The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (71 page)

On January 23, 1981, Guzman was unexpectedly called to run a meeting in San Luis with Mondragon. Guzman never arrived.
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After searching every hospital and jail in Mexicali, where Guzman lived, his family found Guzman in the Mexicali general hospital. Police said Guzman had been heading east on the San Luis–Mexicali road when a cotton truck ran a stoplight as Guzman approached an intersection. His car hit the middle of the truck, sliding underneath. Guzman’s head took the brunt of the collision.

Ganz and Govea were in a meeting at La Paz when Chavez took a phone call and came back looking shaken. He told them there had been an accident and sent them immediately to Mexicali. They drove all night, arrived at 5:30 a.m., and made arrangements for a neurosurgeon to examine Guzman. He was paralyzed and semicomatose.

Among what was known as Marshall’s faction, no one believed the crash that had crippled the workers’ most promising leader was an accident. The driver of the truck never surfaced. No one could explain the four-hour gap between when the collision occurred and when Guzman arrived at the hospital. No union official had looked for Guzman when he did not appear in San Luis.

Ganz and Govea had been planning to leave the union. They hastened their departure. As a farewell present, Chavez sent them to Israel for a month to research kibbutzim and collectives.

On February 10, 1981, two weeks after Guzman was crushed under the truck, Chavez went to the Imperial Valley for a memorial on the second anniversary of the shooting of Rufino Contreras. Ranch committee leaders demanded a meeting and peppered Chavez with questions: What was Manuel Chavez’s role in the union? Why were the paid reps no longer allowed keys to the office? Why had Mondragon appointed Guzman’s successor? Workers complained about a whispering campaign against Ganz and Govea, who were being blamed for the cost of the strike. Chavez told them all the politicking must stop.
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That included the gossip that Manuel had been involved in the car crash that crippled Guzman.

The vegetable workers returned to Salinas in the spring. Animosity increased. So did problems with the RFK health plan. Workers complained their credit was ruined because the plan paid claims so slowly. Every Saturday, the paid reps met to review cases and called La Paz with a list of complaints. Chavez was concerned and impatiently told his staff to fix the problems. He assigned people to clear up the backlog of claims. Delays and mix-ups persisted. Staff members blamed faulty computer programs.

Chavez called union staff to a meeting at La Paz on May 30, 1981. In a rambling speech, he warned of traitors and malignant forces. You are with us or against us, he told them. There was no middle ground. A faction was trying to overthrow the president and the board, Chavez warned. The plot was being masterminded by former union staff who were using the paid reps. Workers were tricked into selling out to the enemy, for money or for sex. Everyone must choose
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sides, he told them: stay and fight with, or get out. Renteria, the director of the Salinas field office, was forced to resign because he refused to help oust Bustamante and others identified as ringleaders.

The UFW’s biennial convention was scheduled for September 1981, and three new board members would stand for election. Chavez had appointed three loyalists: his son-in-law, Arturo Rodriguez; Arturo Mendoza, an amiable organizer who had worked closely with the paid reps in Calexico; and Mondragon. There was no farmworker on the board. The paid reps decided to run their own slate. They chose Rosario Pelayo, who had worked in grapes and vegetables and been a strong UFW supporter for years, and Renteria, the ousted Salinas field office director.

Chavez had the votes, but the vegetable workers represented a sizable block of delegates. He could take no chances. He needed a crushing victory to discourage further challenges. Chavez dictated a new rule
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that would circumvent the delegates and effectively take away their votes. A petition signed by as few as 8 percent of the workers at a ranch could bind that ranch’s convention delegates to vote for the Chavez slate.

Board members descended on Salinas with petitions: if you support Cesar, sign here. The paid reps were out to oust Chavez, Huerta and others told the workers. “How can they run the union?” an internal campaign memo asked, disparaging the paid reps as puppets of Ganz.
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Just as growers had once dismissed Chavez as a tool of Anglo outsiders, now he presumed farmworkers could not have initiated a significant challenge on their own.

Tensions were high as the delegates gathered in the Fresno convention center on September 5, 1981. The dissidents had been carefully seated in the back, as far as possible from any microphones. In his opening remarks, Chavez chronicled the history of the union’s battles for survival against the growers and the Teamsters. Then he painted a dark picture of “malignant forces” out to destroy all that he had built:

“Now we come to this 1981 convention facing yet another assault on our beloved union. An assault even more menacing than the past conventions. More menacing because it is clandestinely organized by those forces whose every wish and desire is our destruction. Obstruction by those evil forces visible and invisible who work at every chance to destroy us—the growers, the teamsters, disaffected former staff, scoundrels, and God knows who, some unwittingly trying to reach the same goal—that is to bury our beloved union.”
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The rule to bind the delegates’ votes had been adopted by the board as an emergency measure; the constitution required that the rule be ratified by the convention. Chavez called the resolution. Bustamante barreled up to the microphone. “To me, this resolution is unjust and undemocratic,” he declared.

Chavez called a vote. “The matter looks very split,” he said, looking at the show of hands. He postponed another vote until after lunch.

During the break, Chavez’s team distributed leaflets accusing the dissidents of being tools of “the two Jews”—Ganz and Cohen. “Outside forces intend to force our President Cesar Chavez to resign.” A memo in Spanish, handwritten in the distinctive lettering of one board member, laid out anti-Semitic arguments:
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The Jews want to take over the union. Ganz and Cohen, and the old legal department. The Jews used our people—Jessica, Eliseo, Gilbert—to control the legal department and the negotiators. They think they are superior to Mexicans.

When Chavez called a second vote after lunch, the measure to bind the delegates passed easily. The dissidents decided there was no point in staying. About fifty walked out. Someone shouted “Traitors,” and a chant began: “Down with the traitors.” Bustamante broke the staff on his union flag in two as he walked out with his brother Chava. “Death to the Bustamantes,” Helen Chavez shouted from the auditorium balcony.

Chavez moved to finish off the paid reps. He sent Huerta, David Martinez, and Arturo Rodriguez to Salinas. The board members visited each vegetable company represented by the dissident paid reps and urged them to oust the traitors who were out to destroy Chavez. When workers stood by their elected leaders, Chavez fired the dissidents who served as paid reps.

In Washington, D.C., Monsignor George Higgins grew alarmed.
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He wrote Chavez on September 21, 1981, ticking off the recent departures and allegations. “In my opinion, Cesar, even the slightest compromise on the issue of anti-Semitism would seriously endanger the movement and could conceivably destroy it . . . As I see it, the truth is that the UFW is in serious trouble and that some of this trouble is strictly of its own making.”

Chavez waited weeks to reply. Hartmire drafted a terse answer that accused Higgins of jumping to conclusions without knowing the facts. By October, the dissident leaders had all been fired, despite their protestations that they had been elected by their peers.

On October 24, 1981, Chavez addressed a group of leaders of the United Church of Christ, reminiscing about how important they had been in the early years of the struggle. He thanked John Moyer for being a strong supporter ever since the minister came to Delano in 1965. Chavez recalled the visit of the “Coachella 95” during the Teamster fight of 1973 as the “single most powerful example of the church’s solidarity.” Then he addressed the present. He was relieved by recent changes, Chavez said, though he did not mention the charges of anti-Semitism or the rebellion by the paid reps. “Our most serious and important internal struggle is over—at least for now,” he said. At last, he said, he had an executive board that shared his vision, after four difficult years and bitter fights. The union had survived its early years “thanks to the sacrifices of the workers, and the genius and courage of a group of heroic lone rangers,” in which he included Medina, Ganz, Drake, and Cohen. But the era of the lone ranger was over, Chavez said. The executive board had adopted his new approach, which he called TMT—top management team. “It is a great relief
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to me.”

There was one more significant departure that tumultuous fall. Scott Washburn had been organizing farmworkers who lived in the canyons of northern San Diego, burrowed into the hillsides under tarps and in makeshift shacks. A few days before the Fresno convention, some of Washburn’s organizers were called to a meeting with executive board member Frank Ortiz. Washburn went along. Ortiz was campaigning against the paid reps. He railed against Ganz and Cohen and said the Jews were out to take over the union.

Word got back to La Paz and Chavez asked for an explanation. Ortiz’s clarification
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hardly helped: “I said, ‘Too bad these two guys had to be two Jews because our best support all across the country comes from the Jewish people and organizations, also, that the Jewish people through all of history have been the most discriminated in the world and now we had Marshal[l] and Jerry working against us.’”

When Washburn saw the anti-Semitic flyers at the convention, he felt sick. He had watched his best friend, Joe Smith, be purged in 1976, had driven Jim Drake to the airport when he left the union, had listened in shock to Eliseo Medina announce his departure after a string of victories in the citrus orchards, and had seen Fred Ross grit his teeth as he tried to convince Gilbert Padilla not to resign. The anti-Semitic slurs were the last straw.

Chavez came to a meeting at the San Diego ALRB office in late October 1981. Washburn nervously pulled him into a conference room. He told Chavez that he, too, was leaving the union. Chavez did not mention all the other union leaders who had left in recent months. He just looked at Washburn and said, “They’ll all be back.”
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Chapter 36

Playing Defense

We’ve been part of a very controversial organization since we started. We’ve been investigated up and down. I can truthfully say we’ve never been found lacking in any respect.

Outside the Salinas UFW office where they once worked, the farmworkers whom Chavez had fired from their leadership posts staged a fast in protest. “We’re only doing what Cesar taught us,”
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Mario Bustamante said during the eight-day fast. “To fight for justice.”

The dissident farmworkers did not go quietly; unlike others who had been purged over the years, the workers had no incentive to keep silent and no place to go. Chavez had effectively blackballed them with both union and nonunion growers. The paid reps filed complaints with the Agricultural Labor Relations Board; state officials said the ALRB lacked jurisdiction. The workers filed internal charges against UFW board members; the executive board exonerated the leadership. The paid reps found an Oakland lawyer who specialized in union democracy and took their case pro bono. Nine farmworkers sued Cesar Chavez in federal court, claiming he had no right to fire them from positions to which they had been elected by their peers.

“The union has always been run according to the views of the President, Cesar Chavez. It became unable to deal with dissenting opinions,” Bustamante said in his deposition. “There can be no doubt that the other plaintiffs and I were removed because Cesar perceived us to pose some kind of threat
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to his stronghold on the UFW, not because we failed to do our jobs.”

The paid reps accused Chavez of using union funds to campaign for his slate on the executive board. He produced checks to show the union had been reimbursed for election-related expenses. The first check had been deposited after the paid reps had complained. They circulated a flyer claiming they had forced Chavez to repay the money. He sued for libel
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and slander, seeking $25 million in damages from nine farmworkers. In an unguarded moment with a reporter, Chavez acknowledged the suit was an effort to intimidate
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their lawyer.

The open dissension attracted the first prolonged spate of negative publicity for Chavez in two decades. Reporters from major news organizations asked about the paid reps, the departure of high-profile figures such as Marshall Ganz and Jerry Cohen, and the Synanon Game. Their inquiries were fielded by Chris Hartmire, who had resigned from the farmworker ministry to work full-time as Chavez’s assistant. Hartmire’s move to La Paz pleased Chavez, who was sensitive to the recent exodus. Hartmire had long been skilled in interpreting and justifying Chavez’s actions. Now he used those talents in a more public forum. Unwittingly, some former staff might be “helping the enemy,” Hartmire told the
Los Angeles Times
. He took notes
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on the messages he was to deliver: Jessica Govea sabotaged the medical plan. Marshall Ganz was trying to start his own union. Anti-Semitism was not tolerated in the union.