Letters of July 31

Oaxaca Teachers Fight Racism Reforms
The work of PLP in Oaxaca, Mexico has been consistent in each of the teachers’ struggles. Now more teachers are asking for copies of CHALLENGE to read about what comrades are doing internationally.
At the State Teachers’ Assembly on July 2 the teachers in the Oaxaca Education Workers Coordinating group agreed to increase the protests in the Federal District.
The main purpose of these demonstrations is to reject structural reforms, such as the Educational Reform, which is now a law in Oaxaca. This law allows the implementation of exams for teachers at all levels, as a requirement to compete for a job or to keep their current positions. This struggle, faced by teachers in Oaxaca and in Mexico as a whole, is similar to those taking place in Chile, Quebec and Spain, where workers are confronting the capitalist system.
The Oaxaca teachers’ declare this is not an educational reform but rather an administrative and labor reform. Teachers and students agree that the sole purpose of the ruling class is to push racism and sexism, which is standard practice in this ruling class system.
PLP is increasing efforts in Oaxaca to move workers to better understand the principles of communism, to more comrades closer to the Party and to develop through communist schools. We hope that through class struggle, the working class will speak with one voice: communism.
Education Reds

Crime Does Pay If You’re A Killer Cop
Five years ago in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, an under-cover cop committed cold-blooded murder. The name of the cop who murdered Shem Walker, an Army veteran, was never known. The cop was under cover, sitting on a tenement stoop, next door to a grocery. Shem’s mother was an amputee. He would faithfully drive down from Connecticut every Saturday to make sure drug dealers weren’t dealing drugs on his mother’s stoop.
On that fateful Saturday night, Shem thought that the young man on his stoop was a drug dealer. He asked the under-cover cop to move off his mother’s stoop. After the third time asking the under-cover cop to move, and seeing he wouldn’t, Mr. Walker took it upon himself, to remove the drug dealer. The cop never showed his shield, but fired at point-blank range into the chest of Mr. Walker, killing him instantly. The killer cop was never brought to justice. We’ll never know who this cop was.
Crime does pay, if you’re a killer cop under Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes’s watch.
Anti-police