential nominee’s trip to eastern Pennsylvania last month.
During their interview, Walz slammed the Trump administration’s response to Hurricane Maria in 2017 — arguing the former prez didn’t “even recognize” Puerto Ricans are actually American citizens.
Martinez also interviewed Rep. Susan Wild — a vulnerable House Democrat from the area with a history of controversies — on his show last month.