The Child Rapes of Cesar Chavez

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Cesar Chavez’s birthday is a holiday in six states, there are over a dozen streets that carry his name in California alone, and far more schools across the country are named after a child rapist.

And now some of those streets may be renamed and Chavez statues may be coming down.

Marches are being canceled, events are being sidelined and the organizations associated with Chavez are facing a reckoning over the stories of his abuses: especially against children.

Cesar Chavez is certainly not the first civil rights leader to also double as a rapist. We’ve known for seven years now that Martin Luther King not only had numerous ‘affairs’, willing or unwilling, but was caught on tape cheering on a rape by one of his friends. More information will be coming out next year when the FBI’s whole library of MLK material will be finally released.

Harvey Milk had lured underage boys to run away, come live with him and sexually service him. Malcolm X had come out of the Nation of Islam and denounced Elijah Muhammad’s harem of teenage secretaries whom he opportunistically raped and impregnated. That eventually led to his murder. The recently deceased Jesse Jackson had been accused of sexual harassment.

But the allegations against Chavez, often held up as MLK’s Latino counterpart, are far worse.

An extended New York Times article describes Chavez sexually abusing girls as young as twelve years old and raping members of the movement, including Dolores Huerta: a co-founder of the United Farm Workers and a key figure in California liberal politics.

The labor leader seemed to have a preference for grooming twelve-year-old girls into adoring him, getting them alone with him, and then violating their boundaries before raping them.

One girl, whom Chavez started grooming when she was only twelve, remembers “when Mr. Chavez drove up with one of his bodyguards” took her to a motel and raped her. “She was a virgin, and remembers that it hurt, and she was bleeding. But she also remembers the gun Mr. Chavez had placed on the night stand next to the bed.” That’s the man schools are named after.

How many in the movement knew what was going on? How many failed to notice, as the New York Times wrote that he, “was a frequent presence in the lives of the daughters of his loyal organizers and volunteers. They recalled his attending their family functions, taking them on tour with him, asking them to work in his office after school and exchanging letters, gifts and photographs”. How many knew and said nothing for the sake of the movement?

A priest who had worked with Chavez’s United Farm Workers told the San Antonio Express that two women had previously come forward. “Those young women spoke out. And it never went anywhere.” Who in the media did they speak to? And who in the media covered it up?

How many on the Left had known about the allegations more recently yet chose to say nothing?

Matt Garcia, the author of the most controversial Chavez biography, “From the Jaws of Victory” told the newspaper that he had seen allegations on a closed chat and appeared to have done nothing with them. “I have been asked to remain quiet, and I will abide by those wishes,”

How many others have been staying silent rather than report on Chavez’s crimes?

While the child rape allegations are new, they certainly don’t come as a complete surprise.

Democrats in California and across the Southwest had built a cult of personality around Chavez, but stories had been trickling out about his transformation of what had been a labor movement into his own cult in which the radical and his family who ran the organization became “prophets” in charge of a commune that provided the aging activist with unquestioning obedience.

Especially from the women.

Chavez had adopted the latter-day practices of India’s Gandhi who had slept naked with young girls to demonstrate his mastery of spirituality. Chavez had explained how Gandhi had been “starving his body… then controlling the sex urge.” At this, Chavez appeared to have been less successful. The United Farm Workers fell apart, but Chavez enjoyed the worship of a small cult.

One of the young girls, whom Chavez began grooming when she was only thirteen, described how he used “alternative healing therapies” to find “pressure points” on her body. “When I was on the yoga mat is when he would try to have sex,” she recalled.

Chavez’s child rapes are not just the abuses of one man, but they tell the larger story (one often told by David Horowitz) of how the leftist movements of the era degenerated into grotesque abuses. It’s no coincidence that so many major civil rights leaders had committed so many of the same crimes or that so many of them were in the Kennedy nexus of sexual abuses.

The pattern of cults of personality devolving into actual cults, radical protests being used as cover for sexual assaults, and then, if the movement survived, turning into actual terrorism is a pattern in the American ‘counterculture’ but also in past and present leftist movements worldwide. Chavez’s abuse of little girls is especially egregious, but not so very different.

The ‘Camelot’ myth contended that virtuous liberal movements had been brought down by ‘right-wing violence’ and ‘secret government sabotage’ when, as David Horowitz did much to show, they were actually destroyed by their own radicalism, unchecked corruption and abuses.

Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and the CIA weren’t the reasons that Cesar Chavez raped little girls, MLK couldn’t keep his pants on, and the counterculture turned into a murderous cult that actively thrived on murder and rape, but maintaining that myth is why we only finally learn about their crimes long after most of those involved are dead and the myth’s usefulness is over.

Will the expose of Chavez’s child rapes finally end his cult of personality? There are signs that unlike MLK, who still remains firmly in the pantheon of progressive saints, Chavez may be done.

But Cesar Estrada Chavez had outlived his usefulness to the Left even while in life. The Left had wanted him to build a modern professional labor organization filled with lawyers and organizers, Chavez chose to run a cult of personality built along the familiar model of Mexican feudalism in which he and his family ran everything and nothing was done professionally.

The lawyers and organizers moved on and built a professional labor movement while Chavez tried to get young girls hooked by pretending to be latter day Gandhi through saintly theatrics that liberal audiences grew bored of as the counterculture offered more shocking novelties.

The Left has long since adopted open borders as its governing creed while Cesar Chavez opposed illegal alien workers as competition that allowed fruit companies to underpay workers.

The New York Times has simply sped up the process of jettisoning Chavez and replacing him with a more useful role model. The child rapes are not the issue, because if they had been the issue, the women who had come forward over the years would have been listened to all along.

Chavez’s real crime to the media isn’t that he raped children, but that he opposed illegal aliens.

Photo credit: Movimiento via Wikimedia Commons