February 2015

For Workers Mobilization to Stop Racist Cop Terror

Outrage Over Police Murder of
Mexican Worker in Washington State

Demonstrators march in Pasco, Washington on February 14 to protest police killing of Antonio Zambrano Montes (shown in photo with his daughter.) (Photo:Joshua  Trujillo/AP)

PORTLAND, OR – The racist police killing of unarmed victims, particularly from oppressed population groups, continues unabated. Last year furious demonstrations broke out nationwide over the wanton cop murders of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley and Tamir Rice, all African American. Now protesters have flooded the streets of Pasco, Washington over the police shooting of Mexican worker Antonio Zambrano Montes on February 10. Zambrano was killed by multiple shots from three officers firing on him while the unarmed man had his arms raised. This was a cold-blooded execution, as millions could see in a video circulated on the Internet.

Antonio was a small man, barely five feet, one inch tall. Police accused the 35-year-old agricultural worker of throwing rocks at them, although he had recently broken both wrists after falling off a ladder picking apples. The video of the incident shows Montes running in terror as officers chase him across a busy intersection, then he turns with his hands outstretched as they fire on him. Moreover, the shooting took place at around 5 p.m., yet police left Zambrano’s body lying in the street all night, as a gruesome warning. His anguished cousin Maria Madrigal said, “To me, it’s like just leaving a dead animal out there” (KUOW Seattle, 13 February).

By all accounts, Zambrano was in bad shape. His wife had left him, moving with their two daughters to California. Injured, he was out of work and seemed disoriented. In January he was trapped in a house fire and his belongings burned. He stayed for awhile in a homeless shelter. More to the point, the police were out to get Antonio. He had been charged with throwing rocks at cops a year ago, and was arrested the week before, apparently for missing a court date. “He was released on Monday,” the Seattle Times (11 February) reported. The next day the police cut him down in a volley of bullets. Charge: throwing rocks at police. Trial: none. Sentence: death.

The cop murder of Antonio Zambrano was no isolated incident but part of a pattern. Police in Pasco gunned down four people over the last six months, which is more than in all of Great Britain (population 60 million) over the last three years. None of the Pasco killer cops was indicted for anything. One of them was the subject of a 2012 lawsuit for use of excessive force against a Latina mother picking up her children from child care. The overwhelmingly white police force rides roughshod over the majority Hispanic population. There is one Latino city councilor, no Latino on the board of education, although 70% of students are Hispanic.

Who could miss the parallels? This was the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, Missouri, only this time with video. Black or Latino population, white police and power structure. “Hands up, don’t shoot?” Bang, you’re dead. The New York Times (17 February) headlined: “Killing in Washington State Offers ‘Ferguson’ Moment for Hispanics.” And as a demonstrator cried out in Ferguson last August, “Is this the Gaza Strip?” (see “Mobilize Across U.S. Against Racist Police Terror in Missouri,” The Internationalist No. 38, October-November 2014). In Hispanic Pasco as in Zionist besieged Palestine, police take a rock in the hand as a license to kill.

Meanwhile, the Mexican government and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto have denounced the killing of Mexican agricultural worker Zambrano in Pasco as a “disproportionate use of lethal force.” They call for a thorough investigation and punishment of those responsible for the homicide. Their purpose is to take the heat off themselves over the Mexican police massacre and kidnapping of some 50 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers college last September. As for the “investigation” of the police murder in Pasco, it is being done by a police agency, just as in Mexico the attorney general “investigated,” in order to cover up the role of the state.

The murder of Antonio Zambrano has galvanized the area’s working-class Latino population, pushed to their limit by racist police terror. One woman remarked, “It’s like having the badge gives you the right to take the life of a Mexican.” Family and co-workers called a rally at Pasco City Hall the following day. As word of the shooting spread, a rally on Saturday, February 14 swelled to 1,000. Protesters demand “justicia,” but justice will not be forthcoming from this racist capitalist system. After the outcry over police shootings in Ferguson, Cleveland and New York, Pasco has become a new flashpoint in protests against deadly cop brutality and impunity.

Pasco is a segregated Latino city in the Tri-Cities metropolitan area together with Kennewick and Richland, WA which are over 80% white. Most media accounts cite 2010 census statistics listing Pasco’s population at under 60,000 and 56% Hispanic, but the 2014 Washington state population estimate lists Pasco’s actual residents at almost 68,000, and the percentage of Latinos is likely closer to two-thirds. The difference is the large number of undocumented immigrants in Pasco, like Antonio Zambrano, who don’t respond to the census out of fear of deportation. It’s no accident that Pasco police act as if they are dealing with a population with no rights.

The Tri-Cities area boomed when the Hanford Nuclear Site was established during World War II. Richland was a government-owned housing complex for workers there. Pasco was home to the agricultural workforce in the Yakima Valley (apples, pears and wineries) and in the Columbia River Basin. Completion of the Grand Coulee Dam in 1941 turned a semi-arid region into one of the richest agricultural areas in the country, producing just about every major crop. Family farms were quickly replaced by giant agribusiness corporations. Today the countryside is dotted with crop circles irrigated by government-subsidized water from the Columbia River.

Even before this, the Yakima Valley in southeastern Washington was a farming and trade hub with a strong labor history. During the 1930s, the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organized pickets demanding better working conditions and wages, while growers bragged to the local press of their special relationship with the police who acted as strikebreakers and enforcers for their draconian labor practices. In the 1940s, the government brought in Mexican agricultural laborers and railroad workers under the bracero program. In the 1960s there were a number of strikes by Latino farm workers, aided by Chicano students.

Today, growers in Washington push for beefed-up “guest worker” programs, in order to obtain an efficient and steady stream of low-paid, disposable workers with almost no accessible rights. And when the “carrot” of dreams of getting ahead through hard work and determination no longer works, the cops supply the stick to keep the “wage slaves” in line. In a city where a huge percentage of the population works in the fields or in related industries, many of them long-time residents, police are empowered to callously use deadly force against immigrants, with little fear of accountability as long as they feel they can keep restless workers isolated and in check.

So a thousand protesters marching through Pasco, WA must have a sobering affect on the good ol’ boys in the local police department. Yet this is no assurance that the routine police murder and brutal treatment of the Latino population will stop. A measure of how deeply this has been ingrained was the gut-wrenching sign carried in the February 14 protest: “Shoot Me on the Leg, But Don’t Kill Me.” Calls for justice from the thoroughly unjust capitalist state not only fall on deaf ears, the police, prisons and politicians who serve the interests of the agribusiness bosses make up a machine of racist repression which it will take a revolution to bring down.

Calls for a federal investigation will do nothing, as Ferguson showed. Liberal talk of “police accountability,” civilian review boards and the like are a cruel hoax. Justice for those who toil in the fields can only come from the working class itself, through an all-out war against racism, injustice and the ruling class that creates it. From Ayotzinapa to Ferguson and Pasco, it’s one fight. The Internationalist Group calls for massive mobilization of the multi-ethnic working class to stop the killer cops in their tracks. For that we need to build a revolutionary workers party battling every form of oppression in the fight for a society in which those who labor rule.■