Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Yearshttps://archive.is/0bP3P#selection-499.0-499.72Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.
He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”
The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. Ms. Murguia said she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years.
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Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977. He was in his 40s and had become a powerful, charismatic figure who captured global attention as a champion of farmworker rights.
The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.
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The abuse allegations appear to be part of a larger pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Chavez, much of which has never been publicly revealed. The Times investigation found that Mr. Chavez also used many of the women who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification. His most prominent female ally in the movement, Dolores Huerta, said in an interview that he sexually assaulted her, a disclosure she has never before made publicly.
Many of the women stayed silent for decades, both out of shame and for fear of tarnishing the image of a man who has become the face of the Latino civil rights movement, his image on school murals and his birthday a state holiday in California.
For them, "Taking one for the cause," was painfully and life-long, literal. As I said above, what Chavez did - and the girls/women being too intimidated to tarnish their icon with the ugly reality they were living - does not entirely surprise me. It's akin to the cover-up and delay of revelation of JFK's horndoggery.
ETA: The women who finally blew this open were, at the time, young teenagers and "nobodies". Today they are "nobodies" in the celebrity-activist sense. Being silent about an abuser who, at the time, could leverage the Hispanic and liberal communities to crush them was unsurprising. Keeping silent for decades about something painful inflicted by a political icon-martyr, also understandable, decades of sadness and pain.
On the other hand, Dolores Huerta was born in 1930. In 1972, she was 42, a fully adult woman who knew what Chavez was. Her silence was loyalty to a "cause" and an icon she knew should not have been. If she has pain, her silence let Chavez rape and abuse teenage girls. She deserves that pain, IMO. If she has repented before God, that's "above my pay grade". I just know she has been silent for 5 or 6 decades and only spoke publicly, at age 95, after girls Chavez raped spoke first.
Has Chavez's icon-hood been ended, or even seriously tarnished? I doubt it. JFK and WJC and Teddy the Snorkel are still Dem/Lib/Prog icons.
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