Who's the real Brown Beret?

[2 items]

Who's the real Brown Beret?

http://regulus2.azstarnet.com/blogs/senorreporter/16637

09/23/2009
Tim Steller

I received a visit this morning from two 50-somethings who say they
are original Brown Berets from the Tucson area concerned about the
protest planned for this Friday. Robert Puig, 55, and Steve Soto, 54,
are wondering who the Brown Berets de Aztlan are, and they're worried
that these new activistas will sully the Brown Berets' good name.

The Brown Berets de Aztlan, you may recall, is the name of the
California group planning a demonstration this Friday morning at Pima
County Superior Court. The inspiration for the demonstration is the
May 30 Arivaca murders, in which nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and
her father, Raul, were killed, allegedly by members of a Minuteman
border-watch group. More broadly, the flier for the demonstration
says they are protesting government and political support for Minuteman groups.

Puig says he spoke with his "prime minister" in San Diego, Jerónimo
Blanco, who gave Puig permission to speak with the press. Puig said
he is hoping to rejuvenate the Brown Berets here in the Tucson area
and worries that the protests here, if any problems emerge, could
harm his effort before it gets rolling. It turns out, Blanco and the
Brown Berets de Aztlan have had conflicts before, as documented here.
In short, Blanco apparently accused Brown Berets de Aztlan of being
communists selling a debunked ideology, and they called him a
"vendido," or sell-out.

It reminds me a bit of the continuing fragmentation among Minuteman
groups. It's just the nature of social movements, I guess.
--

Contact Tim Steller at (520) 807-8427 or tsteller@azstarnet.com .]

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Brown Berets Are Back, With a New Mission for the '90s

http://articles.latimes.com/1993-07-12/local/me-12525_1_brown-berets

By GEORGE RAMOS
July 12, 1993

The past came marching through the front door of The Times the other
day. Four Chicanos, dressed in khaki uniforms and brown berets, came
to talk about la causa. They said they wanted to help politically
empower L.A.'s Latino community, improve the city's schools and, most
important, stop the increasing gang violence in the barrios.

They also wanted to say that they--the Brown Berets--are back.
--

The Berets were part of the social and political activism that swept
Mexican-American communities throughout the Southwest in the late
1960s and early '70s. They were the strutting, arm-waving, shouting
messengers of the Chicano movement who believed it was time to
correct the inequities of an unjust society. Support for Cesar Chavez
and the farm workers' union and opposition to the Vietnam War were
important themes of the Berets' message.

Newspapers at the time, including this one, said they were militants.
In a way, they were.

Thirteen members of the Berets, including founder and "prime
minister" David Sanchez, were arrested in the wake of disturbances
that marked the East L.A. high school walkouts in 1968 by thousands
of protesting Chicano students.

They were part of the Vietnam War protest march in East L.A. in 1970
that turned violent and claimed the life of Ruben Salazar, then the
news director of KMEX Channel 34 and a Times columnist. Also killed
during the unrest was Lyn Ward, a Brown Beret "medic" who died after
a burning trash bin containing combustible materials exploded near him.

And, in their most dramatic maneuver, a contingent of Berets led by
Sanchez sneaked onto Santa Catalina Island in August, 1972, and
claimed it and other offshore islands for Mexico. They contended that
the islands were not part of the Mexican territory ceded to the
United States in the treaty that ended the Mexican War in 1845.

Island residents, at first alarmed at the group's pronouncements,
came to regard the 26 Berets on the island as Catalina's newest
tourist attraction. The Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies were
shocked to learn that the invaders occasionally had to beg for food
from the locals.

As a news service reporter assigned to cover the "occupation," I can
still recall watching some Berets eat corn flakes, with milk, on flat
paper plates. These guys may have been militants but I realized they
weren't as tough as they led others to believe.

The Berets peacefully left the island after 26 days when they were
declared to be in violation of camping ordinances.

Law enforcement agencies, fearing that the Berets were a brown
version of the gun-toting Black Panthers, infiltrated the group but
found no evidence that its members were trading in weapons or
planning an armed insurrection against the government.

.