Cesar Chavez’s household slams Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s marketing campaign

Throughout the 1980 presidential primaries, Fernando Chavez traveled for months with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as they labored on the presidential marketing campaign of his uncle Sen. Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy.

In front room after front room, Chavez mentioned, he noticed some mixture of three framed photos on the wall: portraits of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; of Kennedy’s father, the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.); and of his personal father, Cesar Chavez, who had co-founded the United Farm Employees. The elder Kennedy had grown near the labor icon within the years earlier than the senator’s assassination in 1968.

“These three represented hope and aspirations for folks, particularly marginalized folks” — Black, Latino and Native People, and “even poor whites,” Fernando Chavez recalled in an interview. “It gave them a way of, ‘Wow. Now we have any individual in our nook. Now we have any individual preventing for us.’”

As we speak, the 2 sons’ shut ties are a distant reminiscence. Kennedy Jr. has used Cesar Chavez’s title and picture in his unbiased marketing campaign for president, eliciting outrage from Chavez relations.

A number of of them spoke out this week, as Kennedy plans to carry an occasion Saturday in Los Angeles commemorating Cesar Chavez Day. In selling the occasion, Kennedy’s marketing campaign has featured his personal picture nearly mixing into a photograph of his father sitting beside Chavez in 1968.

“Once we noticed Bobby Kennedy start to make use of photos of my father, after which after we heard about this occasion in L.A., it actually prompted us to face up and to guarantee that folks understood that the Chavez household doesn’t help his marketing campaign,” Paul Chavez, Fernando’s brother, advised The Instances.

“We’ve by no means seen anyone go so far as utilizing that picture for political achieve,” Andres Chavez, Paul’s son, mentioned of Kennedy’s marketing campaign occasion invitation.

Fernando and Paul, in addition to Andres — who runs the Nationwide Chavez Heart in Keene, Calif. — mentioned they’re endorsing President Biden for reelection, and that if Cesar have been alive, he would do the identical.

Biden retains a bust of the labor chief within the Oval Workplace, and Chavez’s granddaughter Julie Chavez Rodriguez, who as soon as organized strawberry pickers and later labored for President Obama, now serves as Biden’s marketing campaign supervisor.

Chavez relations have been additionally offended after they noticed, in a latest Telemundo phase, an Related Press picture of Kennedy Jr. serving to carry Cesar’s casket throughout his 1993 funeral procession.

About 30,000 folks attended that occasion, Fernando Chavez mentioned, and when relations grew uninterested in carrying the easy pine field by means of the streets of Delano, Calif., others stepped in. Tons of of individuals helped carry the casket for components of the miles-long procession, together with Kennedy Jr., then an environmental legal professional, and lots of politicians.

A Kennedy spokesperson mentioned that an middleman had reached out to a member of the Chavez household to ask them to the occasion however had not obtained a reply.

“Mr. Kennedy has been a good friend to the Chavez household since he was a boy, and was requested by the household to be a pallbearer when Cesar Chavez handed away in 1993,” the spokesperson, who didn’t present their title, mentioned in an electronic mail. “This occasion is a celebration of an organizing hero, Cesar Chavez, a person who labored with Mr. Kennedy’s father till the day RFK was murdered. The marketing campaign is proud to sponsor this celebration on the weekend that honors Cesar Chavez’s birthday in California.”

Each Paul and Andres Chavez mentioned they hadn’t been invited to the occasion or heard from the marketing campaign.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., brings up the rear as he joins Edward James Olmos, entrance, then-Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II and others in carrying Cesar Chavez’s casket in 1993. Many individuals helped carry it in a miles-long funeral procession as Chavez’s household grew drained.

(Bob Galbraith / Related Press)

Kennedy has been holding extra occasions in latest weeks as he strives to get on the poll in as many states as attainable — an costly and sophisticated course of with out the backing of one of many two main events. He introduced Tuesday that political newcomer Nicole Shanahan could be his working mate.

Shanahan helped produce and pay for a Tremendous Bowl industrial that relied on imagery and music from a tv spot that John F. Kennedy ran whereas working for president in 1960. The late Democratic president was Robert Kennedy Jr.’s uncle.

The Tremendous Bowl advert angered many Kennedy relations, and a few have since change into extra outspoken about their help for Biden and their frustration with their relative’s presidential run.

Relations of Chavez mentioned it was painful to talk out as a result of the Kennedy and Chavez clans stay carefully linked — aside from Kennedy Jr. In 1988, Kennedy Sr.’s widow, Ethel, visited Chavez throughout considered one of his roughly monthlong protest fasts.

Kerry Kennedy, one of many presidential candidate’s sisters, visited California in 2018 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the United Farm Employees healthcare plan, which was named after their father.

“My household and I repeatedly stood with Cesar and his trigger,” she wrote in a January op-ed within the New York Every day Information.

In March 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, sporting a UFW black Aztec eagle pin on his lapel, was by Chavez’s facet as he broke a 25-day quick meant to attract consideration to the farmworker motion’s concentrate on nonviolent protest.

It had been almost three years since Filipino and Latino farmworkers started placing over low pay and harmful circumstances.

“Now we have come right here out of respect for one of many heroic figures of our time — Cesar Chavez,” Kennedy Sr. mentioned on the time. “I additionally come right here to congratulate all of you, you who’re locked with Cesar within the wrestle for justice for the farmworker.” Chavez, who had misplaced 35 kilos after subsisting solely on water, was too weak to talk.

This second cemented a friendship that had fashioned two years earlier, when Kennedy visited Delano for a Senate subcommittee subject listening to and expressed shock and anger at how farmworkers have been being handled.

Now, with the 2024 presidential election simply months away, Chavez relations mentioned they concern that in an in depth contest, any help for Kennedy might assist Republican Donald Trump regain the White Home.

“I’m form of horrified and saddened about that,” mentioned Fernando Chavez, who added that he hasn’t stayed in contact with Kennedy Jr. since they labored collectively a long time in the past.

Fernando and others identified how badly farmworkers have been hit by COVID-19, partly fueled by rampant disinformation amongst Latinos concerning the vaccine’s efficacy. The Cesar Chavez Basis labored to vaccinate farmworkers, Andres Chavez mentioned, and Kennedy Jr.’s views on vaccines horrified him.

In a 2021 podcast, Kennedy advised dad and mom to “resist” the U.S. Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention’s tips on vaccinating their youngsters. By the years he has repeatedly unfold falsehoods concerning the effectiveness of vaccines, and extra lately mentioned the COVID-19 lockdowns have been one thing a totalitarian state would do, likening them to Nazi Germany.

“When Trump and Kennedy have been spreading misinformation about vaccines within the pandemic, folks have been dying,” Andres Chavez mentioned. “I don’t suppose my grandfather would stand by anyone who could be spreading this misinformation — realizing that farmworkers and Latinos have been among the many most impacted.”