There are a lot of ex-cons in the Movement now, along with a whole new element -- the "Batos Locos." And the only difference, really, is that the ex-cons are old enough to have done time for the same things the batos locos haven't been arrested for, yet. Another difference is that the ex-cons are old enough to frequent the action bars along Whittier, while most of the batos locos are still teenagers. They drink heavily, but not in the Boulevard or the Silver Dollar. On Friday night you will find them sharing quarts of sweet Key Largo in the darkness of some playground in the housing project. And along with the wine, they eat Seconal -- which is massively available in the barrio, and also cheap: a buck or so for a rack of five reds, enough to fuck anybody up. Seconal is one of the few drugs on the market (legal or otherwise) that is flat guaranteed to turn you mean. Especially with wine on the side and a few "whites," bennies, for a chaser. This is the kind of diet that makes a man want to go out and stomp people. . . the only other people I've ever seen heavily into the red/white/wine diet are the Hell's Angels.
The results are about the same. The Angels would get loaded and then snarl around looking for somebody to chain-whip. The batos locos get loaded and start looking for their own kind of action (burning a store, rat-packing a nigger, or stealing some cars for a night of high-speed cruising on the freeways). The action is almost always illegal, usually violent -- but only recently has it become "political."
Perhaps the main Movement/focus in the barrio these days is the politicalization of the batos locos. The term translates literally as "crazy guys," but in harsh political terms it translates as "street crazies," teenage wildmen who have nothing to lose except their hostility and a vast sense of doom and boredom with the world as they know it. "These guys aren't afraid of the pigs," a Chicano activist told me. "Hell, they like a fight with the pigs. They want it. And there's a hell of a lot of 'em, man. Maybe two hundred thousand. If we can organize these guys, man, we can move on anybody."
But the batos locos are not easily organized. For one thing, they're hopelessly ignorant about politics. They hate politicians -- even Chicano politicians. They are also very young, very hostile, and when you get them excited they are likely to do almost anything -- especially when they're full of wine and reds. One of the first overt attempts to bring the batos locos into the new Chicano politics was the mass rally against police brutality last January 31st. The organizers took great care to make sure the thing would be peaceful. The word went out all over the barrio that "this one has to be cool -- no riot, no violence." A truce was arranged with the East L.A. sheriff's department; the cops agreed to "keep a low profile," but they nonetheless sand-bagged and barricaded the sheriff's substation right next to the site of the rally in Belvedere Park.
Writing in The Nation, a Chicago priest named David F. Gomez described the scene as the rally gathered steam: "Despite the tension, a fiesta atmosphere prevailed as Chicanos sat on the scarred grass of the park's soccer field and listened while barrio speakers aired grievances of police brutality and the gringo occupation of Aztlan. Oscar Acosta gave the most rousing talk of the afternoon. 'Ya es tiempo. The time is now! There's only one issue. Not police abuse. We are going to be clubbed over the head for as long as we live because we're Chicanos! The real issue is nuestra tierra, our land. Some people call us rebels and revolutionaries. Don't believe it. Emiliano Zapata was a revolutionary because he fought against other Mexicans. But we are not fighting our own people but gringos! We are not trying to overturn our own government. We don't have a government! Do you think there would be police helicopters patrolling our communities day and night if anybody considered us real citizens with rights!'"
The rally was peaceful -- all the way to the end. But then, when fighting broke out between a handful of Chicanos and jittery cops, nearly a thousand young batos locos reacted by making a frontal assault on the cop headquarters with rocks, bottles, clubs, bricks and everything else they could find. The cops withstood the attack for about an hour, then swarmed out of the place with a stunning show of force that included firing deadly buckshot balls out of 12-gauge shotguns straight into the crowd. The attackers fled through the backstreets to Whittier Boulevard, and trashed the street again. The cops pursued, firing shotguns and pistols at point blank range. After two hours of street warfare, the toll was one dead, 303 serious injuries and a little less than a half million dollars' worth of damage -- including 78 burned and battered police cars.
The entire L.A. power structure was outraged. And the Chicano Moratorium Committee was aghast. The rally's main organizer -- 24-year-old Rosalio Munoz, a former president of the UCLA student body -- was so shocked by the outburst that he reluctantly agreed -- with the sheriff -- that any further mass rallies would be too dangerous. "We will have to find a new way of expressing grievances," said a spokesman for the more moderate Congress of Mexican-American Unity. "From now on the course will be to play a low profile."
But nobody spoke for the batos locos -- except maybe the sheriff. "This violence was not caused by outsiders," he said, "but by members of the Chicano community! They can't say we provoked them this time." This was a definite switch from the standard-brand cop-analysis of "Mexican violence." In the past they had always blamed it on "Communists and Outside Agitators." But now, it seemed, the sheriff was finally catching on. The real enemy was the same people his men had to deal with every goddamn day of the week, in all kinds of routine situations -- on street-corners, in bars, domestic brawls and car accidents. The gente, the street-people, the ones who live there. So in the end, being a sheriff's deputy in East L.A. was not much different from being a point man for the American Division in Vietnam. "Even the kids and old women are VC."
This is the new drift, and everybody in East L.A. who's willing to talk about it uses the term "since Salazar." In the six months since the murder and the unsettling coroner's inquest that followed it up, the Chicano community has been harshly sundered by a completely new kind of polarization, another painful amoeba-trip. But the split this time was not between the young militants and the old Tio Tacos; this time it was between student-type militants and this whole new breed of super-militant street crazies. The argument was no longer whether to fight -- but When, and How, and with What Weapons.
Another awkward aspect of the new split was that it was had been painful, but essentially simple: now it was more no longer a simple matter of "the generation gap" -- more than a conflict of life-styles and attitudes; the division this time was more along economic, or class lines. And this was painfully complex. The original student activist had been militant, but also reasonable -- in their own eyes, if not in the eyes of the law.
But the batos locos never even pretended to be reasonable. They wanted to get it on, and the sooner the better. Anytime, anywhere: Just give us a reason to work out on the pig, and we're ready.
This attitude created definite problems within the movement. The street people had right instincts, said the leadership, but they were not wise. They had no program; only violence and vengeance -- which was wholly understandable, of course, but how could it work? How could the traditionally stable Mexican-American community gain anything, in the long run, by declaring total war on the gabacho power structure and meanwhile purging its own native vendidos?
AZTLAN! Love it or leave it.
-- sign at Chicago rally
Ruben Salazar was killed in the wake of a Watts-style riot that erupted when hundreds of cops attacked a peaceful rally in Laguna Park, where 5000 or so liberal/student/activist type Chicanos had gathered to protest the drafting of "Aztlan citizens" to fight for the US in Vietnam. The police suddenly appeared in Laguna Park, with no warning, and "dispersed the crowd" with a blanket of tear gas, followed up by a Chicago-style mop-up with billyclubs. The crowd fled in panic and anger, inflaming hundreds of young spectators who ran the few blocks to Whittier Boulevard and began trashing every store in sight. Several buildings were burned to the ground; damage was estimated at somewhere around a million dol
lars. Three people were killed, 60 injured -- but the central incident of that August 29th, 1970 rally was the killing of Ruben Salazar.
And six months later, when the National Chicano Moratorium Committee felt it was time for another mass rally, they called it to "carry on the spirit of Ruben Salazar."
There is irony in this, because Salazar was nobody's militant. He was a professional journalist with ten years of experience on a variety of assignments for the neo-liberal Los Angeles Times. He was a nationally known reporter, winning prizes for his work in places like Vietnam, Mexico City and the Dominican Republic. Ruben Salazar was a veteran war correspondent, but he had never shed blood under fire. He was good, and he seemed to like the work. So he must have been slightly bored when the Times called him back from the war zones, for a raise and a well-deserved rest covering "local affairs."
He focused on the huge barrio just east of city hall. This was a scene he had never really known, despite his Mexican-American heritage. But he locked into it almost instantly. Within months, he had narrowed his work for the Times down to a once-a-week column for the newspaper, and signed on as News Director for KMEX-TV -- the "Mexican-American station," which he quickly transformed into an energetic, aggressively political voice for the whole Chicano community. His coverage of police activities made the East Los Angeles sheriffs department so unhappy that they soon found themselves in a sort of running private argument with this man Salazar, this Spic who refused to be reasonable. When Salazar got onto a routine story like some worthless kid named Ramirez getting beaten to death in a jail-fight, he was likely to come up with almost anything -- including a series of hard-hitting news commentaries strongly suggesting that the victim had been beaten to death by the jailers. In the summer of 1970 Ruben Salazar was warned three times, by the cops, to "tone down his coverage." And each time he told them to fuck off.
This was not common knowledge in the community until after he was murdered. When he went out to cover the rally that August afternoon he was still a "Mexican-American journalist." But by the time his body was carried out of the Silver Dollar, he was a stone Chicano martyr. Salazar would have smiled at this irony, but he would not have seen much humor in the way the story of his death was handled by the cops and the politicians. Nor would he have been pleased to know that almost immediately after his death his name would become a battle cry, prodding thousands of young Chicanos who had always disdained "protest" into an undeclared war with the hated gringo police.
His paper, the L.A. Times, carried the account of its former foreign correspondent's death on its Monday front page: "Mexican-American newsman Ruben Salazar was killed by a bullet-like tear gas shell fired by a sheriff's deputy into a bar during rioting Saturday in East Los Angeles." The details were hazy, but the new, hastily revised police version was clearly constructed to show that Salazar was the victim of a Regrettable Accident which the cops were not aware of until many hours later. Sheriff's deputies had cornered an armed man in a bar, they said, and when he refused to come out -- even after "loud warnings" (with a bull horn) "to evacuate" -- "the tear gas shells were fired and several persons ran out the back door."
At that time, according to the sheriff's nervous mouthpiece, Lt. Norman Hamilton, a woman and two men -- one carrying a 7.65 automatic pistol -- were met by deputies, who questioned them. "I don't know whether the man with the gun was arrested on a weapons violation or not," Hamilton added.
Ruben Salazar was not among those persons who ran out the back door. He was lying on the floor, inside, with a huge hole in his head. But the police didn't know this, Lieutenant Hamilton explained, because, "they didn't enter the bar until approximately 8 PM, when rumors began circulating that Salazar was missing," and "an unidentified man across the street from the bar" told a deputy, "I think there's an injured man in there." "At this point," said Hamilton, "deputies knocked down the door and found the body." Two and a half hours later at 10:40 PM, the sheriff's office admitted that "the body" was Ruben Salazar.
"Hamilton could not explain," said the Times, "why two accounts of the incident given to the Times by avowed eyewitnesses differed from the sheriff's accounts."
For about 24 hours Hamilton clung grimly to his original story -- a composite, he said, of firsthand police accounts. According to this version, Ruben Salazar had been "killed by errant gunfire. . . during the height of a sweep of more than 7000 people in (Laguna) Park when police ordered everyone to disperse." Local TV and radio newscasts offered sporadic variations on this theme -- citing reports "still under investigation" that Salazar had been shot accidentally by careless street-snipers. It was tragic, of course, but tragedies like this are inevitable when crowds of innocent people allow themselves to be manipulated by a handful of violent, cop-hating anarchists.
By late Sunday, however, the sheriff's story had collapsed completely -- in the face of sworn testimony from four men who were standing within ten feet of Ruben Salazar when he died in the Silver Dollar Cafe at 4045 Whittier Boulevard, at least a mile from Laguna Park. But the real shocker came when these men testified that Salazar had been killed -- not by snipers or errant gunfire -- but by a cop with a deadly tear gas bazooka.
Acosta had no trouble explaining the discrepancy. "They're lying," he said. 'They murdered Salazar and now they're trying to cover it up. The sheriff already panicked. All he can say is, 'No comment.' He's ordered every cop in the county to say nothing to anybody -- especially the press. They've turned the East L.A. sheriff's station into a fortress. Armed guards all around it." He laughed. "Shit, the place looks like a prison -- but with all the cops inside!"
Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess refused to talk to me when I called. The rude aftermath of the Salazar killing had apparently unhinged him completely. On Monday he called off a scheduled press conference and instead issued a statement, saying, "There are just too many conflicting stories, some from our own officers, as to what happened. The sheriff wants an opportunity to digest them before meeting with newsmen."
Indeed. Sheriff Pitchess was not alone in his inability to digest the garbled swill that his office was doling out. The official version of the Salazar killing was so crude and illogical -- even after revisions -- that not even the sheriff seemed surprised when it began to fall apart even before Chicano partisans had a chance to attack it. Which they would, of course. The sheriff had already got wind of what was coming: many eyewitnesses, sworn statements, first-hand accounts -- all of them hostile.
The history of Chicano complaints against cops in East L.A. is not a happy one. "The cops never lose," Acosta told me, "and they won't lose this one either. They just murdered the only guy in the community they were really afraid of, and I guarantee you no cop will ever stand trial for it. Not even for manslaughter."
I could accept that. But it was difficult, even for me, to believe that the cops had killed him deliberately. I knew they were capable of it, but I was not quite ready to believe they had actually done it. . . because once I believed that, I also had to accept the idea that they are prepared to kill anybody who seemed to be annoying them. Even me.
As for Acosta's charge of murder, I knew him well enough to understand how he could make that charge publicly. . . I also knew him well enough to he sure he wouldn't try to hang that kind of monstrous bullshit on me. So our phone talk naturally disturbed me. . . and I fell to brooding about it, hung on my own dark suspicions that Oscar had told me the truth.
On the plane to L.A. I tried to make some kind of a case -- either pro or con -- from my bundle of notes and news-clips relating to Salazar's death. By that time at least six reportedly reliable witnesses had made sworn statements that differed drastically, on several crucial points, with the original police version -- which nobody believed anyway. There was something very disturbing about the sheriff's account of that accident; it wasn't even a good lie.
Within hours after the Times hit the streets with the news that Ruben Salazar had in fact been killed by cops -- rather than street-snipers
-- the sheriff unleashed a furious assault on "known dissidents" who had flocked into East Los Angeles that weekend, he said, to provoke a disastrous riot in the Mexican-American community. He praised his deputies for the skillful zeal they displayed in restoring order to the area within two and a half hours, "thus averting a major holocaust of much greater proportions."
Pitchess did not identify any "known dissidents," but he insisted that they had committed "hundreds of provocative acts." For some reason the sheriff failed to mention that his deputies had already jailed one of the most prominent Chicano militants in the nation. "Corky" Gonzales had been arrested during Saturday's riot on a variety of charges that the police never really explained. Gonzales, fleeing the combat zone on a flatbed truck with 28 others, was arrested first for a traffic violation, then on a concealed weapons charge and finally for "suspicion of robbery" when police found $300 in his pocket. Police Inspector John Kinsling said it was a "routine" booking. "Any time we stop a traffic case and find that there is a weapon in the car and that its occupants have a sizeable amount of money," he said, "we always book them for suspicion of robbery."
Gonzales ridiculed the charge, saying, "Anytime a Mexican is found with more than $100 he's charged with a felony." The police had originally claimed he was carrying a loaded pistol and more than 1000 rounds of ammunition, along with many spent cartridges -- but by Wednesday all felony charges had been dropped. As for "robbery," Gonzales said, "Only a lunatic or a fool could believe that 29 people would rob a place and then jump on a flatbed truck to make their getaway." He had climbed aboard the truck with his two children, he said, to get them away from the cops who were gassing the rally, to which he'd been invited as one of the main speakers. The $300, he said, was expense money for himself and his children -- for meals in L.A. and three round-trip bus tickets from Denver to L.A.
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time Page 18