Content note: This story contains details of sexual violence. Civil rights icon Dolores Huerta is one of several women in the United States speaking out against the sexual violence they say they endured at the hands of labour leader Cesar Chavez.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listIn a statement on Wednesday, Huerta said she was motivated to speak out after being contacted for an investigation by The New York Times, which revealed that children as young as age 12 were abused by Chavez.“I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for,” Huerta wrote.“Following the New York Times’ multi-year investigation into sexual misconduct by Cesar Chavez, I can no longer stay silent and must share my own experiences.”Chavez, who died in 1993, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association alongside Huerta and other advocates. They rose to fame during the US civil rights movement of the 1960s, practising nonviolent protest techniques similar to those of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.Together, Chavez, Huerta and other advocates drew attention to the abuses facing vulnerable immigrant farmworkers, particularly in the Hispanic and Filipino American communities.Some of the slogans from the movement continue to have resonance in the US political sphere.The Spanish phrase “si, se puede” — or, in English, “yes, we can” — was adopted as the campai …
