Cesar Chavez’s history of sexual abuse

This deeply reported story is simply horrifying.

It reveals among other things that, according to Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez raped her in 1966, after a pseudo-consensual encounter six years earlier. Huerta says that she bore two children as a result of these events.

Then there are several things like this:

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?” . . .

Looking back on it now, Ms. Rojas said she believed then that Mr. Chavez wanted her to be a real part of his life. He would tell her that they would move together someday to Mexico. He told her to stay away from other boys because he’d get jealous. He told her that the Flamingos song, “I Only Have Eyes for You,” was their song, and that every time she heard it she should “just remember that I love you.”

“I had love for him,” Ms. Rojas said. “He did his grooming very well. He should get an Academy Award for all he did.”

Chavez was 46 at the time.

My parents were not particularly political people, despite the fact that my mother’s family were refugees in Mexico from fascist Spain (Her uncle was murdered in the early days of the civil war. My grandmother, a very proud woman married to a distinguished scientist, always bristled when anyone used the Spanish word for refugees to describe the family. “We were invited,” she insisted. This was I suppose literally true, as Mexico was the only in the country in the entire world that took in people like my mother’s family, other than the Soviet Union.

In any event, the very first political act I can remember my parents engaging in was boycotting grapes in 1969. The kids all loved grapes, and we had it explained to us in detail why it was important to this.

And here is what enables all this:

More than 10 years ago, members of a private Facebook group for longtime Chavez organizers and supporters were stunned to read a post from Ms. Rojas that she wrote in a fit of anger as they prepared to celebrate the holiday in his name.

Her post read, in part: “Wake up people. This man u march for every year molested me.”

Ms. Rojas deleted the message days after posting it and was accused by some who saw it or heard about it of jeopardizing all that had been accomplished by not only Mr. Chavez but her parents and those they marched alongside.