Pasco, Washington

Mexican Worker Shot Dead by Cops

Antonio Zambrano-Montes, a 35-year-old Mexican immigrant from Michoacán, had his hands up. Fired at 17 times, he was killed by police in Pasco, Washington, on February 10. Zambrano had recently lost his job as a farmworker because he fell off a ladder and broke both wrists. He lived in a shelter after having lost his home in a fire, left with nothing. Like many who risk their lives to escape the deplorable conditions imposed on their home countries by U.S. imperialism and its local lackeys, Zambrano had come to El Norte looking for work. He ended up in the fields owned by the American capitalists who make staggering profits from the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor.

The cop killing of Zambrano was filmed. The same was true for Eric Garner in New York as well as a homeless man known as “Africa” in Los Angeles last week, both casualties of the daily police violence meted out to black people in cities across the country. For allegedly throwing rocks, Zambrano was chased across a busy intersection, shot from behind and then executed in cold blood on the sidewalk. As always, bourgeois mouthpieces smeared the victim to make it appear that he deserved what he got. Many activists see the parallels between the killings of Zambrano and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, who were both vilified by authorities after the police had blown them away and left their lifeless bodies lying on the ground.

Around 1,000 people demonstrated against police brutality in Pasco on February 14. We solidarize with their anger and desire to end this raw terror. However, the bitter truth is that the only way to eliminate police brutality is to do away with the system of racist American capitalism, for which the thugs in blue are the front line of defense.

Some signs at the Pasco demonstration included calls for the police to protect, not kill, while others read: “Buenos policías, los respetamos” (Good cops, we respect you). But the very job of the police is to protect the property and profits of the capitalist class, and to violently repress and intimidate workers, the oppressed and those at the bottom of society. By the lights of the capitalist rulers, the “good cops” are the ones who bust up picket lines, terrorize blacks and crack the whip against immigrants. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution (1917), the cops are at the core of the capitalist state, which is “an organ of class domination, an organ of oppression of one class by another.”

Many people have expressed hope in an investigation of Zambrano’s killing by the federal government. However, the purpose of such investigations has never been to rein in cop terror, but to whitewash it—as shown in the Justice Department recommendation in January that no charges be brought against Michael Brown’s killer. Neither would the purpose be to protect the immigrant population of Pasco, which is nearly 60 percent Latino. It is the federal government under Obama that is directing the nationwide anti-immigrant crackdown of massive deportations and detentions.

In recent years, Pasco has attracted thousands of immigrants who toil for a pittance in temporary and dangerous jobs in the surrounding fields. They are patrolled by mostly white police forces that treat them with contempt. But the answer is not to recruit more Latino cops, as some spokesmen for Pasco’s Latino community advocate, which would just put a different face on the same enemy and if anything, improve the effectiveness of the police in going after immigrants. Incorporating sizable numbers of black cops into the police forces of major cities has done nothing to lessen cop brutality. No amount of tinkering with the machinery of state repression can change the nature of the police.

The fight against police terror cries out for the mobilization of the enormous potential social power of the industrial working class welded to the anger of the ghetto and barrio poor. Such a class-struggle fight must be based on the understanding that the interests of the exploited and oppressed are counterposed to those of the capitalist rulers, their state forces and their political parties—whether Democrat or Republican. Black, white, immigrant—all workers need a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose aim is the uprooting of the entire capitalist system. Socialist revolution is the only way to avenge the death of Antonio Zambrano-Montes and the many other victims of this decaying order.