Cesar Chavez, MLK, and "One Battle After Another"

The NYT is shocked, shocked to discover that Cesar Chavez was a man like any other man, only more so. (The FBI's MLK tapes are set for release next January.)

United Farm Worker union boss Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) was a very big deal during the radical late 1960s-early 1970s, the Mexican-American Martin Luther King, the United States’ own Gandhi, the saint of the Central Valley.

As the most famous Chicano leader, his March 31st birthday is an official holiday in California and an official or optional holiday in a number of other states.

But it was hardly unknown before now that Chavez had gone badly off the rails and devolved from a tough guy union boss (traditionally, not itself the saintliest of professions) into a paranoid cult leader tied into the scary Synanon pseudo-religion, practicing attack therapy on his followers to keep them in line. (Stalin would have been jealous that he didn’t know about attack therapy in the 1930s.)

For example, I published an article over 20 years recounting some of Chavez’s various scandals, which I will post below.

Now, the New York Times is shocked, shocked to discover that Mexican-American leftist icon Cesar Chavez indulged himself with young girls, even before their Quinceañeras.

Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years

An investigation by The New York Times found extensive evidence that the United Farm Workers co-founder groomed and sexually abused girls who worked in the movement.

By Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes

The reporters interviewed several women who told their stories for the first time, as well as more than 60 other people, including Cesar Chavez’s top aides and relatives. The reporters also reviewed hundreds of pages of union records, confidential emails, photographs and other material.

March 18, 2026

Updated 4:11 p.m. ET

According to two women, Chavez started romancing and fondling them (separately) when they were 12 or 13 year old adolescents, and then had sexual intercourse with one at age 15 (but never had intercourse with the other). Fifteen was under the legal age of consent in California at the time (although in Mexican culture, fifteen is traditionally the age at which the father hosts a big party to announce it’s time for some other man to take his daughter off his hands).

Also, Chavez’s right-hand woman, the legendary Dolores Huerta, now 96, has announced that besides her 11 acknowledged children, she secretly had two more children by Chavez. But she was not his mistress during the years she rose to power in his organization. She says that instead he raped her in 1966 and he sort of raped her in 1960. Remarkably, …

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