Free Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone by Hunter S. Thompson Page A

anybody—except Richard Nixon and perhaps Oscar Acosta. Because by that time Oscar was beginning to find his own track. He was America’s only “Chicano lawyer,” he explained in a letter, and he liked it. His clients were all Chicanos and most were “political criminals,” he said. And if they were guilty it was only because they were “doing what had to be done.”
    That’s fine, I said. But I couldn’t really get into it. I was all
for it
, you understand, but only on the basis of a personal friendship.
Most
of my friends are into strange things I don’t totally understand—and with a few shameful exceptions I wish them all well. Who am I, after all, to tell some friend he shouldn’t change his name to Oliver High, get rid of his family, and join a Satanism cult in Seattle? Or to argue with another friend who wants to buy a single-shot Remington Fireball so he can go out and shoot cops from a safe distance?
    Whatever’s right, I say. Never fuck with a friend’s head by accident. And if their private trips get out of control now and then—well, you do what has to be done.
    Which more or less explains how I suddenly found myself involved in the murder of Ruben Salazar. I was up in Portland, Oregon, at the time, trying to cover the National American Legion Convention and the Sky River Rock Festival at the same time ... and I came back to my secret room in the Hilton one night to find an “urgent message” to call Mr. Acosta in Los Angeles.
    I wondered how he had managed to track me down in Portland. But I knew, somehow, what he was calling about. I had seen the
L.A. Times
that morning, with the story of Salazar’s death, and even at a distance of two thousand miles it gave off a powerful stench. The problem was not just a gimp or a hole in the story; the whole goddamn thing was wrong. It made no sense at all.
    The Salazar case had a very special hook in it: not that he was a Mexican or a Chicano, and not even Acosta’s angry insistence that the cops had killed him in cold blood and that nobody was going to do anything about it. These were all proper ingredients for an outrage, but from my own point of view the most ominous aspect of Oscar’s story was his charge that the police had deliberately gone out on the streets and killed a reporter who’d been giving them trouble. If this was true, it meant the ante was being upped drastically. When the cops declare open season onjournalists, when they feel free to declare any scene of “unlawful protest” a free fire zone, that will be a very ugly day—and not just for journalists.

    Ruben Salazar was killed in the wake of a Watts-style riot that erupted when hundreds of cops attacked a peaceful rally in Laguna Park, where five thousand or so liberal/student/activist type Chicanos had gathered to protest the drafting of “Aztlan citizens” to fight for the U.S. in Vietnam. The police suddenly appeared in Laguna Park, with no warning, and “dispersed the crowd” with a blanket of tear gas followed up by a Chicago-style mop-up with billyclubs. The crowd fled in panic and anger, inflaming hundreds of young spectators who ran the few blocks to Whittier Boulevard and began trashing every store in sight. Several buildings were burned to the ground; damage was estimated at somewhere around a million dollars. Three people were killed, sixty injured—but the central incident of that August 29, 1970, rally was the killing of Ruben Salazar.
    And six months later, when the National Chicano Moratorium Committee felt it was time for another mass rally, they called it to “carry on the spirit of Ruben Salazar.”
    There is irony in this, because Salazar was nobody’s militant. He was a professional journalist with ten years of experience on a variety of assignments for the neo-liberal
Los Angeles Times
. He was a nationally known reporter, winning prizes for his work in places like Vietnam, Mexico City, and the Dominican Republic. Ruben Salazar was a veteran war