The Machine That Protected Cesar Chavez for Sixty Years
The real scandal isn't what Chavez did. It's the government-funded infrastructure that made him untouchable and continues to protect others like him.
Last week, the New York Times published allegations that legendary labor leader Cesar Chavez sexually abused multiple women and girls over decades. Within barely a day, statues were covered up, street signs came down, and governors nationwide cancelled annual Chavez birthday celebrations.
Sixty years of silence turned into forty-eight breathless hours of reckoning.
Why did the reckoning take so long? Cesar Chavez died in 1993. Why didn’t anyone speak up years ago, especially once he was gone? More to the point, how did Cesar Chavez—cultural icon, civil rights hero, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, perhaps the most famous Latino in American history—abuse women and girls for decades without consequence?
Everyone familiar with Chavez had heard the rumors of sexual misconduct. They remained rumors because his victims stayed silent. They did so to protect the United Farm Workers, an institution that had become essential to the progressive political machine.
The Machine Behind the Man
The United Farm Workers (UFW) that Cesar Chavez founded was much more than just another labor union. It was a government-funded nonprofit network that sat at the heart of the progressive Political Vise, protected by politicians who needed it, media who lionized it, and activists who built their identities around it.
In the Political Vise, government-funded nonprofits sit at the bottom of the system—the most powerful position—pressuring politicians directly while shaping how the media reports and how the public understands events. Some do vital work. Too many exist to extract taxpayer money and convert it into institutional power. The United Farm Workers was the latter.
Jerry Brown, California’s governor in the 1970s, gave Chavez’s nonprofit network nearly unfettered access to federal grants. According to a 1979 Reason magazine report, Brown “waived his right as governor to see and sign federal grants to anyone in the state of California,” giving Chavez “carte blanche approval of anything requested.” The National Farmworker Service Center, created by Chavez and the UFW, received almost two million dollars in federal grants. When the nonprofit’s credit union faced insolvency, it received a taxpayer bailout while gouging the very farmworkers it claimed to serve.
How to Build a Secular Saint
The protection (and the coverup) extended far beyond California. President Obama designated a national monument in Chavez’s honor in 2014 and declared Cesar Chavez Day a federal commemorative holiday. President Biden proudly displayed a bust of Chavez near his Oval Office desk. The media canonized Chavez as a secular saint, a folk hero, a modern-day Gandhi and a successor to Dr. King. Just as those credulous reporters dismissed rumors of his sexual impropriety, they rarely investigated how he ran his union, despite abundant evidence that the UFW regularly engaged in criminal conduct. His chief biographer chronicled Chavez’ penchant for autocratic control, his purges of perceived opponents, his strange alliance in the 1970s with the violent Synanon cult, and his brutal campaigns against undocumented immigrants. Chavez was untouchable.
Schools, streets, parks, libraries, and community centers across the country bore his name.
Dolores Huerta said Chavez raped her twice, resulting in two children whose paternity she hid for decades. She was his partner in building the farmworker movement. She co-founded the union with him. Huerta remains, at ninety-five, a towering figure on the American left. She kept quiet for so long not out of devotion to an abusive man, but to protect an institution that had made each of them into political kingmakers.
The Fastest Funeral in Political History
California leaders declared themselves appalled by the revelations. Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas declared that “the farmworker movement has never been about one man.” Senator Adam Schiff said, “the legacy of UFW promoting equitable and fair treatment for our farm workers is not the province of any one person, including Cesar Chavez.” Governor Gavin Newsom tried to remind everyone to focus on “a movement (the UFW)...that we should all be celebrating.”
These politicians took just hours to toss away a cultural icon. Even as they did so, the Vise remained intact because the Vise was never about Cesar Chavez himself. It was about the machinery of power.
Government-funded nonprofits like the UFW extract wealth from taxpayers through grants and legislation, then use that money to pressure the very politicians who fund them. The cycle is self-perpetuating and nearly impossible to break. Politicians fund nonprofits. Nonprofits help elect politicians. Those politicians vote to fund more nonprofits. The cycle sustains itself at public expense.
Former Illinois Governor Pat Quinn demonstrated this perfectly. In 2010, he announced a fifty-five-million-dollar Neighborhood Recovery Initiative, ostensibly to reduce gang violence in troubled neighborhoods. What really happened was Quinn funneled those nonprofit funds to pay unemployed youth to walk precincts and distribute campaign fliers for himself and his allies. It was a blatant violation of the law, and a clear illustration of how the system actually operates.
The Question Nobody in Washington Wants to Answer
In 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began exposing this machinery on a national scale. In the final weeks of the Biden administration, two billion dollars were transferred from the Environmental Protection Agency to green nonprofits. The TransLatin@ Coalition, like the UFW, a predominantly Hispanic organization, got more than half of its budget from the federal government. The Coalition used that money to advocate for puberty blockers, sex change surgeries for teens, and the dismantling of ICE. For decades, radical non-profits have raked in fortunes in government funds, and then used those funds to pressure politicians, shape media narratives, and build institutional power that makes them accountable to no one. The UFW was one of the earliest and most successful organizations to master the levers of the progressive Vise.
We can’t allow the Chavez scandal to distract us from asking a very pressing question: what other government-funded nonprofit networks are operating right now with the same protection, the same impunity, and the same machinery that the UFW enjoyed until last week? It’s easy to change the name of a street, or a school, or a ship. But until the system that funds, amplifies, and enforces progressive political pressure is dismantled, we will hear stories like this again and again.