Epifanio Camacho, a courageous and militant farmworker, loyal member of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), and lifetime fighter for the international working class, died on July 4 at the age of 98. As an early leader of the United Farm Workers (UFW), Epifanio organized a strike of rose grafters in the San Joaquin Valley in 1965. He went on to play a central role in the historic strikes against the grape vineyard bosses in the late 1960s.
In the mid-1970s, Epifanio was purged from the UFW by the class traitor and sellout Cesar Chavez. Their split was inevitable. Chavez was a pacifist who made a religion out of non-violence. He allied with reformist politicians like Robert F. Kennedy and racist AFL-CIO boss George Meany, and relied on boycotts and the bosses’ legal machinery. He was a nationalist who attacked undocumented workers and turned them in to be deported. By contrast, Epifanio believed in the unity of the entire working class, and that no boycott could rival the power of a strike at the point of production. He was fearless in captaining a picket line, in fighting strikebreaking scabs and the Teamster thugs sent to protect them. He sabotaged countless police cars with his secret weapon: children’s toy jacks, strewn across roads with their pointed side up to puncture the cops’ tires. He was arrested more times than he could count. His sister and brother workers knew they could count on him to put their class interests first.
Even before Epifanio joined PLP , in 1974, Chavez had accused him of being a communist—a label he wore proudly for the rest of his life. He played an instrumental role in building the Party among farmworkers in California and, by extension, in Mexico. Though Epifanio had no formal education, he was a brilliant thinker, a true worker intellectual who made enormous contributions as both a writer of leaflets and a distributor of CHALLENGE. (In the space of 11 months in 1982, his network sold more than 20,000 newspapers, with each sale carefully recorded.) While the pacifist misleader Cesar Chavez may be featured in the capitalist history books, it is Epifanio Camacho who made a historic contribution to the international communist movement—who did his part to change the world.
Here are some excerpts from Epifanio’s talk on base building at a PLP summer project in 2008 in Delano, California:
"After I started organizing other workers, one day I was arrested and taken to jail, and then to the bosses’ court. On that day, the role of the bosses’ state became clear. On one side there were the rich bosses with their legal system and other means of oppression.
"And on the other side there was the working class. And the day that I walked out of the courthouse, I realized that the workers would sooner or later lose every battle against the bosses unless we organize a revolution against the capitalist state.
" I spent five years next to [Cesar Chavez] as a UFW leader. He was scared all the time, and all the workers saw it and knew it. Most workers met secretly and took their own initiative. For example, we decided that no one in our community should rent a house to a scab. When this happened, their houses were burnt down!
"Racists organized by the Teamsters Union started showing up to pickets with baseball bats. The UFW was urging everyone to kneel in the face of violence. The bosses’ television only showed the pickets held by the workers won to pacifism, being beaten and bloodied while they were kneeling. The racists bragged they were coming for us next. We had a big meeting and I said to the workers, ‘We’ll be waiting for them! Tomorrow not even a housewife should come to the picket without a weapon.’ On the morning of the battle, all the women were showing off how carefully they’d hidden their blades! We were ready for them in one day, and we met violence with violence. To this day, over 30 years later, the Teamsters never returned to Delano. Not long after the fight, the local government disbanded the local police and left the area to the state troopers.
"What had changed for me was during that time I met the PLP. Our struggle continued from ‘below,’ from the ranks of the workers. Most of the workers were used to fighting and the most militant of us formed a new working-class leadership. What kept this leadership together now were revolutionary ideas. The UFW was afraid of the PLP, and afraid of the ideas in our newspaper, CHALLENGE. Chavez publicly prohibited any UFW member from buying CHALLENGE, and anyone caught reading it was threatened with immediate expulsion.
“We were in a tough spot. We knew everyone, but they feared being thrown out of the UFW. Now, I am a communist. I learned how to write communist leaflets for the workers. We had many meetings discussing how to reach the workers, and we started reaching them. Workers began joining PLP. Before long, the workers started placing communist ideas above the reformism of the UFW and Chavez.
"Over time our base grew, and we got up to selling 500 CHALLENGEs a week. Can you imagine the sight of hundreds of workers reading CHALLENGE at lunchtime? Imagine! Well, that’s what happened. Our whole community was affected by communist ideas. An entire family would share one paper. The workers’ children organized PLP clubs in the high school. Right here in my home we had many PLP dances and events. We would have red flags everywhere. Workers would let their children go to our events because we all knew each other, and they trusted my security abilities.
"One thing PLP does that you never saw from Chavez or the UFW was criticism and self-criticism. Every time we came out of a meeting, I felt like I’d taken a shower. And the work always improved. And it was easier to organize this way.
"In PLP we’re building a base for communist revolution. You can’t say it’s easy….Sometimes we’re not aware of how little things impact the future. Years ago, two coworkers from Oaxaca joined the Party. Then they got deported and built the Party in Oaxaca. Later they became inactive, but along the way recruited other people to the Party. Just yesterday I met two young comrades participating in this Summer Project from Oaxaca who are very strong. They joined as a direct result of those first two! Now our work there is getting strong. Everything we do counts.
"What’s the key to organizing? How do you start when you’re all alone? Wherever you work, you always start by finding the worker who’s most discontented with the boss…Listen carefully to what they say. Use their discontent as an opportunity to explain why things are this way. Eat with them every day, or as often as you can.
"Beyond that, there’s no formula. You should be bold and lead by example. Go to the bathrooms when no one’s around and leave literature. Go to the parking lot and put leaflets on every car window or in the windshield wipers, including your own. Then, on your break, feel them out. If they support our ideas, show them it was you! Now they’re contacts…You’ll find out that when things really get going, even occasional readers and friends who haven’t appeared to show much interest will step up and risk their lives for us. You’ll see. It all starts with you! You need the initiative to find a way to get communist ideas around.
"I like talking to the younger comrades because the potential is in the youth. I’ve never been to school, but I’ve always wanted to go because I love to learn. All workers want to learn. Inside of all of us is a struggle of opposites, between ignorance and wanting to learn more. If your education is inadequate in school because of racism, sexism, and nationalism, you must organize against it. Learn as much as you can but remember that everything you learn, you must put at the service of the working class."
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PLP-Mexico remembers Epifanio
The PLP Collective in Mexico is saddened by the death of our comrade Camacho. His living example, his teachings, and his commitment and confidence in the international working class were proof of the power of communist ideas and actions when workers make them their own. We will honor his memory fighting tirelessly against this criminal capitalist system. In what follows, two comrades detail their experiences with comrade Epifanio.
From Mexico City: I met Epifanio when I first joined PLP in 1975, while visiting Rodrigo, his comrade-in-arms in the fields. Rodrigo was bedridden, but eager to learn. He asked Epifanio, “Who was Lenin?” Epifanio explained how the Bolsheviks led rural and urban workers to take power. The same day, we carried a bundle of CHALLENGE newspapers to Cortez, another one of his comrades, who right away asked, “Are you sure this is the right way? My friends have many questions about the paper.” Epifanio reassured him, “Don’t be afraid, we have nothing to lose, and we could win! We need to be daring. Next time we will meet with your friends to clarify any doubts.” On other occasions when we went to distribute the paper house to house, workers kept asking for the “supplement”—a one-page flyer using the simple language of the fieldworkers, where Epifanio explained communism, nationalism, racism, and imperialism. Truth be told, workers demanded that flyer. Through the distribution of CHALLENGE and the flyers in the fieldworkers’ communities, and in the fields where Epifanio lived and worked, this process led to a mass understanding of communist ideas.
Epifanio challenged the owners, the police, la migra, the liberal politicians, the religious leaders, and all sorts of capitalist vermin. An undocumented worker who knew him once told me, “Many undocumented fieldworkers knew that Epifanio’s house was a sanctuary for them.” In reality, it was so for all those ready to fight for communism.
Epifanio’s unassuming character, determination, and deep confidence in the workers have been lessons for life. To remember Epifanio Camacho, long live communism!
From Oaxaca, Mexico: I met Epifanio when I was an undocumented worker in Delano, California. Comrade Camacho was a communist teacher for us campesinos, because he was always looking for the best ways for us to understand dialectical materialism in our study groups. He and Luis Ventura were responsible for bringing the revolutionary communist ideas of PLP to Oaxaca, which today inform our work. We remember his commitment to promoting the party line in a massive way in Delano and McFarland, and the insight he developed to transcend the reformist politics of Cesar Chavez and embrace communist revolutionary ideas. ¡Hasta siempre camarada Epifanio!