Debates are set to go down on this week between Doral governmental candidates, but at least one person vying for public office in the city isn’t participating.
It’s not for fear of defending her ideas or facing her opponents in a public forum, she argued; it’s because the outlet hosting the event, media website Doral Voice, is overtly biased and owned and operated by a political ally of one of her opponents.
“They have been really geared towards personal attacks on elected officials, their families and a lot of people who work in City Hall,” said Doral Councilwoman and former Vice Mayor Claudia Mariaca, who is running for city Mayor.
“I shy away from calling them an organization or even a media outlet. It’s very politically motivated, one of those fly-by-night organizations that show up during an electoral season with no other purpose than to spread bad information.”
Mariaca announced she wouldn’t be participating in the debate in an email Tuesday.
She called Doral Voice and an affiliated publication, Doral First Magazine, “fake outlets” that have “openly and freely spread false information about our Mayor and members of the Doral Council.”
Doral Voice is registered with the state under Juan Carlos Esquivel, a logistics executive running for Seat 4 on the Doral City Council. The company opened in April 2021 and remains in good standing with the state as of Tuesday.
If Esquivel was trying to obscure his ownership of the company, he hasn’t been especially careful. The phone number listed on his campaign website is the same listed online for Doral Voice. He has also mentioned the outlet several times on his campaign’s Facebook page.
Some posts on the Doral Voice website are plagiarized, including one published Oct. 21 highlighting safety measures in the Miami-Dade County public school system. The outlet lifted the story word-for-word from a Telemundo article published one day earlier.
Esquivel is a political ally of Miami-Dade School Board member Christi Fraga, who is running against Mariaca and two other candidates — Pedro Cabrera Jr. and Haim Otero — for the Doral mayoralty.
In June, Fraga donated $1,000 to Esquivel’s campaign through her political committee, Next Generation Leaders. Fraga also endorsed Esquivel’s 2020 campaign for Doral Council.
Florida Politics reached out to Esquivel but received no response by press time.
Doral First Magazine is a subsidiary of PubliMedia America LLC, which the Florida Division of Corporations lists as opening in February 2021 and going inactive last month. The magazine’s editor, Miguel Landa, told Florida Politics that PubliMedia’s parent company is still operational and registered in New York City.
In May, Doral First Magazine ran a story questioning the motivation of a mailer Mariaca’s office purportedly sent residents in early May with her contact information and an offer to help with issues in the city. The mailer included no mention of Mariaca’s mayoral campaign.
Mariaca noted the outlets openly supported former Sweetwater Commissioner Sophia Lacayo, who spent more than $1 million of her own money to unsuccessfully run against Doral Mayor Juan Carlos Bermudez for the Miami-Dade Commission in a campaign rife with red flags and misleading material.
Lacayo bought nearly $37,000 in political ads this year from Doral First Magazine beginning in March. In July, the outlet published a story about a years-old comment Bermudez about not wanting to give former President Donald Trump keys to the city. Trump endorsed Bermudez the next month.
Bermudez has endorsed Mariaca as his preferred successor.
Mariaca told Florida Politics that rather than attend Doral Voice’s “sham debate” she aims to participate in another one tentatively scheduled for later this week on WSB Mega TV, a local station under the Spanish Broadcasting System banner.
She also hopes to take part in the League of Women Voters of Miami-Dade County’s Doral Mayoral Candidate Forum, which the group postponed Oct. 24.
“I am not shying away from any of these debates,” she said. “I just refuse to acknowledge this so-called media outlet. It takes away from real media. I like facts, and I like debating actual stuff. I’m happy to do it any time as long as it’s fair and unbiased.”
The Tuesday debate on Doral Voice between candidates for Mayor began at around 3 p.m. Fraga and Otero appeared in-studio with “renowned journalist and news director” Carlos Nuñez moderating. Mariaca and Cabrera were represented by empty seats with nameplates atop them that the outlet printed before the event.
The other debates for seats 1, 2 and 4 on the Doral Council will take place, respectively, on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
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