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On August 29, 1970, the largest protest demonstration ever mounted by people of Mexican descent living in the United States took place in the Mexican-American barrio of East Los Angeles. Organized by a committee headed by former University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), student body president and antiwar activist Rosalio Munoz, the National Chicano Moratorium demonstration was designed to protest the disproportionately high numbers of Mexican-American casualties in the Vietnam War. Between twenty and thirty thousand people marched down Whittier Boulevard, the focus of the main shopping area in East Los Angeles, and congregated on a baseball field at Laguna Park. The day was warm and sunny, and whole families, from grandparents to young children, sat on the grass with plans to picnic, hear the speeches, and enjoy the accompanying music.(1)
A block away, however, deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, responding to a minor disturbance, declared the demonstration an unlawful assembly and ordered the park vacated. Before the mass of people had a chance to leave the park and, indeed, well before most people knew that police had ordered them to disperse, sheriff's deputies charged the crowd, shooting tear gas and beating fleeing demonstrators with nightsticks. Many people panicked as they were crushed against the fences and buses that surrounded the park. A large contingent, however, turned against the line of deputies and fought pitched battles with them. As the angry crowd fled the park, many people swept onto Whittier Boulevard where they attacked passing patrol cars, broke windows, and set fire to several retail stores and police cars. The Los Angeles Times reported that by the end of the day police had arrested over one hundred people, forty people were injured, and three lay dead or dying. One of the dead was journalist Ruben Salazar, a columnist for the Times and news director for Los Angeles's most popular Spanish-language television station, KMEX.(2)
Los Angeles County deputy sheriff Sgt. Thomas Wilson killed Salazar by shooting a tear gas projectile into the Silver Dollar Cafe, where Salazar sat drinking a beer. The 10-by-1-1/2-inch projectile passed through a doorway covered only by a cloth curtain and went completely through Salazar's head. Salazar had arrived at the bar about a mile east of Laguna Park...