Sponsoring the revolution: illegal immigrants are pawns in a game aimed at fomenting revolution and funded by the nation's major tax-exempt foundations.

April 10, 2006: In the streets of Dallas, Texas, a human tidal wave surged through the streets. The immense crowd carrying the Mexican flag and placards featuring the likeness of Cuban Marxist terrorist Che Guevara--estimated to be at least 100,000 strong, with other estimates running as high as 500,000 --shuffled at times and surged at other times toward city hall, yelling insults and throwing bottles of water at those few counter-protestors brave enough to confront the seething throng. The counter-protestors quickly evaporated when police indicated they couldn't guarantee their safety in the face of the hostile demonstrators.

The scene was the same in countless cities around the country. One of the largest protest rallies, organized to pressure the federal government to allow unrestrained immigration from Mexico, was held, predictably, in Los Angeles. There at least 500,000 people poured into the streets. Of them, 25,000 were students released from Los Angeles public schools in order to take part in the demonstration--with the school district providing busses to haul the students back to the schools when the protests ended. In Los Angeles, as elsewhere that day, the protestors carried banners: "We are indigenous!" read one, "The ONLY owners of this continent!" Another: "If you think i'm 'illegal' because i'm a Mexican learn the true history because i'm in my HOMELAND." Another: "CHICANO POWER!" And another: "THIS IS STOLEN LAND!" The placards were often accompanied by the communist trademark clenched fist salute and sometimes, reportedly, with the burning of the American flag.

The demonstrations, which called for open borders and the return of the southwest states to Mexico, were organized by a number of radical groups, with one of the primary sponsors being LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens. But the demonstrations were large enough, and widespread enough, that they were more than the work of just one special-interest pressure group. Joining LULAC were the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA), and numerous other left-wing radical organizations, including the Communist Party USA, which played up the demonstrations in its newspaper, the People's Weekly World.

The size of the April 10 demonstrations, and their national coordination, hints at the existence of a massive organizational structure pulling the strings behind the scenes. The lifeblood of such an infrastructure is money, and lots of it. In fact, it turns out that the radical Hispanic groups that orchestrated the marches are not the grass-roots groups they seem to be. Instead, they are funded, and in some cases were created, by money flowing from pedigreed "establishment" sources, primarily the large tax-exempt charitable foundations, like the Ford Foundation and others. The debt these radical organizations owe to the foundations, and the extent that they are, in fact, creatures of these foundations, was admitted by Henry Santiestevan, former head of the Southwest Council of La Raza, the forerunner to the present NCLR. "It can be said," Santiestevan admitted, "that without the Ford Foundation's commitment to a strategy of national and local institution-building, the Chicano movement would have withered away in many areas."

Funding Revolution

The Ford Foundation has a long history of funding efforts to subvert national sovereignty and to foment unrest in the interest of pursuing internationalist goals in the United States and abroad. Even Congress took notice during the Eisenhower administration and included the Ford Foundation's activities in its investigation of tax-exempt foundations.

The attention from Congress had little effect on the activities of these foundations. The Ford Foundation, until recently the largest of the tax-exempt foundations, for its part got serious about forming and funding Chicano pressure groups in the late 1960s. At the time, Marxist terrorist Reies Lopez Tijerina was embroiled in a reign of terror in New Mexico, having stormed the Rio Arriba County courthouse in New Mexico at the head of 150 other armed terrorists, killing a police officer, shooting another man, and taking 20 people hostage, all in an effort to establish "exclusive and supreme jurisdiction within our territorial jurisdiction, over all persons and property situated therein, to the exclusion of all other countries and governments."

Calmer and more calculating heads saw that political pressure and activity was likely to be more effective than the direct, violent revolutionary action of terrorists like Reies Lopez Tijerina. One of these was attorney and LULAC official Peter Tijerina. When he died in 2003, the Laredo Morning News recalled, "Tijerina traveled to New York to get advice from Jack Greenberg, then the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Legal Defense and Education Fund. With the help of the NAACP, he wrote a proposal to the Ford Foundation, which told him they only funded national organizations."

Using some of his own assets as seed money, Tijerina founded MALDEF the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. It was hardly a risk. Little more than a front group that existed in name only, it was more than enough to satisfy the Ford Foundation. Not long after MALDEF's founding, the Ford Foundation turned on the money spigot. According to the Laredo Morning News, Tijerina's "efforts paid off with the foundation's five-year grant of $2.2 million--more than double Tijerina's original request."

Though Tijerina may be able to take credit for the initial impetus behind MALDEF the Ford Foundation quickly demonstrated that it was the real power behind the MALDEF throne. According to Karen O'Connor and Lee Epstein of Emory University, early on, when some radicals with MALDEF made "anti-gringo" statements, the Ford Foundation insisted that the organization make changes. Also, according to O'Connor and Epstein, "Ford threatened to terminate MALDEF's funding if it did not move its headquarters out of Texas and relocate them in a more 'neutral' city such as Washington, D.C., or New York." The Ford Foundation did not object to radicalism, but the foundation wanted MALDEF to become active nationally.

In fact, Tijerina was ousted as head of the organization and Mario Obledo, who has become noteworthy for his oft-voiced glee at the prospect of California returning to Mexican control, was installed as the head of the organization. The foundation has since taken credit for its role in creating MALDEF. In its 1984 report Hispanics: Challenges and Opportunities, the Ford Foundation gave itself a pat on the back, noting, "the Foundation helped establish the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund in 1968."

MALDEF is not the only radical open-borders organization to get its start through Ford Foundation funding. Hispanics: Challenges and Opportunities also notes: "In the area of community and economic development, Foundation support in 1968 helped create the National Council of La Raza (NCLR; originally the Southwest Council of La Raza)."

La Raza (meaning "the race"), often portrayed as a nonpartisan organization, was since its beginning a creature of the radical left. In a 1970 report about La Raza, the California Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities noted: "It is administered by a Board of 26 and its president is Maclovio Barraza. Mr. Barraza has been identified by the Subversive Activities Control Board as a member of the Communist Party, and presides over the Council which recently received a grant of $1,300,000.00 from the Ford Foundation.... The operation of this large and well-financed private concern, with a Communist at its head, obviously exerts a powerful influence on the Mexican-American minority throughout its domain including the Brown Berets."

Marxist Revolution

Little known today, the Brown Berets live on in the form of MEChA, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan. According to Carlos Montes, a co-founder of the Brown Berets, the group grew out of Young Citizens for Community Action, a relatively obscure "youth group," but was quickly radicalized. "We evolved from civic participation and assimilation to revolutionary nationalism," Montes said in an interview with the communist paper Fight Back! "The brown beret was a symbol of the pride in our culture, race and history. It also symbolized our anger and militancy and fight against the long history of injustice against the Chican@ [sic] people in the U.S., especially the Southwest. We claimed the Southwest as Aztlan, the original homeland of the indigenous Aztec ancestors and founders of Mexico City, Tenochtitlan."

According to the Marxist Hispanic paper !LA VERDAD! (i.e., The Truth), which bills itself as a revolutionary community paper that opposes "assimilation into this Amerikkkan society," the Brown Berets were part of the larger revolutionary movement of the 1960s. According to !LA VERDAD!, the radicalization of the Brown Berets "did not come about in a vacuum.... The writings of great revolutionaries such as Mao Tse-tung, Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and others were raising the consciousness of the oppressed masses throughout world. In Mexico, Lucio Cabanas and Genaro Vasquez were leading revolutionary guerrilla movements, and hundreds of Mexican students were massacred at Tlateloco in 1968 while protesting against the neo-colonial Mexican government and yanqui imperialism. Within the borders of the U.S., the Crusade For Justice (in Denver) and the Alianza (in Nuevo Mexico) led by Corky Gonzalez and Reies Lopez Tijerina, respectivally [sic], were organizing Raza in the barrios and the campos for self-determination and Chicano Power, while the Black Panther Party, under the leadership of Huey P. Newton, was taking the struggle against white-capitalist power to the streets of the African communities.... It was their existence within this tremendous political atmosphere that transformed the Berets (and other formations) from a pacifist-reformist grouping--to one calling for the national liberation of the Chicano Mexicano people."

MEChA has continued, and expanded upon, this program of Marxist revolution. The organization's revolutionary philosophy and intent to retake the Chicano homeland of Aztlan were spelled out in its El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan (The Spiritual Plan of Aztlan). "Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans," the MEChA manifesto says. "We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent. Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggles against the foreigner 'gabacho' who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlan. For La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada." That last portion, by the way, could have been spoken by the despicable Hitler himself. Translated it reads: "For the race, everything. For those outside the race, nothing."

Rooting out the sources of funding for MEChA is more difficult than for large groups like La Raza and MALDEF Instead of directly receiving large grants from the tax-exempt foundations, MEChA is funded by student activity fees on college campuses. These are often a component of tuition costs paid by students and their parents. In addition, the Washington Times reports that the organization gets funding from academic departments. At Stanford University, where students voted to withhold student fees from the group in 2004, the Times noted that the organization would continue to receive "funding from the academic departments, the Stanford Fund and El Centro Chicano, the school's Hispanic umbrella group." Similar funding arrangements exist at the many other colleges hosting MEChA student groups. Because most of these schools are taxpayer funded or subsidized, it is the American taxpayer and unwitting parents and students who are paying for MEChA's racist and subversive activities.

Millions of Dollars

All told, millions of dollars have flowed into groups like MALDEF, La Raza, and MEChA over the last few decades, bankrolling a communist-inspired subversive movement aimed at worsening the illegal immigration crisis and wrenching significant parts of the American Southwest from the United States. They continue to be heavily funded. Groups giving the National Council of La Raza more than a million dollars each since the year 2000, according to the Foundation Directory, include the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, the California Endowment, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Fannie Mae Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Charles Stew art Mott Foundation, the PepsiCo Foundation, the UPS Foundation, Wal-Mart Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation, Inc. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the biggest single funding source, giving La Raza over $20 million since 2002.

The funding sources are similar for MALDEF. Though not nearly as well funded as La Raza, MALDEF received lavish funding from tax-exempt foundations like the Anheuser-Busch Foundation ($500,000 in 2004), the Marguerite Casey Foundation ($750,000 from 2003 to 2005), the Ford Foundation ($3.6 million from 2003-2005), and the Rockefeller Foundation ($1.1 million 2002-2004).

It's money well spent if the goal is to destroy the United States. "California is going to be a Mexican State," said former MALDEF and LULAC leader--and Ford Foundation favorite--Mario Obledo. "We are going to control all the institutions. If people don't like it, they should leave." If it happens, as Obledo desires, it will be a revolution bought and paid for by America's internationalist political elites through the subversive activities of the foundations they control.