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Ruben Salazar
March 3, 1928 - August 29, 1970

t was a pleasant warm morning on August 29, 1970 when the third and largest National Chicano Moratorium March started from Belverdere Park for its six mile march to Laguna Park in East Los Angeles to protest the Vietnam War. Chicanos were dying in disproportionate numbers in what was considered a racist war. Many of the protesters felt that the real battle was not in a far away land but in this country; a country which was denying the Mexican-American community the most basic of human rights. At around 3 p.m. when most of the 30,000 marchers had reached Laguna Park, a swat team of more than 500 policemen began to sweep the park with billy clubs upraised and hurling tear gas grenades. Panic and riot ensued. Two hours later many businesses on Whittier Boulevard had been vandalized, nearly 200 marchers had been jailed, hundreds were injured, and three were killed. Among the dead was Ruben Salazar, who had attended the rally to report the story for Spanish-language television station KMEX. The never adequately explained tragic killing of the prominent, controversial, and popular Salazar made him an instant martyr of the Chicano movement and a symbol of police abuse of Mexican Americans.

Ruben Salazar was born in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, across the Rio Grande from El Paso on 3 March 1928. A year later his parents, Luz Chavez and Salvador Salazar, a watch repairman, moved across the river, and Ruben grew up in El Paso. He attended primary and secondary schools there and learned to practice the Boy Scout virtues. After high school he entered the U.S. army, where he served a two-year tour of duty just before the Korean conflict. Out of the service and now an American citizen, Salazar entered the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and received his B.A. in journalism four years later in 1954. During his last two years as a student at UTEP he worked as a reporter for the El Paso Herald Post, where he demonstrated both great interest and skill in investigative reporting.

While working as a reporter at the El Paso Herald Post, he became deeply aware of police mistreatment of Mexicans and wrote extensivley on the brutality against Mexican-Americans in Texas prisons. After graduation Salazar took a job with the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, a small town in northern California; three years later he left the staff of the Press Democrat for a reportorial position on a big city newspaper, the San Francisco News. Having served his seven years of apprenticeship, in 1959 he moved south as a reporter on the city staff of the Los Angeles Times.

During his six years there in the city room he persuaded his superiors to allow him to write a column, sometimes troublesome for the Times, in which he gave voice to the problems and concerns of eastside Chicanos. He continued to give evidence of his ability as reporter, writing an award-winning series of articles on the Los Angeles Latino community that earned him a well-deserved reputation for conscientious and objective reporting. In 1965 Salazar was sent by the Times to Vietnam as a foreign correspondent to cover the rapidly escalating American involvement there, of special interest to the Latino community because of the proportionately large number of Mexican Americans in the U.S. forces and among the casualties.

After nearly two years in Vietnam Ruben Salazar was called back by the Times to take over the job of bureau chief in Mexico City, thus becoming the first Mexican American to hold such a position at a major newspaper. He covered the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic that year and was one of two Times correspondent; in Vietnam during the period of increased U.S. involvement in that war. Two years later, while reporting on the election of Arnulfo Arias as president of Panama, he was captured and briefly held by terrorists who accused him of being a CIA agent or a puppet of the U.S. State Department.

At the end of 1968 Salazar returned to Los Angeles with a special assignment to cover the Mexican American community, in which the Chicano movement was beginning to move into high gear. Aware of the increasing importance and rising militancy of Mexican Americans, in the following year the Times took steps, involving Salazar, to focus more sharply on the Chicano community.

Meanwhile, in late 1969 Salazar decided to accept a position as news director of station KMEX-TV and planned to leave the Times. The response of the Times was to suggest that in his new position Salazar continue writing a weekly column explaining and interpreting Chicano life and culture to the greater Los Angeles community. He decided he could handle both jobs and subsequently used both forums to articulate the many grievances that Mexican Americans had nursed for so long. A political moderate, he nevertheless spoke out fearlessly, condemning racism, prejudice, and segregation. Abuses by the police became the special target of his hard-hitting weekly essays, and he repeatedly pointed out in his column the much higher than average Mexican American casualty rate in the Vietnam War. Inevitably there was a reaction and pressure was exerted to tone down, if not muzzle Salazar.

He was under investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI, and pressure was put on him to tone down his language. When the National Chicano Moratorium called a march for late August 1970 in Los Angeles, Ruben Salazar naturally was present at the event in his dual capacity. With his crew from KMEX he covered the march from Belvedere Park to Laguna Park. While relaxing with a beer in the Silver Dollar Cafe on Whittier Boulevard after the rampage, he was killed instantly by a high-velocity 10-inch tear gas projectile that hit him in the head. The subsequent 16-day coroner's inquest, which was televised and carried live by all seven Los Angeles television stations ruled that the killing was a homicide but there was never any legal action against Los Angeles County Sheriffs Deputy Tom Wilson who shot the fatal projectile at Salazar's head. Many Mexican Americans and Anglos felt that the inquest was flawed.

Salazar's tragic death became an immediate symbol of police abuse and the failure of the American justice system to provide Mexican Americans with equality of treatment. Ruben Salazar's funeral was a quiet testimonial to his belief that Chicano grievances could be resolved within the system and to his efforts to bring about that resolution. His informed, articulate, and level-headed voice for social change was sorely missed in the Los Angeles area. In 1971 he was posthumously awarded a special Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and after the controversy of his death had subsided, Laguna Park was renamed Salazar Park in his honor. Later he received the supreme mexicano tribute, a corrido describing his contributions to la raza. On the tenth anniversary of his death his widow, Sally Salazar, was the guest of honor at the dedication of the Ruben Salazar Library in Santa Rosa, California.