Ciboire à deux réservoirs, is EVERYONE a sexual predator?
Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2026 2:49 pm
Reading this story made me think, how many more were there? How many men we saw as heroes were really monsters in disguise?
Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years
Ana 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.
Recently, more than 50 years later, Ms. Murguia learned that a street near her home in the Central California city of Bakersfield was in the process of being renamed. City officials want to name it in honor of her abuser.
Cesar Chavez Boulevard.
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.
The questions raised by The Times about Mr. Chavez, one of the most consequential figures in Mexican American history, set off immediate reverberations and alarmed and disturbed his allies. Even before this article was published, upon learning of the reporters’ inquiries, the U.F.W. canceled its annual celebrations honoring Mr. Chavez, a response to what the union he once led called “profoundly shocking” accusations.
Ms. Murguia and Ms. Rojas, both of whom are now 66, were the daughters of longtime organizers who had marched in rallies alongside Mr. Chavez. He used the privacy of his California office to frequently molest Ms. Murguia, she said. He had known her since she was 8 years old. She became so traumatized that she attempted to end her life multiple times by the age of 15.
“I wanted to die,” she said.
Ms. Rojas said she was 12 when Mr. Chavez first touched her inappropriately, fondling her breasts in the same office where he’d meet with Ms. Murguia. When Ms. Rojas was 15, he arranged to have her stay at a motel during a weekslong march through California, she said, and had sexual intercourse with her — rape, under state law, because she was not old enough to consent (Ms. Murguia said Mr. Chavez molested her but never had intercourse with her.)
The abuse allegations appear to be part of a larger pattern of sexual misconduct by 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.
The findings are based on interviews with more than 60 people, including his top aides at the time, his relatives and former members of the U.F.W., which he co-founded with Ms. Huerta and Gilbert Padilla. The Times reviewed hundreds of pages of union records, confidential emails and photographs, as well as hours of audio recordings from U.F.W. board meetings.
The accounts of abuse from Ms. Murguia and Ms. Rojas were independently verified through interviews with those they confided in decades ago and in more recent years. Elements of their stories were also corroborated in documents, emails, itineraries and other writings from union organizers, supporters of Mr. Chavez and historians.
The Times spoke at length with Ms. Huerta, the renowned Latina activist who helped run the farmworkers’ union with Mr. Chavez and coined the social-justice rallying cry, “Sí, se puede,” loosely translated as “Yes, we can.”
She said she has held on to a dark secret for nearly 60 years.
One night during the winter of 1966 in Delano, Calif., she said, Mr. Chavez drove her out to a secluded grape field, parked and raped her inside the vehicle. Ms. Huerta, who was 36 at the time, said she chose not to report the assault to the police because of their hostility toward the movement, and she feared that no one within the union would believe her. She also described an earlier encounter in August 1960, when she said she felt pressured to have sex with him in a hotel room during a work trip in San Juan Capistrano in Southern California.
Ms. Huerta later began a long-term domestic partnership with Mr. Chavez’s brother Richard, with whom she had four children. He died in 2011.
Ms. Huerta turns 96 on April 10. Her memories of the details of the assault that night in Delano are at times hazy. But she speaks of the attack in a startlingly matter-of-fact manner.
She described being stunned by Mr. Chavez’s aggression, and then numb to it. She framed her silence at the time not as an absence of pain, but as a kind of strategic necessity, particularly as a woman fighting for respect in the male-dominated world of 1960s union organizing. Now, her accusation shatters what was a widely celebrated — and seemingly egalitarian — bond between two of the most influential Hispanic activists in U.S. history.
“Unfortunately, he used some of his great leadership to abuse women and children — it’s really awful,” Ms. Huerta said.
More than 30 years after his death, Mr. Chavez has become only more revered in the Latino community, as President Trump’s efforts to limit immigration and scale back rights threaten to destroy many of the gains secured by decades of his work.
Through a series of grueling fasts, grape boycotts and marches that captured the world’s imagination, Mr. Chavez drew a spotlight to the plight of the American farmworker. He improved not only wages, living conditions and health care for generations of farmworkers and their families, but strengthened the political power of Latinos, giving their voice and concerns an urgency and moral authority on the national stage.
He was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 1994. When Joseph R. Biden Jr. entered the White House in 2021, he put a bronze bust of Mr. Chavez on display in the Oval Office.
The allegations of rape and sexual abuse are likely to have far-reaching consequences.
On Tuesday, the United Farm Workers issued a statement saying that the organization would not take part in any activities celebrating Mr. Chavez’s birthday on March 31. The union said the “troubling allegations” that were surfacing were incompatible with the organization’s values, adding that it did not have firsthand knowledge of any misconduct.
“We need some time to get this right, including to ensure robust, trauma-informed services are available to those who may need it,” the union said in its statement.
Mr. Chavez’s family said on Tuesday night that they were “not in a position to judge” the claims. “As a family steeped in the values of equity and justice, we honor the voices of those who feel unheard and who report sexual misconduct,” they said in a statement. “These allegations are deeply painful to our family.”
A handful of Mr. Chavez’s relatives and former U.F.W. leaders have been aware for years about various allegations of sexual misconduct, but there is no evidence that they made efforts to fully investigate the accusations, acknowledge the victims or apologize to them. Instead, many of the women say they were discouraged from speaking out in order to preserve Mr. Chavez’s public image.
Internal emails dating back over a decade show union members discussing Ms. Murguia’s claims of abuse and the impact it had on her life. One of Ms. Murguia’s relatives confronted Mr. Chavez while he was still alive, in the 1980s. According to the relative, Mr. Chavez offered no defense and responded only by clearing his throat.
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.
Nothing has emerged publicly to back up the claims made by Ms. Huerta. Her description of assault could not be independently verified because she said she had told no one, not even her children or closest friends, until just a few weeks ago.
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?”
The letter is among thousands of documents and other materials in the Walter P. Reuther Library archives at Wayne State University in Detroit.
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.”
