Shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon, on Monday, June 5, 1967, the terror began in the village of Tierra Amarilla, the county seat of Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. Some 150 armed “liberators” under the command of one Reies Lopez Tijerina swept into town to begin their “guerilla war” of national liberation. Rushing into the courthouse, a group led by Tijerina himself surprised state police officer Nicainor Saiz and ordered him to surrender his firearm. Before he could do so, he was shot in the chest.
The unarmed jailer, 63-year-old Eulogio Salazar, attempted to escape from the vicious mob of howling “Tijerinistas” by climbing out a window. Reies Tijerina shot him in the face, then shot him again. The “guerilla” gangsters brutally pistol-whipped Undersheriff Dan Rivera and for about two hours held 20 citizens hostage in the courthouse. Then hooting, shooting, and looting, the “revolutionary” thugs fled the terrorized hamlet.
Marxist Manifesto
The Tijerina bandits had broadcast their intentions months before in a “Manifesto” that appeared in the classified columns of the Albuquerque Journal. Declaring ownership of millions of acres of the American Southwest — including the states of California, Arizona, and New Mexico — the brigands claimed “exclusive and supreme jurisdiction within our territorial jurisdiction, over all persons and property situated therein, to the exclusion of all other countries and governments.”
Moreover, declared the manifesto, “We shall enter troops into these territories to restore our authority; and our troops will preserve the strictest discipline.” The Marxist screed continued with this warning: “If the aggressors shed one drop of blood of any of our soldiers during the progress of this liberation campaign, a state of war shall exist as of that moment between us and that aggressor; and … during the progress of such a war, we shall not take any prisoners of war, but shall take only war criminals and traitors, and try those war criminals and traitors by a military tribunal and execute them.” (Emphasis added.)
No blood of Tijerina’s “soldiers” was shed during the “liberation” of Tierra Amarilla but, as we have seen, that did not stop the revolutionary banditti from initiating a little bloodletting themselves. Nor did the bloodletting stop once the gangsters were rounded up by the police and the New Mexico National Guard.
Eulogio Salazar, who had survived the courthouse ordeal, testified at a preliminary hearing that it was Reies Lopez Tijerina who had shot him. He did not live to testify at the trial; he was beaten to death. Salazar was so badly battered he was unrecognizable. State Police Chief Joe Black said that in his 30 years in law enforcement he had never seen anyone so brutally beaten.
Salazar’s ghastly fate could not but impress the jurors and witnesses who were already subjects of a campaign of terror and intimidation. Tijerina was finally given a light sentence of two to 10 years, but served only six months and was then freed on parole. Like many of the revolutionary leaders of yesteryear, he faded into obscurity.
Now he’s back — with a vengeance. At a national “Latino Leadership Summit” held at the University of California-Riverside in January 1995, Reies Lopez Tijerina, “King Tiger,” was the “man of the hour.” When he was introduced, the more than 400 “Latino activists” present — professors, politicians, labor leaders, attorneys, students, and professional “community activists” — leapt to their feet in sustained, tumultuous, adulatory applause. Many held their right arms high in the communist clenched-fist salute, while shouts of ¡Viva la Revolución! and “Power to the People!” filled the air.
Foundation Project
During Tijerina’s legal battles following his attack on Tierra Amarilla, an odd and disturbing symbiosis between the revolutionaries manning the barricades and certain moneyed elites dwelling in the penthouses became strikingly apparent. It was not surprising that the Communist Party, USA took up Tijerina’s cause, showcasing him in one publication after another, or that it used its secret list of subscribers to The Worker, the official Communist Party newspaper, to raise funds for “King Tiger’s” defense. That was to be expected. Neither was it surprising that the communist-founded ACLU, the communist-founded National Lawyers Guild (NLG), the radical Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), the ultra-left Southwest Council of La Raza Unida, the Marxist-trained César Chavez, communist “Black Power” militant Stokely Carmichael, and Castroite Brown Beret leader David Sanchez rallied to his side.
What did surprise a great many folks was the revelation that the subversive — and often outright criminal — activities and agendas of these organizations were being fueled almost completely by tax-exempt foundations bearing names like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford. Especially Ford. The Ford Foundation, it seems, had adopted the Latino/Hispanic/Chicano/Mexican-American/Aztecan revolution (like most ethnic “nationalists,” the Brown radicals had a difficult time agreeing on what to call themselves) as one of its pet projects.
In its 1970 report, the California Senate Fact-finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities said of the Southwest Council of La Raza Unida, which was founded in 1968 with a $630,000 Ford Foundation grant: “It is administered by a Board of 26 and its president is Maclovio Barraza. Mr. Barraza has been identified by the Subversive Activities Control Board as a member of the Communist Party, and presides over the Council which recently received a grant of $1,300,000.00 from the Ford Foundation…. The operation of this large and well-financed private concern, with a Communist at its head, obviously exerts a powerful influence on the Mexican-American minority throughout its domain including the Brown Berets.”
The California Senate report quoted a stinging editorial from the Arizona Daily Star, which observed, “Some Ford Foundation money has been spent in staging marches designed to stir up Mexican-American youth, and in financing campaigns against such persons as Rep. Henry Gonzalez of Texas, whose Mexican-American credentials are of the highest order.” “In other words,” said the Star, “troublemaking and divisiveness, plus efforts to grab ethnic-group power have been the aims of those using the Ford Foundation money.”
William H. McIlhany, in his book The Tax-Exempt Foundations, made note of:
the Mexican American Youth Organization, founded in 1967 by Jose Angel Gutierrez, who used it as a base to build his La Raza Unida Party (“The United Race Party”). Gutierrez built his movement along Marxist lines, fomenting as much hatred as possible between Americans of Mexican and non-Mexican descent. And he was soon using it to take political control of the town of Crystal City [Texas] and impose his own version of Soviet-style independent administration at the municipal level. Even though these activities became too noxious for continued Ford funding, Gutierrez’s outfit was not to be left wanting; it received a generous planning grant from Washington. The Ford Foundation did not cease its substantial support for Gutierrez’s employer, the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, which received at least $3,840,000 between 1968 and 1975.
Ford’s “Chicano Movement”
This is the same Ford-funded Jose Angel Gutierrez who declared at a Tijerina rally in 1967: “Our black brothers call him honky, but he is the same Anglo we know. Our devil has pale skin and blue eyes.” The same Gutierrez, in an address to a May 4, 1970 Mexican American Youth Organization meeting in San Antonio, yelled: “To the gringos in the audience, I have one final message to convey: ‘Up yours, baby. You’ve had it, from now on.'”
This same Ford-funded Jose Angel Gutierrez, now director of Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas-Arlington, also spoke at the January 1995 Latino Summit in Riverside. Like Tijerina and the other Marxist agitators, his appeal was to racism and to forming a separatist nation of “Aztlan.” “We are a hunted people,” he cried. “Why do they come after us? Because we are fighting as a new Mestizo nation, not to be conquered…. Gringos stole the land of the territorial minority — us! We have a right to build our homeland…. Build Raza! We are going to build Aztlan! We are here AGAIN!… They say you are Latinizing Los Angeles — I love it! Aztlan is our homeland — we are here again!”
According to Henry Santiestevan, former head of the Southwest Council of La Raza, “It can be said that without the Ford Foundation’s commitment to a strategy of national and local institution-building, the Chicano movement would have withered away in many areas.” Indeed, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the Ford Foundation is the “Chicano movement.” As mentioned elsewhere in this issue, a tabulation of Ford Foundation grants to the Hispanic radicals during the period of 1968 to 1992 came to over $31 million. Millions more have been added since.
From the Ford Foundation’s most recent report (Summer/Fall 1995), for instance, we see the following grants:
• National Council of La Raza, $160,000 and $75,000. • Northern New Mexico Legal Services, $20,000. • Mexican Academy of Human Rights, $20,000. • Hispanic Leadership Opportunity Program, $2,325,000 (including $525,000 for MALDEF). • Immigrant Legal Resource Center, $145,000. • National Immigration Law Center, $335,000. • National Immigration Law Forum, $130,000. • Urban Institute Program for Research on Immigration Policy, $900,000. • Hispanics in Philanthropy, $100,000.
These and other Hispanic activist groups receive millions of dollars more in funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Charles Stewart Mort Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, Southwestern Bell Foundation, Surdna Foundation, the New York Community Trust, the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation, the AT&T Foundation, the GTE Foundation, the Rosenberg Foundation, the Amoco Foundation, the UPS Foundation, and other tax-exempt foundations.
Additional grants to the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, the Marxist Institute for Policy Studies, and other militant groups go into the fight to radicalize the Hispanic population, undermine immigration enforcement, and lobby for revolution. It was Ford-funded MALDEF, for instance, which initiated the Texas litigation that culminated in the Supreme Court’s Plyler v. Doe decision requiring state taxpayers to provide free schooling to the children of illegal aliens. It was litigation brought by MALDEF and the ACLU which resulted in the decision by liberal-left federal judge Mariana Pfaelzer striking down California’s popularly passed Proposition 187 to withhold welfare benefits from illegal aliens. Ford funding keeps battalions of radical attorneys employed suing the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol on behalf of illegal aliens and so-called “refugees” and “asylees.”
In 1954, former communist leader Louis Budenz, who had once served as managing editor of the Daily Worker, wrote in his book, The Techniques of Communism: “At the Fourteenth National Convention of the Communist Party, held in 1948, the Mexican-Americans came in for special consideration. Here again, the Soviet fifth column adopted an attitude which was designed to promote conflict in the United States and to make the Mexican-American issue one that would promote Communist agitation in Latin America against the United States.”
In the May 1949 issue of its theoretical journal Political Affairs, the Communist Party, USA reported on “The Plight and Struggles of the Mexican-Americans.” Sounding a theme that would become very familiar, the Red organ stated: “The special historical development of the Mexican people in the United States as a conquered people, victim of American imperialist expansion, with close ties to Latin America, requires a new a special approach of our Party to the Mexican problem.”
Forty years later, the August 1989 issue of Political Affairs was devoted to reporting on “The Ideological Conference of the Communist Party, USA.” Addressing the conference on the subject of “Chicano-Mexicano Equality and Questions of Ideology” was Lorenzo Torrez, chairman of the Communist Party of Arizona. “In the 1930s and then in 1972,” declared Torrez, “our stated position was that Chicanos constituted one of the national minorities, which, along with other minority groups, suffered powerful discrimination, racism, inequality, and capitalist oppression.” And, said Comrade Torrez, “our Party projected a militant agenda for all kinds of affirmative action programs.” “These views now are implanted in the main thought patterns of modern U.S. politics,” according to Arizona’s top Red, and have been “accepted by the major mass-media newspapers across the country.”
While it is wise not to accept at face value any statement of alleged fact by a Communist, Torrez’s boasts concerning the implantation and acceptance of the CPUSA’s “views” and “agenda” in elite political circles and the media clearly hit the mark. Which makes his concluding remarks all the more noteworthy.
“Finally, let me close with this idea,” said Torrez. “I think there is no unanimity among Chicano masses that equality cannot be fully achieved within the capitalist system. In fact, I would venture to say, most think it is possible to achieve equality under our present system. If this is true, then it presents a big problem for building mass socialism or working-class consciousness.”
Notice, Comrade Torrez laments that in spite of all the Communist organizing, agitating and propagandizing over half a century, “most” of the “Chicano masses” tend to view the hated “capitalist system” favorably. Observe also that this is a “big problem.” Big problem for whom? For the Communists, of course, and for their foundation patrons in the noble cause of “building mass socialism.” Which is why the Ford Foundation in 1984 zeroed in on “leadership development of Hispanics.” In Importing Revolution, William Hawkins writes: “The elite being so well groomed and financed by Ford is to be indoctrinated … to become radical in outlook and oriented towards social welfare programs rather than private enterprise…. Bred to be political animals, the Ford-sponsored Hispanic elite can be expected to outcompete others for power and thus move the entire community leftward.”
Ford’s consistent funding of the Marxist “Chicano” radicals over the past several decades makes it difficult to see anything other than a near identical coincidence of purpose between the Communist Party and the Foundation.
Roots of Subversion
Ford and other tax-exempt foundations had become notorious for funding socialist and communist programs long before the controversy surrounding their support for the militant radical groups of the 1960s. Following World War II, the connection between Soviet espionage and pro-communists in the foundations, the State Department, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and other institutions became a major concern with many Americans. The important role of the foundation-funded Institute of Pacific Relations, a communist-dominated think tank, in “losing China” to the communists brought that concern to a head.
A congressional committee headed by Representative Carroll Reece of Tennessee was established to investigate the foundations. In 1953, Norman Dodd, the director of research for the committee, was invited to the headquarters of the Ford Foundation by its president, H. Rowan Gaither. “Mr. Dodd,” Gaither told him, “all of us here at the policy-making level have had experience, either in O.S.S. [Office of Strategic Services] or the European Economic Administration, with directives from the White House. We operate under those directives here. Would you like to know what those directives are?” When Dodd said that he would, Gaither continued: “The substance of them is that we shall use our grant-making power so to alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.” Mr. Gaither, of course, was not willing to repeat that statement before the committee, but his continued actions, and those of his CFR colleagues, proved the veracity of his strange admission.
Tragically, before Reece, Dodd, and others involved in the investigation could bring to light the treason that was taking place, the committee’s entire effort was squashed. Later, in 1966, Carroll Quigley, a distinguished professor of history at Georgetown University and formerly an instructor at Princeton and Harvard Universities, shed important light on this whole period with his monumental work, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. Concerning the role of the communist-socialist radicals in the tax-exempt foundations and government, he said: “It must be recognized that the power that these energetic Left-wingers exercised was never their own power or Communist power but was ultimately the power of the international financial coterie.”
Moreover, Quigley noted: “There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and many of its instruments.”
“At the end of the war of 1914,” wrote Quigley, “it became clear that the organization of this system had to be greatly extended. Once again the task was entrusted to Lionel Curtis who established, in England and in each dominion, a front organization to the existing Round Table Group. This front organization, called the Royal Institute of International Affairs, had as its nucleus in each area the existing submerged Round Table Group. In New York it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a front for J.P. Morgan and Company.”
Goal of World Government
A paramount goal of Mr. Gaither’s treasonous comrades at the foundations and the CFR has always been to bring the United States into subjugation under an all-powerful United Nations world government. It is interesting to note that the foundation-funded Hispanic radicals are doing their part to bring that about.
Increasingly, the radicals are appealing to the United Nations and to UN treaties and documents for authority to justify their Marxist schemes. “El Plan de Riverside” is one of those schemes. Devised by the foundationistas at the aforementioned Latino summit, “El Plan” says, among other things: “Denial of health care to the undocumented immigrant is a gross violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on the Indigenous People, and it is in contradiction to the principles or charter of the Pan American Health Organization…. Denial of health services and benefits to children is inhumane, barbaric, genocidal and must be prohibited.”
The threat of these and other outlandish proposals some day being enacted must be taken seriously. The silk hats of the tax-exempt foundations and the Hispanic brown-beret radicals fully intend to transform America. By encouraging an uncontrollable flood of Third World immigrants, and by discouraging assimilation, they are gradually subverting the nation’s cultural and social underpinnings and creating a powerful and manipulable voting bloc with virtually no understanding of the principles of freedom. It is long past time for these subversive foundations to lose their tax-exempt status and for a thorough congressional investigation to expose their treachery.
