How does a gang member known as ‘Diablo’ get a well-paid gig as ‘peace ambassador’ for the City of Los Angeles?

It’s always something seedy going on when an active gang member, known as ‘Diablo,’ in the course of carrying on his gangster business in Los Angeles’s gang-infested MacArthur Park, somehow does it as a ‘peace ambassador’ for the City of Los Angeles.

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That’s the story, as exposed by U.S. Attorney General Bill Essayli, who busted Diablo for contraband this week:

It turns out he’s one of a number of ‘peace ambassadors,’ in a $70,000 to $100,000 a year “job” to restore peace and safety to the cartel-controlled, drug-infested MacArthur Park. 

That’s the city park whose DSA-member city councilwoman, Eunisses Hernandez, reportedly halted the dragging of its lake by a private group to hunt for dead bodies. She denied she did, of course, contradicting a report from a park ranger.

I wrote about that here.

Peace ambassador. I’ll bet.

“Peace ambassador,” as it turns out, is a pet project of Hernandez’s. She set it up herself, and the results are pure blue-city mayhem.

Her city website for it reads:

Reimagining Public Safety

In Council District 1, we believe that community safety starts with care, connection, and trust. That’s why Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez launched the Peace Ambassadors, a new initiative to prevent violence before it starts and to support Angelenos in moments of crisis.

CARE-BASED PREVENTION

Since January 2025, two full-time Peace Ambassador teams have been deployed to high-need areas in Pico Union and Westlake, including MacArthur Park. Each team consists of two unarmed workers who have lived experience in the justice or gang systems and are trained in violence prevention and trauma-informed care.

These teams work five to six days a week, during peak hours identified through LAPD data and community input.

• Prevent and De-escalate Violence
• Ensure Safe Passage
• Serve As Liaisons

Had enough? The rest of it says they liase with NGOs, such as this one, which in my earlier research of her background, I found she was big on directing public money to.

Now it seems that the gang member, who got himself a slick gig on the city payroll, came from one of these NGOs. Who the heck let him on and gave him a city paycheck? According to the Los Angeles Times, prosecutors said he was paid $58,000 a year for that ‘peace ambassador’ gig through his NGO, which is known as ‘Healing Urban Barrios.’ and drew in revenue of $3.25 million in 2024, sharply higher than the $83,000 of its 2019 tax returns, with by far the largest amounts spent going to salaries.

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Does that sound like a suitable position for an unreformed, un-rehabbed, active gang member with murder on his rap sheet? The Times reports that Essayli said that the now-busted gangster had been recorded giving gang enforcement orders over the phone to jailhouse buddies about punishing gang members who ‘break the the rules.’

Hernandez tried to dismiss it was an aberration, according to the Los Angeles Times:

District 1 Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said in a statement to The Times that Alvarez was removed from the Peace Ambassador program earlier this month.

“We take any allegations of misconduct seriously,” the statement from Hernandez’s office said. “We will not allow allegations involving one former employee of a nonprofit organization to discredit an entire field of work and dedicated intervention workers who show up every day to prevent harm.”

Spearheaded by Hernandez, the Peace Ambassador program kicked off in 2025 as a public safety strategy meant to augment direct police interventions, Under the program, the city pays non-profits to deploy trained street ambassadors to “prevent violence before it starts and to support Angelenos in moments of crisis.”

Ambassadors typically have “lived experience in the justice or gang systems,” and are trained in trauma-informed care, according to city materials. 

Nothing to see here, move along.

Essayli said he hadn’t stopped being a gang member and the feds (certainly not the coopted local cops) picked him up for having illegal body armor in his car trunk, which as a felon, he would know he was forbidden to have. He reportedly told the feds he wanted to spray graffiti on it and create ‘art.’

Riiight.

Or does this ‘peace ambassador’ racket sound like an enforcement mechanism, indicating to all the illegals in the area (who are likely more numerous than legal residents) that Los Angeles is run just like the favelas and barrios and ranchos, their homelandd shantytowns that encircle large cities such as Lima, Medellin, Tijuana and Caracas, where the lack of lawful order is replaced by gang rule, and that gang rule is enforced by violence, and that gang rule also involves paying ‘tribute’ or ‘vacunas’ to gangs for ‘protection’? 

It sounds like the latter, which explains why resistance is so intense to anyone trying to effect change or just clean the city up. 

Such as upstart mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, who read the situation clearly:

The revelation here is that it’s not just criminals and officials who live in leftist luxury bubbles who are the problem, it’s gangs themselves running at least some parts of the city, including calling the shots at MacArthur Park. That’s Chavista dynamics, and Los Angeles is further down on that road than anyone imagined. Thank goodness there was Bill Essayli to check them. He’s proving quite a treasure to all Americans who want to see the elected government, not the gangs, actually holding positions of political power.

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Image: Screenshot from LA THIS WEEK video, posted on YouTube.