Chavez Joins Anti-Spraying Protesters

The issue was malathion. The setting was Santa Monica. The magnet was Cesar Chavez. And the result was a strikingly diverse protest--a sort of disharmonious conversion of fruit pickers, tree preservationists, politicians, child advocates and futurists.

Members of Forests Forever were there, as were the Mothers From East Los Angeles, Mothers and Others, Santa Monica Mayor Dennis Zane, Pesticide Watch, Kids Cry Out (a group of Los Feliz schoolchildren) and Four Directions, an American Indian organization.

Hucksters sold Chavez posters, said to have been commissioned by Jane Fonda, as well as “Boycott Grapes” T-shirts and bumper stickers.

“Today marks a milestone,” Chavez told the cheering crowd outside Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel, where California fruit growers and distributors were holding a yearly convention.

“We’re here to tell the pesticide traffickers we will no longer tolerate the spraying in silence. They talk about acceptable levels of exposure--acceptable to whom?” the United Farm Workers leader asked. “There is no acceptable level of exposure to chemicals that may cause cancer, miscarriages, stillbirths . . . and death.”

The rally was organized by the Burbank-based group FOCUS, or Families Opposed to Chemical Urban Spraying. Nearly 200 activists--chanting, waving signs, blocking traffic--took part in what was described as a new alliance of farm workers and wealthy urbanites opposed to malathion spraying.

“We’ve got Republicans and Democrats here, people from Santa Monica and East L.A., urban people and rural people,” actress Julie Carmen said.

Wearing a “PEACE” T-shirt, with his long hair trailing out of a faded fedora, 40-year-old Vic Forsythe of West Los Angeles stood with a bullhorn, leading the chants for picket-carrying marchers.

“Stop the spraying! That’s what we’re saying!”

Forsythe, president of the Vegetarian Society of Southern California, said he is upset that malathion is being used on private yards and patios, in stores and even on public buses.

“It’s getting to be too pervasive,” he complained. “It’s killing wildlife, killing birds. Once the birds are killed, there will be more insects. The insects will adapt (to the malathion). Then what?”

Fruit growers, who watched the demonstrators through the hotel windows, took issue with the marchers. Michael Durando, president of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League, which represents more than 90% of the state’s fruit growers and shippers, said he sympathized with the concerns of the protesters but still strongly supports the spraying program.

“If we allow the Medfly to spread throughout California . . . we will see a dramatic reduction in the production of fresh fruits and vegetables in this state,” he said. “You will have a situation where consumers will be be buying fruit in the market and cut into them and find maggots in them.”

Durando, who said the crop loss would reach several billion dollars in California, predicted that even back yard gardening would come to an end.

“With the Medfly, there will be no real way for back yard folks to control the infestation,” he said. “You won’t see fruit coming off the trees. The worms will get it first--the maggots.”

The UFW members, who already are mounting a grape boycott to protest the use of pesticides stronger than malathion, will join with anti-malathion forces in another boycott to be announced next week, said FOCUS leader Adelaide Nimitz. She declined to name the target of the boycott.

“They will never eradicate the Medfly--never,” she said. “The Mediterranean fruit fly is established. It is sort of like the cockroach or the spider. To talk about eradicating them is ludicrous.”

Farm worker Gonzalo Ramirez, through an interpreter, told the crowd about the alleged effects of pesticides in the fields on his child.

“My little girl was a victim of cancer,” he said, requiring a kidney transplant from her brother.