Cesar Chavez, one of the founders of the United Farm Workers, who died in 1993, led a movement for the rights and dignity of a long-abused, neglected and exploited agricultural workforce. Through a series of marches, hunger strikes, boycotts and union drives, Chavez and his movement succeeded in winning crucial labor and civil rights protections and advancing the cause and status of the Latino civil rights movement nationwide.

He also, according to a new report from the New York Times, sexually harassed and assaulted women in his movement, and sexually abused and raped the daughters of some UFW organizers when they were girls.

The Times report provides extensive corroboration of allegations by two women, Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas, both now 66, that they were repeatedly molested by Chavez more than 50 years ago, beginning when they were 12 and 13 years old. The report also contains newly public allegations by Dolores Huerta, the renowned trade union activist and co-founder of UFW, that Chavez once pressured her to have sex with him on a work trip and then later raped her in a parked car – encounters that Huerta says led to pregnancies, which she strove to conceal before giving the resulting daughters away to be raised by others.

Murguia and Rojas, the women who say they were abused by Chavez as children, describe remarkably similar patterns of conduct by the union leader. The daughters of organizers, the girls had been raised to revere Chavez as a hero; early in their adolescence, they were each summoned by Chavez to his office, where he initiated sexual abuse. Both women say that the abuse went on for several years, while they were still children; Rojas says that when she was 15, Chavez arranged for her to travel with him from her home in La Paz, north of Los Angeles – where she lived with her parents in a community devoted to Chavez’s work, and near his compound – to Stockton, California, for a UFW march. While there, she says that Chavez took her to a motel........

© The Guardian