KTBB News, Weather, Talk

YUMA, Az. (AP) – Antonio Bustamante has kept a watercolor of labor leader César Chavez for more than 35 years, hanging it on the wall of his law office in Yuma, Arizona. As a young man, he was moved by Chavez and helped organize workers before joining his security team.

Like many others, Bustamante must now wrestle with reconciling the man he adored with the allegations Chavez groomed and sexually abused women and young girls.

“I’m trying to figure out how emotionally and intellectually I’ll be able to understand my perception of him as an extremely good man,” Bustamante said, his voice heavy with emotion, “compared to these things that are said he did.”

Chavez built a national reputation organizing in the fields. With Dolores Huerta — also one of his victims — he co-founded the United Farm Workers union, led a hunger strike, a grape boycott with Filipino farmworkers, and eventually pressured growers to negotiate better wages and working conditions for Mexican American farmworkers.

Nearly two weeks after a New York Times report detailing allegations of sexual abuse, communities and rights groups across the country are still figuring out how he should be remembered. His name and image have already been erased from monuments, streets and murals around the country.
Reckoning with a legacy

Bustamante said he learned of the allegations when an old friend called to tell him about the upcoming report. What flashed through his mind, he said, were the faces of others who had known and admired Chavez, and “how their eyes would be devastated.”

“We were looked down upon by society, we were Mexicans,” Bustamante said, recalling the first time he saw Chavez speak outside the Arizona Capitol in 1972 as he launched a hunger strike. He “gave us worth, and for young people that was everything.”

Now, some of Bustamante’s friends have taken down images of Chavez. In his community, Bustamante likened it to denouncing Catholicism and removing photos of the pope.

For many, it’s an example of why movements should not be tied to a single leader.

Teresa Romero, president of United Farm Workers, said the contradiction between the Chavez’s legacy and the allegations is unavoidable.

“We have in one hand César Chavez, the man who committed horrible acts that we’re not going to justify,” Romero said. “On the other hand, we have César Chavez, the organizer who brought thousands and thousands of people together to be able to work for farm workers, and improve their lives and working conditions.”

Unfortunately, both of those things came from the same person, Romero said.

Sehila Mota Casper, executive director of Latinos in Heritage Conservation, said the farmworker movement was always driven by collective effort.

“The rights and protections that came from it belongs to the people that built it,” she said. “It wasn’t just one individual.”

That perspective, she said, offers a way to move forward: recognizing Chavez’s role without letting it overshadow the contributions of others, including Huerta, and the challenges they faced.

Advocacy groups like the nonprofit Voto Latino took a similar stance, saying, “The women who organized, marched, and sacrificed alongside farmworkers carried this movement on their backs.”
Dismantling a man, preserving history

The allegations also prompted swift public action. Within days, statues were removed and celebrations cancelled or renamed, including events tied to the federal César Chavez Day on March 31.

Political leaders from both parties have condemned the alleged abuse. Some Republicans, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, cited it as part of a broader criticism of Chavez’s progressive legacy.

Abbot said Texas — a state with dozens of Confederate monuments — would no longer celebrate César Chavez Day, saying the allegations “undermine the narrative that elevated Chavez as a figure worthy of official state celebration.”

At the same time, groups like the nonpartisan Latino Victory Project, which focuses on developing Hispanic political leadership, said this current moment should not distract from the still-ongoing civil rights battles.

“Those legacies are unchanged,” said Paul Ortiz, a labor history professor at Cornell University and director of graduate studies for Latino Studies. “And those legacies are all about people power.”

What seems inevitable, Bustamante said, is that there will always be an asterisk next to Chavez’s name.

“Does that take away the greatness of what his accomplishments were, the meaning of them? No, it doesn’t,” he said. “But can we look past that to honor him? That’s the tough part.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — About 100 of the nation’s most contaminated toxic waste sites are in areas prone to flooding and wildfires, a potential public health threat to millions of Americans in surrounding communities, the internal watchdog at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found.

The EPA’s Office of Inspector General issued a trio of reports last week assessing the weather-related vulnerabilities of the 157 federal Superfund sites prioritized for cleanup due to the serious risk they pose to public health and the environment. About 3 million Americans live within a mile of a Superfund site, while 13 million people live within 3 miles (4.8 kilometers).

Some of the Superfund sites were found to be at risk from multiple natural-disaster threats. The studies found 49 in coastal areas are at risk from sea-level rise or storm surge from hurricanes, with many located near highly populated areas and important ecological locales like Chesapeake Bay. Another 47 are in low-lying sites prone specifically to inland flooding from heavy rain. The review also found 31 sites in areas at high risk for wildfires.

Despite these risks, the five-year plans governing the expensive and time-consuming cleanups at the sites often failed to account for damage posed by flooding from sea-level rise and more frequent storms and wildfire, the IG’s review found.

“That is a big problem because it means the site managers are not planning mitigation measures,” said Betsy Southerland, a former director of the agency’s water protection division who spent over 30 years at the EPA.

“The communities living near those sites should be made aware of this planning failure and should insist on robust plans,” she said.

At locations with little or no planning for floods, contaminants could be released into surrounding communities and taxpayer dollars already invested in remediation could be wasted, the review found.

The EPA said it is reviewing the IG’s findings and that the Superfund program does factor “the impacts of extreme weather events and other hazards as a standard operating practice in the development and implementation of cleanup projects.”

Last year, President Donald Trump fired EPA Inspector General Sean O’Donnell at the beginning of Trump’s second term, and the office’s new review makes no mention of climate change, a term the Republican administration has scrubbed from federal websites. But the new reports issued by the IG’s remaining staff still lay out the risks posed by a warming planet to the nation’s most dangerous toxic waste sites.

Lara J. Cushing, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who has studied the effects of a changing climate on the nation’s toxic waste sites, petrochemical plants and other hazardous areas, called the new reports “noteworthy and important.”

“Although President Trump may wish to ignore it, the fact is the climate is changing and we need to be proactive in responding to rising seas and more extreme weather or face the consequences of increasingly frequent cascading natural-technological disasters that poison communities and local?ecosystems,” said Cushing.

The inspector general’s findings echo a 2017 investigation by The Associated Press that found 327 Superfund sites vulnerable to flooding driven by climate change. The AP’s review was launched following Hurricane Harvey, which caused extensive flooding in parts of Houston that included seven Superfund sites and triggered spills from tanks holding cancer-causing toxic waste.

The EPA’s new report said that during Harvey, dioxin chemicals were carried by flooding into neighboring streets, yards and homes close to the San Jacinto River, an area highlighted by AP’s reporting.

At the time, the EPA under the first Trump administration criticized AP’s reporting as fear-mongering “yellow journalism.” Trump has called climate change a hoax, blocked renewable energy projects and sought to boost the burning of planet-warming fossil fuels.

“This series shines a light on potential threats to federal facility Superfund sites and the critical role of five-year reviews in addressing them,” said Kim Wheeler, the spokesperson for the Inspector General’s office. “By identifying sites at risk from these weather-related events, we aimed to raise awareness and encourage forward looking planning.”

TEXARKANA – Authorities have discovered a DNA match for a person who has been missing since January of last year, nearly eight months after human remains were discovered in a Texarkana creek bed.

Amber French, 43, is the identified victim discovered near Waggoner Creek in August 2025, according to a statement released by the Texarkana Police Department on Monday. Our news partners at KETK report that the remains, which were thought to be bones, were initially discovered on August 1, 2025, by someone strolling along a creek bed. The police department verified that they were human and that began an investigation.

More bones were discovered when Texarkana detectives, Texas Game and Fish officers, and a K-9 unit were dispatched to the scene. Officials could only conclude at the time that the body had decayed because the bones were old enough. After that, a medical examiner in Dallas received the bones. According to the police department, DNA revealed that they belonged to French, who was reported missing in May 2025 after her family had not heard from her since January. PIO Shawn Vaughn of the Texarkana Police Department told KETK News on Monday that while foul play is “not necessarily suspected,” it is also not ruled out. The investigation is still ongoing.