BY HARRY RING
LOS ANGELES - While the United Farm Workers (UFW) was locked in conflict with California growers, the FBI was conducting a campaign of illegal infiltration and surveillance of the union. The FBI's anti-union operation was first ordered in 1965 by then-president Lyndon Johnson and followed up by his successor, Richard Nixon.
Two newspaper articles described the 1,434-page FBI file on César Chávez who was president of the UFW until his death in 1993. The file was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, first by the Sacramento, California, Bee, then by the Los Angeles Times. Their accounts indicate the FBI had close ties with the growers.
In the Bee article, Michael Wagner reported, "Although the names of informants and most sources were deleted from the files the FBI released, it appears numerous tips came from growers, including companies the union tried to organize or boycott."
Growers, FBI work together
The growers' ties with the FBI are apparent in the Chávez
dossier.
One report from an unnamed stool pigeon declares, "While Chávez is pictured-as a true leader of oppressed farm workers, he actually is the leader of a group of `beatniks, misfits and winos' -generally dressed in an untidy manner with long hair, wearing sandals."
California Grape Commission president Bruce Obbink says the FBI operation was justified. He told Los Angeles Times reporter Alan Miller, "Here you've got a known conflict between employers and the UFW. You've got 500 pickets, or 1,000, or 2,000 running around. You've got every group from prayerful priests to armed revolutionaries showing up in support of this thing, and you've got packinghouses being burned down and vineyards being sawed to the ground-I would think that somebody would look into something."
Pointing to the file, reporter Miller observes, "The FBI relentlessly tracked the farm workers movement but, at the same time, did not aggressively pursue complaints by the union about violence and threats against its members - including the beating of picketers and reports of a plot to assassinate Chávez."
In those battles, which erupted in the mid-1960s, harshly exploited immigrant farm workers, mainly from Mexico and the Philippines, fought to win union contracts, waging strikes and organizing consumer boycotts against California grape and lettuce growers.
The growers resisted fiercely. They signed phony "sweetheart" contracts with corrupt Teamster union bureaucrats and then used Teamster goons against pickets, supplemented by local cops and deputies.
But as Miller says, that was of no concern to the FBI or those who ordered its operation against the union.
Attempt to disrupt the union
According to the Times article, the first entry in the
file, dated Oct. 8, 1965, reports that an unnamed informer
has picked up word that Chávez "possibly has a subversive
background."
The report concedes that the snoop "was quite vague," but hastily adds that another informer "has a file on Chávez allegedly showing a communist background."
The same source advises that some of Chávez's associates in the union are also "subversive." But, the report again ruefully adds, "He has no specific indication-on any of the individuals named."
The FBI pressed ahead with its "investigation" of the union, and extended its spying to those who supported the farm workers' strikes and boycott activity.
The bias of the informers was equaled only by their ignorance. One unnamed source advised that in some of its demonstrations, the union used two symbols. One was Our Lady of Guadeloupe, the other the emblem which became the union standard - a black eagle on a red field. The eagle, the tipster advises, "was the symbol used by the Trotskyites in Mexico." Actually, the emblem was derived from an Aztec symbol.
Similarly, a Los Angeles field office report to then-FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover asserted the UFW was going to picket U.S. treasurer Ramona Banuelos for hiring undocumented immigrants in her business. The report added that the demonstration might include pickets from the Progressive Labor Party and the Young Socialist Alliance.
This reporter can't speak for the Progressive Labor Party, but it can be flatly stated that if there had been such a demonstration, the Young Socialist Alliance would not have participated.
Like the Socialist Workers Party, with which it stood in political solidarity, the YSA firmly supported the right of immigrants to work in the United States, whether they were "illegal" or not, and for that reason would not have joined in such a protest.
The report on this did manage to get a few other facts straight. It said the YSA was a "main source of recruitment" for the Socialist Workers Party. It described the YSA as "a multinational revolutionary socialist youth organization" opposed to the Vietnam war.
According to one reporter who read the entire Chávez file, the spying on UFW supporters included citing individual activists who were allegedly seen at meetings of the YSA or other groups, such as the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs, then the youth organization of the Communist Party.
Other targets caught in FBI sights
One target of the FBI smear list was Luis Valdez, director
of the hit film La Bamba.
From a farm worker family, Valdez founded and still heads El Teatro Campesino, which was established during the early years of the union to win support for la causa (the cause), as the UFW's struggle for social justice became known.
The FBI took a dim view of Valdez not only because of his support for the union but also because, in 1964, he defied the travel ban to Cuba and spent three months there getting a first-hand look at the revolution.
Responding to a Times query on the Chávez file, an FBI spokesperson said, "Under today's laws and guidelines, this kind of investigation would not be initiated by the FBI."
Leaving aside the truthfulness of the assertion, there is the fact that President Bill Clinton's "counterterrorism" bill in Congress would, among other things, scrap those "laws and guidelines" and further expand the powers of the FBI.