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v7tv4t, ;::441:Aw o logoso r o m p oopitiesow ,A.531V*.A.411VA&VM.ft,,,, , ,, OP% ZeP l eA .p./.4. Above, Jose Angel Gutierrez, Chicano activist and a founder of La Raza Unida, in Crystal City, December 1969; Right, Judge \(and former county In the ensuing month Gutierrez tried to back off from the implications of what he had said. MAYO would “kill gringos” economically and at the polls, not physically, he said; he meant killing the “gringo system,” not the person; he had said that if he killed a gringo, it would be in self-defense. Bernal made a sophisticated attempt to meet Gonzalez’ challenge about Gutierrez’ rhetoric too sophisticated, some thought, to be smart politics. Upholding “my association with MAYO,” Bernal said “Gutierrez’s allusions to violence and killing do not represent anything more than the civil rights tactics of the sixties . . . As a part of free speech, they can represent no more than metaphors, meaning by ‘kill’ that he expects the actual death of no one. Obviously, he only expects to ‘kill’ by politics, within the traditional power of American democracy . . . I do not take Angel Gutierrez’s remarks any more literally than I did when Henry Gonzalez said he would ‘pistol whip’ Congressman Ed Foreman for calling him a `pinko’ a few years back.” Gonzalez recalls that about this time, he told Gutierrez they both wanted to help the people and that ought to mean they’d wind up on the same side, but when they tried to intimidate him and get him to say “Kill the gringo,” he would not yield. “You’re not helping the people when you double the fist and say ‘Kill the gringo,’ ” he said. Bernal knows that he took damage politically for justifying Gutierrez. “I got caught in it,” he realizes now, as in different ways Pena did, too. Did it beat them? “Oh, yeah,” Bernal says. “They used Henry’s remarks about us all.” Although Gonzalez did not campaign against Bernal’s re-election, a two-yearold letter from Gonzalez to Bernal’s opponent Lombardino, commending him on fine work in the legislature, was “blown up real big and they used it at the polls” in both the first and second primaries, Bernal said. But he didn’t think it had much to do with the out come, and Gonzalez, for his part, says as soon as he learned of the letter’s use he blew up and importuned Lombardino to make no further use of it and was assured that was the end of it. “White Taco” The first scandal of the Nixon Administration involved a fiery MexicanAmerican politician, Albert Fuentes of San Antonio, and Gonzalez’ former aide Eddie Montez. Fuentes was state chairman of PASO and ran for statewide office, but then switched to the Republican Party and became special assistant to Hilary Sandoval, chief of the Small Business Administration under Nixon. In 1969 Gonzalez played a decisive role in a chain of events that put Fuentes and Montez in prison. Gonzalez says that Rudy Esquivel, now a judge in San Antonio, brought him a report of misdoing in the SBA, and Gonzalez induced him to get an affidavit, which Esquivel did. Gonzalez gave this affidavit, which involved Fuentes and Montez, to the chairman of the Senate THE TEXAS OBSERVER 9