Good morning. Energy facilities have become major targets in the war, and the markets don’t like it. The price of oil is now up more than 48 percent since the war began. There’s more news from the Middle East below. But before those updates, I want to tell you about a major Times investigation into a labor rights icon.
A tarnished legacyCesar Chavez rose from the poverty of Arizona’s agricultural fields to shape America’s labor movement. He co-founded the nation’s first successful union of farm workers and championed the Latino working class. Chavez’s name is emblazoned on streets, schools, parks and monuments across the United States. In California, many schools close on Cesar Chavez Day, March 31, his birthday. Now, more than 30 years after Chavez’s death, a Times investigation reveals that at the same time that he was working to better the lives of immigrant workers, Chavez sexually abused and assaulted women and girls. The victims include Dolores Huerta, who founded the United Farm Workers union with Chavez and was for decades his most prominent ally. Huerta, now 95, told The Times that Chavez raped her in 1966. It was a secret she had kept for nearly 60 years. “Unfortunately, he used some of his great leadership to abuse women and children — it’s really awful,” Huerta told The Times. What to knowThe Times found extensive evidence that Chavez sexually abused two teenage girls in the 1970s. Ana Murguia, now 66, met Chavez when she was 8 and he was in his 40s. She said Chavez molested her in his office. The abuse started when she was 13 and ended four years later, she said. Debra Rojas, also 66, was 12 when Chavez first fondled her breasts in his office. When she was 15, he had sex with her — rape, under California law. A line from The Times’s reporting: “He told her that he had known they belonged together since he saw her at the age of 9.” Both women struggled in the years that followed the abuse: depression, panic attacks, substance abuse. They kept silent, they said, out of fear that the accusations would tarnish Chavez’s legacy. In recent months, though, after talking with Times reporters, they came to believe that their stories mattered as much as his.
Dolores Huerta had two children by Chavez. Huerta told The Times she had felt pressured to have sex with him in a hotel room during a work trip in 1960. Six years later, he raped her in a car parked in a secluded grape field, she said. She told The Times she did not report the assault to the authorities because of the police’s antagonism toward the labor movement and because she feared her union would not believe her. Both encounters resulted in pregnancies. Huerta hid them by wearing baggy clothes, she told The Times, and arranged to have the babies raised by others. “I have kept this secret long enough. My silence ends here,” Huerta said yesterday afternoon, in her first comments since the publication of the investigation. Chavez pursued or harassed other women in the movement. The Times spoke to at least a dozen of them. Some of them chose to speak on the record, while others preferred to remain anonymous. Several relatives and union members knew about Chavez’s behavior. They talked to Chavez’s son, Paul Chavez, about it in the early 2000s. “It was unimaginable to me, just hard to process,” he recalled thinking. “You’re talking about my dad.” The fallout has been swift. States, cities and the United Farm Workers of America canceled upcoming marches and celebrations of Chavez. Arizona’s governor said that her state would stop recognizing his birthday as a holiday. The U.S. Department of Labor has an auditorium named in his honor — an American flag now hangs over the door, covering his name. The Times investigation was thorough. It took nearly five years. Our reporters corroborated victims’ claims by speaking to more than 60 people close to Chavez and the union. They reviewed hundreds of pages of records, confidential emails, photographs and audio recordings of union meetings. A reporter’s reflectionManny Fernandez is one of the reporters on the investigation. Manny’s a California native, born and raised in Fresno. He went to Fresno State. His grandparents on both his mother’s and his father’s sides started out as farmworkers, working the very fields Chavez organized. That weighed on him, he told me yesterday. “It didn’t distract me from doing the work,” he said. “It was just an irony that I’m the guy from The Times who’s doing this, who’s from here, who understands the legacy of Chavez, which in California cannot be overstated.” “He represented the best of us — and by us, I mean Latino America,” Manny continued. “And to discover that Chavez had this dark side is disturbing. But we do need to know who our heroes are.” Please read the whole story. It’s free for everybody who receives this newsletter.
Airstrikes hit the infrastructure of South Pars offshore gas field, which is shared by Iran and Qatar. It is Iran’s biggest source of natural gas. Iraq, which normally gets one-third of its natural gas from Iran, said the attack had knocked out a large part of its electric power supply. Hours later, Qatar accused Iran of attacking Ras Laffan, one of its major energy hubs, and Iran reported an airstrike on oil and petrochemical facilities. The attacks were some of the most significant on energy sites since the war began. Oil prices spiked after reports of the strikes. President Trump said the United States knew nothing about the attack on South Pars, that it was a unilateral Israeli initiative, that Qatar had no role in it and that “NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field.” But he threatened to destroy the field if Qatar’s energy facilities were attacked again. Follow the latest updates here. More on the War
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