Whatever’s right, I say. Never fuck with a friend’s head by accident. And if their private trips get out of control now and then—well, you do what has to be done.
Which more or less explains how I suddenly found myself involved in the murder of Ruben Salazar. I was up in Portland, Oregon, at the time, trying to cover the National American Legion Convention and the Sky River Rock Festival at the same time ... and I came back to my secret room in the Hilton one night to find an “urgent message” to call Mr. Acosta in Los Angeles.
I wondered how he had managed to track me down in Portland. But I knew, somehow, what he was calling about. I had seen the L.A. Times that morning, with the story of Salazar’s death, and even at a distance of two thousand miles it gave off a powerful stench. The problem was not just a gimp or a hole in the story; the whole goddamn thing was wrong. It made no sense at all.
The Salazar case had a very special hook in it: not that he was a Mexican or a Chicano, and not even Acosta’s angry insistence that the cops had killed him in cold blood and that nobody was going to do anything about it. These were all proper ingredients for an outrage, but from my own point of view the most ominous aspect of Oscar’s story was his charge that the police had deliberately gone out on the streets and killed a reporter who’d been giving them trouble. If this was true, it meant the ante was being upped drastically. When the cops declare open season on journalists, when they feel free to declare any scene of “unlawful protest” a free fire zone, that will be a very ugly day—and not just for journalists.
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 five thousand or so liberal/student/activist type Chicanos had gathered to protest the drafting of “Aztlan citizens” to fight for the U.S. 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 dollars. Three people were killed, sixty injured—but the central incident of that August 29, 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 Sheriff’s 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.