LRUP: Politically Correct or Political Cult?

I recently wrote about the effective demise of a relationship I’d been in for the past year and some months and how the interference of my ex-significant other’s older brother and niece (his daughter) eventually put an end to it. In it I described my years of work with El Partido de La Raza Unida (LRUP) and how the leader of that organization, Xenaro Ayala (the brother) on one occasion either conveniently forgot or outright lied about the length of my association with him. The whole story brings up an important point about the process by which political parties and organizations degenerate into cults with stultified thinking processes and the expulsion or migration of their most effective and innovative leaders to other endeavors takes place. Those expulsions and migrations eventually leave behind the most ineffective and socially dysfunctional leaders in place.

At the outset, lest I be accused of making a partisan attack out of politically rivalry, the same critique I am going to make applies equally to my own political party, the Peace & Freedom Party (PFP) and its current crop of leaders.

So how and why do the effective leaders migrate to other endeavors?

1. Co-optation-those who have real power, i.e., major political parties and other NGOs, governments, large private sector business entities, and essentially, every group that possesses or controls significant resources enabling them to divvy up a portion of the proverbial pie, have the ability to co-opt activists. Well meaning activists can obtain enough resources to continue the work that they set out to do in their former independent organization. Both the co-opting organization and the co-opted individual accommodates to each other to greater or lesser degrees. Self-serving individuals or those who tire of the struggle and decide that they can use the talents they learned, honed, and developed in the independent organization have an easier personal situation. They accommodate to a greater degree to the co-opting organization, carry out its mission and reap the rewards of their new affiliation.

My term paper in graduate school for a seminar class with Dr. Kit Machado on Authoritarianism was on Mexico. I studied and analyzed the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and how it had been successful with the longevity of its rule in Mexico. Co-optation was the key to its success. If a group of rural farm workers seized and occupied land from a latifundista, instead of repressing the organization, the PRI would conveniently have the government decide that the peasant takeover was justified by the goals and constitutional arrangements of the Mexican revolution, pay off the latifundista for the land seized, give title to the farm workers, and co-opt their leadership by making them officials of the PRI’s agricultural membership sector. This kind of co-optation was and remains brilliant, and it works much better than violent repression, even as it maintains the authoritarian nature of society and government.

2. Opportune Migration-every government and political entity or even group of people has a structure of power, a structure of authority, a structure of ideology, and a structure of society, ranging from the most primitive to the most complex. In the most simple, such as nomadic hunter-gatherer groups, all those structures are virtually the same. With the varying tides and luck of elections or other means by which power is distributed, power vacuums get created when an organization loses badly to its rival(s). However, its structure of authority (dictated by its bylaws, constitution, and formal rules) stays in effect, as initially does its structure of ideology. When the power vacuum develops, the vacuum draws in to it new members and leadership. Frequently, they come from another independent and rival organization and begin to change the structure of ideology, fill the power vacuum, and potentially change the structure of authority more to their liking.

A great example is the interaction of the Democratic Party and the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace. Amongst the ranks of Democratic Party politicians who were formerly members of the Progressive Party of 1948 were former California United States Senator Alan Cranston and former South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Party Presidential nominee George McGovern. They had a profound effect on the development and change in the Democratic Party’s ideology, structure of power, and structure of authority.

My own political journey is an example of migration. Most of what I know and learned from my early political endeavors was learned primarily from and in the PFP and to a lesser extent, LRUP. While I remain a member of PFP, my activity migrated to other more effective political activities to implement the changes I believe need to be made to society and government, although those activities are generally in NGOs that are not political parties. Amongst these organizations are the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the California Association of Licensed Investigators (CALI). Those are organizations which have a real effect by pressure on the structures of authority and power in government, and by changing the structure of ideology and society so that there is additional social pressure placed on the structures of power and authority in order to influence public policy.

What Happens to the Remainder of a Group

When its Effective Leaders are Co-opted or Make

an Opportune Migration?

Initially a group’s structure of authority remains intact but becomes vulnerable to potentially unalterable changes. In order to maintain the newly emerged leadership in power and authority, constitutions and bylaws wind up becoming authoritarian and/or simply ignored in actual practice. Aside and apart from the formalities of authority, power becomes consolidated and maintained within the organization by using the practices that mark a cult, even though the cohesion of the power structure within the organization effectively isolates the organization as a whole and diminishes its ability to project power externally.

Cult Characteristics of El Partido de La Raza Unida

http://www.prem-rawat-talk.org/forum/uploads/CultCharacteristics.htm contains a compilation of the criteria used by various institutions and experts on cults, including UC Berkeley and the American Family Foundation, to classify religious cults. Much of the criteria set out there is easy to apply in evaluation of LRUP as a cult:

1. The group is focused on a living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment. Xenaro Ayala became president of LRUP in 1981 and has apparently never even been challenged since for the post. Members, past and present, are not even aware of whether there is any mechanism for regular renewal of legitimacy through formal elections that is not completely controlled by Xenaro Ayala and his immediate family members.

2. Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished. Even prior to his ascendancy to the National Presidency of LRUP, and in part to facilitate it by eliminating potential leadership rivals, Xenaro Ayala instigated a series of purges of members of the San Fernando Valley Chapter. Amongst those expelled from the Chapter were Marshall Diaz, Miguel Perez, and Eugene Hernandez. I could explain perspectives of the rationale for their expulsion, but if anybody really wants to know why, they should ask Xenaro Ayala and simply judge whether his reasoning for why they had to be expelled from the organization makes any sense or is even sane.

What is more important though is that for all the ultra - left criticism of bourgeois norms of democracy by LRUP and their allies, the procedures used by LRUP to judge members guilt or innocence of what amounts to “thought crime” (ala George Orwell) are less democratic and provide less due process than the California Corporations Code provides for members of non-profit corporations.

3. The leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think, act, and feel (for example: members must get permission from leaders to date, change jobs, get married; leaders may prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, how to discipline children, and so forth). This is precisely the point I made in my last blog entry. Xenaro Ayala and his daughter, Libertad Ayala, consistently interfered with my relationship to Xenaro’s sister (Libertad’s aunt) [see: http://janbtucker.com/blog/2011/10/21/never-do-anything-against-conscience/]. For example, Libertad repeatedly accused me of supposedly carrying on affairs — an accusation that is actionable as per se defamation under Civil Code Section 46 — without any shred of evidence to back it up and without any regard for the emotional damage she caused to me or her aunt.

4. The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and members. LRUP and its ally, Brown Berets National Organization (BBNO) of Jeronimo Blanco, have announced their vision that LRUP is to be the “government” of Aztlan and BBNO is to be its “army.” The inherent nature of this vision as a delusion of grandeur leaves little to the imagination.

5. The leadership induces guilt feelings in members in order to control them and Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group. This guarantees the organization stays small as LRUP has no qualms about guilt tripping members until they burn out. This is why virtually all public speaking engagements end up being done by Xenaro’s immediate family members for LRUP.

6. Members’ subservience to the group causes them to cut ties with family and friends, and to give up personal goals and activities that were of interest before joining the group and Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members. Precisely the goal of the continual harassment of me and the continual pressure exerted against Xenaro’s sister to drop her relationship with me through criticism of my political activities, his telling her that as an LRUP member she was forbidden to join the National Organization for Women (NOW), and his behind the scenes denigration of her in the National Chicano Moratorium Committee (NCMC) planning meetings due to her initial refusal to succumb to his pressure tactics.

In earlier days of the LRUP, there was a complete lack of respect for women in LRUP which repeatedly caused wives and girlfriends of LRUP members to object to having meetings in their homes, demands that their husbands and boyfriends drop out of activity in the party, and which significantly contributed to an inordinate number of divorces in the San Fernando Valley Chapter.

7. The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which causes conflict with the wider society. In the case of LRUP the us vs them mentality applies to virtually any person who merely disagrees with the intellectual pronouncements of Xenaro Ayala and/or any person who is a potential rival for leadership of the movement. Two cases on point:

A. Ruben Botello: as I have similarly described the issue of the lack of due process or basic fairness in LRUP expulsion procedures, Xenaro lacks a basic sense of fairness in excoriating people he perceives as enemies or rivals. In essence, Xenaro either cannot refrain from allowing his own personal conflicts of interest from interfering with his actions as a representative of LRUP as an entity; he views the interests of LRUP as synonymous with his own interests and values.

In the planning committee meeting for the 40th commemoration of the National Chicano Moratorium Committee (NCMC) when I proposed Dr. Botello as a potential speaker at the commemoration event, Xenaro Ayala objected over what amounted to a minor disagreement in an intellectual debate which in Xenaro’s mind, which cannot accept any disagreement or criticism, became blown all out of proportion to reality. In doing so, he acted as the official representative of LRUP without any consultation with other members or leaders of the organization as to whether his personal dispute with Dr. Botello was a legitimate reason for him as the party’s representative to object in coalition forum such as the NCMC.

Just as the party’s expulsion procedures are less democratic and fair than those dictated by the bourgeois capitalist system’s Corporation Code dictates for non-profit corporations, Xenaro’s views of organizational ethics would be considered out of bounds in virtually any modern civilized society, whether Communist, Socialist, Fascist, Capitalist or Communitarian. Well recognized duties of officers and directors of non-profit corporations include the duty of loyalty, the duty of care, a fiduciary duty, and a duty of reasonable inquiry. Inherently, these duties dictate that a director or officer must avoid conflicts of interest and that a board of an organization acts as a group making group policy and decisions.

Xenaro however demonstrated in that instance and consistently in virtually every forum I have observed him in as exercising the actual power, whether or not he possessed the formal authority, to dictate LRUP policy as he saw fit, even when by his own acknowledgement his pronouncement was self-serving as to his own personal philosophical disagreement. This is far more authoritarian than the bourgeois institutions he claims to find so despicable.

B. Ramsey Muniz: in spite of the fact that responsible organizations as diverse as LULAC and the Union Del Barrio’s Chicano/Mexicano Prison Project have condemned the conviction of 1972 and 1974 Texas Gubernatorial LRUP candidate Ramsey Muniz (who garnered an astonishing vote of more than 6% — almost unheard of for third party candidates) on highly questionable drug trafficking charges, Xenaro effectively vetoed NCMC action to allow a presentation on his behalf in 2010. Xenaro says that he personally interviewed Muniz and decided in his infinite wisdom that Muniz wasn’t a victim of a government frame up and therefore not worthy of the status of a political prisoner.

Xenaro may be a legend in his own mind, but I doubt his qualifications to judge the truthfulness or deception of Muniz even if he had a face to face interview with him at his prison. I have spent over 30 years as a private investigator and served 7 unprecedented terms as Chairman of the Board of the World’s largest organization of private detectives. I have been trained and tested in the science of detecting deception in investigative interviews. In a training and blind test conducted by the late Dr. Maureen O’Sullivan of the University of San Francisco, a well recognized expert in the subject, I scored a rare 8 out of 9.

So with my expertise in the field, I’d like to know precisely why Xenaro thinks he is even qualified to assess Ramey Muniz’s truthfulness. Furthermore, what documents and evidence did he review prior to interviewing Muniz. In a case like this, I would have reviewed the trial transcript and all discovery and investigative materials which would probably involve about a week’s worth of reading to begin with.

Based solely on Xenaro’s vague and ambiguous description at the NCMC planning meeting on why he opposed allowing representatives of Muniz to speak and based upon my own background, training, education, and experience, the only reason I can fathom for Xenaro’s opposition (acting as usual in the name of LRUP without consultation to other members or chapters) is that he fears the possibility that Muniz’s release would create an automatic rival for legitimacy and leadership of LRUP. Muniz came to San Fernando and made appearances throughout California in 1972, helping LRUP chapters throughout the state. I saw him speak in 1972 at his San Fernando gathering — by far the largest turnout I’ve ever seen for San Fernando Valley LRUP in its history — and Muniz then and now was one of the best political orators I have ever seen, bar none.

Incidentally, my investigative experience includes advising Xenaro’s family on investigative issues during a family crisis — for which I refused an offer of compensation….little did I then suspect that I was dealing with a family of ingrates.

One Final Note: Beware of Charisma

Don’t take my word for this last point. Do your own research. Google the search terms Borderline Personality Disorder and Charismatic and read the available literature. See if anything I’ve described above sounds familiar. Also try the combination of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Charismatic.

Finally, as The Who cautions in their song, Don’t Get Fooled Again:

We’ll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgment of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
And I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again

Change it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fall that’s all
But the world looks just the same
And history ain’t changed
‘Cause the banners, they all flown in the last war

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
And I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again
No, no!

I’ll move myself and my family aside
If we happen to be left half alive
I’ll get all my papers and smile at the sky
For I know that the hypnotized never lie

Do ya?

There’s nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now the parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again
No, no!

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

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