The Chicano Liberation Front (CLF) was an underground revolutionary group in California, United States, that committed dozens of bombings and arson attacks in the Los Angeles area in the early 1970s.

[1][2] The radical militant group publicly claimed responsibility for 28 bombings between March 1970 and July 1971 in a taped message sent to the Los Angeles Free Press.

[4] The Chicano Liberation Front was also more than likely responsible for explosions at a downtown federal building[5][6] and at the Los Angeles Hall of Justice,[7] although those incidents remain officially unsolved.

[4] The closest law enforcement ever got to the CLF appears to have been a 19-year-old named Freddie De Larosa Plank, who was charged for an attempted arson at a high school,[8] and for firebombing a U.S. Army Reserve building.

[9] The 1970s leftist radical bombings were generally difficult crimes to solve,[10] and the CLF was apparently extremely cautious, close-knit, and ideologically sincere enough,[11] that they avoided the catastrophic collapses of other paramilitaries of the era.

"[13] One history of American terrorism said it was typical of "small groups of revolutionaries" like the Chicano Liberation Front to give themselves grandiose names to project strength, even when their actual membership count was likely closer to that of a squad than an army.

The closest thing to a primary source on the origins of the CLF appears in a 2007 oral history produced by University of California, Los Angeles:[24] The [Chicano] Moratorium people were being brought up on charges.

[26] The CLF never claimed responsibility for this bombing, but the recording sent to the Los Angeles Free Press had two unintelligible or erased descriptions of events that, if the Front spokeswoman was keeping to a chronological order, would have occurred between March 1970 and September 29, 1970.

[28] The first public notice that the CLF even existed came with the April 1971 explosion of a bomb in the second-floor men's room at Los Angeles' landmark City Hall building.

[32] Apparently this reputation, in combination with the bombing index compiled by reporter Michael Blake and persistent interview requests made by LAFP city editor Judie Lewellen,[27] compelled the CLF to say their piece in the form of a recording.

We are students, janitors, so-called wetbacks, concerned parents, Vietnam veterans...we are the fighting vanguard of La Raza...fed up with our people being treated like dogs.The August 1971 tape, which listed a couple dozen bombings the group wanted credit for, pointedly does not mention the January 1971 explosion that killed 18-year-old part-time mail orderly Tomas Ortiz.

[9] Freddie De Larosa Plank was arrested in April 1970 after he and three unidentified companions attempted to light the Lincoln High School admin building on fire by shooting at a pile of gunpowder set on a gasoline-soaked office carpet.

"[37] August 1971 was the occasion of the first anniversary of the death of journalist Ruben Salazar, who had been struck in the temple by a tear-gas canister fired into a restaurant by a L.A. County sheriff's deputy at the National Chicano Moratorium March.

[39] In September 1971 a professor of human behavior told an Associated Press reporter that radical bombings in California were mostly perpetrated by bourgeois whites or "Mexican-Americans living up to a revolutionary tradition.

[41] He described the lawyer as someone who stayed up all night "eating acid and throwing Molotov cocktails" and then arrived for morning court on a waft of gasoline fumes, with "a green crust of charred soap-flakes" visible on his status-symbol snakeskin cowboy boots.

[42][41] Furthermore, Acosta had apparently written to Thompson in 1972 to the effect that: "I think I can make a pretty good argument that it was you, or God through you, that called a halt to the bombings...Which means that you'll be remembered as the Benedict Arnold of the cockroach revolt.

[14] The New World Liberation Front in particular was an extremely prolific and chaotic terrorist "brand" that adapted a variety of personas original to other underground radicals of the era.

There is little scholarship that examines the CLF outside of the general context of Chicano Movement, and there is no known publicly available list of confirmed CLF-attributed bombings; this is the case for several of the amorphous domestic terrorist groups of the era.

Per a 2014 U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) analysis of patterns of domestic terrorism in the United States, the Chicano Liberation Front was responsible for two percent of all terrorist attacks in the U.S. in 1970s.

Brown describes members of the Chicano Liberation Front as vatos locos and states that they, in turn, think he is a "sheep" who is "being used," a capitalist pig, a traitor, and/or a Tío Taco.

While reminiscing about his concerns of law-enforcement infiltration in the period while he was reporting out the story that became "Strange Rumblings," Thompson addresses the by-then-long-dead Acosta (who disappeared somewhere in or around Mexico in 1974): "How many of those bomb-throwing, trigger-happy freaks who slept on mattresses in your apartment were talking to the sheriff on a chili-hall pay phone every morning?

[42] The Chicano Liberation Front is also mentioned in an anti-war movement poem by Patricio Paiz called "En Memoria de Arturo Tijerina."