Revolution #150, December 14, 2008
Patchogue, NY: Hundreds Protest Murder of Marcello Lucero
Revolution received the following correspondence from a reader:
On Saturday night, November 8, an Ecuadorian immigrant, Marcello Lucero, was murdered by a lynch mob for the crime of being Latino. Marcello came to the U.S. sixteen years ago searching for his American dream, but he found the nightmare that is all too common for people of color.
All the alleged attackers except one were white, and all were from the local high school. Reportedly they told their friends, “let’s go find some Mexicans to f——up.” Lucero was attacked at the train station, beat up, stabbed and left in the middle of the road to die.
To be real, this is not some prank or some kids getting kicks. This was a lynching. These seven kids are in custody and an investigation is underway. This is not the first incident like this to occur in this area over the last several years. Undocumented workers being attacked and almost killed, the firebombing of a Mexican family’s home in 2003, are still fresh in the minds of this community. Suffolk County is the same county where John White, an African-American man, was unjustly convicted of murder in 2006 for defending his family from a group of racist white youth coming after his son. There is a climate of hate and racial discrimination and anti-immigrant feeling out here in Suffolk County, and it has been fostered by Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy. People were outraged when Levy first called Marcello Lucero’s murder just a “one-day story,” and claimed it was getting media attention only because of his anti-immigrant policies.
A vigil was called for Friday, November 15 at 7:00 o’clock near the Patchogue train station where this lynching took place. A group of us, regular Revolution readers, who live in the area, got there about 6:00 o’clock and there were about 50-100 people already. We began selling Revolution/Revolución newspapers and were received with much curiosity, and people began buying and reading the paper on the spot, understanding that this system that’s talked about in Revolution/Revolución had everything to do with this murder and why we all were here. Within an hour hundreds of people kept pouring into this area and at the height of the night more than a thousand were present. Over 100 copies of Revolution/Revolución newspaper (mostly Spanish) got out into the hands of the crowd.
There were various clergy and civic leaders of the community. Some met with chants of “justicia justicia” when the crowd felt they capitulated. Chants of “the people united will never be defeated” could be heard at different times.
The people definitely want a more militant stance. This is a community that is tired of being attacked and being a scapegoat for the failing of this sickening, dying capitalist system. More work needs to be done to build the revolutionary movement we need, and we will do it!!!!!!
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