“They don’t want the press to rock the boat. And I think the press’s obligation is to rock the boat.”
(Ruben Salazar, May 13th, 1970.) See www.democracynow.org/...
Fifty-five years ago today, on August 29, 1970, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Thomas Wilson fired two rounds from a tear gas gun through the curtained doorway of the Silver Dollar Cafe, a bar on Whittier Boulevard in the County of Los Angeles. The first round, a “Flite Rite” round designed to penetrate windows, doors, and other light structures in situations where suspects were barricaded, struck KMEX-TV News Director Ruben Salazar in the head, killing him.
That day, Salazar had been covering the National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War, the largest ever protest march of Mexican Americans, which drew close to 30,000 people. Los Angeles law enforcement clashed with the marchers and fired tear gas into the crowds. Salazar was in the Silver Dollar taking a break with his news team when the fatal round was fired.
Just 42 years old when he died, Ruben Salazar was already a significant voice for social justice for the Chicano/Mexican American community in Los Angeles. Born in Cuidad Juárez, Mexico, and raised in El Paso, Texas, Salazar, a US Army veteran, joined the Los Angeles Times as a reporter in 1959. During his time there, he interviewed prominent figures like César Chávez, RFK and President Eisenhower. Salazar also reported internationally, including on the 1965 US occupation of the Dominican Republic, the Vietnam War, and the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of students in Mexico City. He had just left the Times to become news director of Los Angeles’ main Spanish-language TV station when he was killed.
As a journalist, Salazar brought attention to issues like discrimination against Mexican Americans in employment, education, and health care, on police brutality towards Chicanos, and on racism in general. His writings angered the Los Angeles political power structure, especially law enforcement officials, who tried to get him fired from his L.A. Times job. His reporting also made him a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
Salazar’s death was ruled a homicide. The deputy who fired the round denied wrongdoing and was neither arrested nor charged. There was an unexplained delay of several hours before a medical response arrived at the Silver Dollar to follow up word that a person lay dead inside.
Ruben Salazar's family filed a civil case and reached an out-of-court financial settlement with L.A. County. In 2012, the L.A. County Office of Independent Review (OIR) issued a Special Report on the killing. See documents.latimes.com/… While admitting that the matter would have been handled differently four decades later, the report did not alter the official conclusion that the killing was accidental. The OIR was an initiative of an L.A. Sheriff’s official later sentenced to federal prison for obstructing an FBI investigation into abuses in county jails.
For many, the anniversary of Ruben Salazar’s killing continues to evoke strong parallels with the present day. As journalist Roberto Camacho writes in his article on “The Powerful Legacy of Ruben Salazar” (August 26, 2025):
“In an era where police are increasingly targeting reporters and journalists that cover their abuse with ever more frequency, it is nothing short of a miracle that this country has not already experienced a reprise of the same instance of police violence that so cruelly claimed Salazar’s life.”
www.thedailychela.com/...
Indeed, the past echoes into the present.
In 1970, Republican Richard Nixon was President of the United States. Nixon, like Trump over a half-century later, was elected on a “law and order” platform. Nixon, like Trump, moved to federalize policing in Washington, D.C. Under Nixon, Hoover’s FBI continued its long misuse as a corrupt instrument of domestic repression— a legacy Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel embraces with gusto. Just before the Chicano Moratorium where Salazar lost his life, four American students at Kent State University had been killed by National Guardsmen deployed to put down protests — the possibility of another Kent State due to Trump’s manipulation of the National Guard was highlighted recently by columnist Eleanor Clift. See www.thedailybeast.com/...
In some respects, perhaps, things are worse now. For example, the 1968 Republican Party Platform, on which Nixon ran, contained words you’d never see from Trump and MAGA:
Minorities among us—particularly the black community, the Mexican American, the American Indian—suffer disproportionately.
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/…
As we think on this anniversary, however, we should not despair.
Instead, we should be inspired by a life well-lived. And commit to ensuring such sacrifices are not made in vain.
Like Martin Luther King, Jr., Ruben Salazar left it all on the field.
Descanse en paz, hermano.
