This weekend, I decided to sit down and read through NYT's expose of Chavez. Depending on whether or not you're an anti, the testimonies from the former minors may or may not shock you at all. It seems that the allegations of “CSA” by Cesar concerns Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas, who had their first intimate moments with him at the ages of 12 and 13 years, respectively, with both of them knowing him since the ages of 8 or 9 years. The NYT article, for anyone interested in it: https://archive.ph/ag0A4
For Debra, we’ve got this testimony of hers:
For Ana:But the paper trail of some of Mr. Chavez’s misconduct involving young girls can be found in the very archives built to preserve his legacy.
In one handwritten letter on girlish stationery imprinted with roses, Ms. Rojas wrote to Mr. Chavez in January 1974 at the age of 13, shifting between childlike school updates and swooning devotion. She said she wrote the letter more than a year after he first kissed and fondled her in his office in 1972, when she was a 12-year-old seventh-grader. “I’m really glad I got to see you & spend time with you, well not like that, but just to know I was near you was enough,” she wrote, adding, “I think of you all of the time. Do you think of me?”
[…]
“I had love for him,” Ms. Rojas said. “He did his grooming very well. He should get an Academy Award for all he did.”
[…]
Mr. Chavez touched her then for the first time. She described being frozen. He could see how nervous she was. He kissed her and touched her breasts.
“It’s a shock,” she said. “It was uncomfortable. It went from star-struck to I don’t understand this. What is happening?”
It was the first of many times he touched her sexually. After that first sexual encounter, he used to call her house and talk union business with her father, and then, before they hung up, he would ask him to put his daughter on the phone.
“I didn’t know what the word grooming was,” Ms. Rojas said. “It’s like you’re mesmerized.”
[…]
“He kept calling and calling and calling for me to go on the march,” Ms. Rojas said. “My dad just wanted to be in his favor, because my parents loved him. We all loved him.”
In August 1975, the march reached Stockton, the San Joaquin Valley city about an hour south of Sacramento. One night, Ms. Rojas recalled, Mr. Chavez told her he was sending her home for a week. She was sad and confused, and thought she had done something wrong.
She was waiting at the bus station when Mr. Chavez drove up with one of his bodyguards. He invited her into the car, and they drove to a motel on Highway 99.
In the motel room he shared with her, she said, he had intercourse with her for the first time — rape, under California law. 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. She couldn’t help but look at it every time she turned her head, and it scared her, she said.
“I said, ‘What’s that for?’” Ms. Rojas said.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said he told her.
He said because of the death threats he received, he and his security team wanted to make sure they were safe.
Several people and documents corroborated the accusations made by Ms. Rojas, including a relative who said Ms. Rojas first told her in the late 1990s that Mr. Chavez had abused her.
As the march ended, Ms. Rojas said, Mr. Chavez grew colder toward her. He told her that he needed to go back to his wife.
As for Dolores Huerta, since she only ever disclosed her own allegations a few weeks ago, they couldn’t be verified from independent sources.Ms. Murguia said she was 13 when Mr. Chavez began inviting her into his office. He had an obsession with alternative healing therapies, and would sometimes put her on his desk and demonstrate the “pressure points” that could relieve stress and pain, she said. That eventually led to kissing, and then fondling. And then more.
“When I was on the yoga mat is when he would try to have sex,” Ms. Murguia said.
Ms. Murguia said she wasn’t attracted to Mr. Chavez, and was initially surprised by his touches, but said she felt chosen. “Part of it was, why would someone like that like someone like me?”
She said Mr. Chavez told her not to tell anyone because other girls and women would be jealous of their special bond.
He took her on tour with him, having her travel in his car and stand with him at events and marches. She appears next to him in several photographs — among them one of the most iconic images from the U.F.W.’s famous 1,000-Mile March in the summer of 1975, and an earlier shot alongside the folk singer Joan Baez.
But it was also during that time, two years after he first touched Ms. Murguia in his office, that things changed.
By now age 15, she had accompanied Mr. Chavez on a trip to Los Angeles. At a fund-raiser’s home in Bel Air, she walked into the kitchen and found him kissing a woman. She left quickly. “I was disgusted,” she said. On the way back to La Paz, she rode with the guards and the dogs, refusing to share a car with him.
Their time in the office grew less intimate and eventually ended. She started to ache with a quiet distress.
“I felt very alone,” she said. “I had zero support.”
She finally left La Paz at 19 but soon fell into a spiral of heroin addiction. Desperate, she thought that Mr. Chavez could help her and returned to La Paz. But this time, when she went to his office, she found a room full of men. And Mr. Chavez, she said, turned on her.
“He told me I was bringing drugs into the community and needed to get out.”
She went home in tears and remembers a family member asking what happened. “He doesn’t need me anymore,” she recalls saying. “I’m grown up. He told me to get out.”
The next day, she checked into a rehab program that Mr. Chavez had arranged for her. She never spoke to him again.
As far as the testimonies go, him cheating on Ana or being somewhat casual towards Debra are the worst parts, but that still wouldn't warrant him being unpersoned, especially given that all in all it seems to be a case of sour grapes and heartbreaks turning into trauma due to how adult-minor relationships are viewed more harshly nowadays. The letters by Debra indicate that Cesar's relationship with her wasn't as bad as the MSM today makes it out to be. I'm not sure about you, but the timing seems to be awfully suspicious, especially now that Trump is more intent on consolidating his sphere of influence over the western hemisphere and undermining Latino anti-trumpist opposition at home.
Either way, he can't really defend himself as he is dead, and I'm sure whatever is set up here will fall well below legal evidentiary standards
(probably even for civil, which is lower than criminal). It's worth noting that Chavez is considered not just a union leader but a civil rights leader
Which is part of why he's held up by liberals in a way that union leaders who weren't socialist either like Reuther who because he wasn't red makes him more palatable.
Regardless, it's a big loss for Hispanics. If someone with as large of a legacy as Chavez can be unpersoned then really no one is safe. It's interesting bc aspects of Chavez's legacy like the fact that he opposed illegal immigration made no dent in his reputation. Gets accused of le pedophilia and his statutes and steps names are coming down it seems.
Nothing i saw in here indicated anything about force or coercion or even particularly "toxic" behavior by Chavez, so we'll see.
I assume this took place in the 60s/70s? Would not be a big surprise if he was more forceful, coercive and/or toxic by the standards of today, but then again "Toxic" is such a slippery slope lol it can be anything anyone wants but we have enough experience with it from real life you know it when you see it.
