Never forget the Ludlow, Colorado, and Veracruz, Mexico, massacres

Over 20 people were killed by the Colorado National Guard in Ludlow on April 20, 1914, during a coal miners’ strike. Eleven of those murdered were children. They choked to death when the tent above them had been set on fire by soldiers.

The next day, April 21, 1914, the U.S. began a military occupation of Veracruz, Mexico. Hundreds of Mexicans were killed during the invasion.

These two atrocities 110 years ago were committed on behalf of Wall Street banksters who are still running the United States today. Their Pentagon war machine is supplying the bombs and shells that have killed over 14,000 Palestinian children in Gaza.

The coal miners in Colorado were on strike against the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, which was controlled by the Rockefellers, the world’s first billionaire family and founders of Big Oil.

Nine thousand miners had walked out of the Colorado Fuel and Iron company-owned camps on Sept. 23, 1913. They struck against $1.68-a-day wages.

They revolted against the CF&I company stores, CF&I-controlled schools, and CF&I-censored libraries. Strike leader Louis Tikas, a Greek immigrant, was shot in the back and killed.

The U.S. attack on Veracruz was in response to the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. The United States had stolen half of Mexico in the late 1840s to expand slavery.

Thirteen years before the U.S. occupation of Veracruz, Los Angeles oil tycoon Edward Doheny opened his first oil well in Tampico, Mexico. President Woodrow Wilson invaded Mexico to protect the profits of U.S. oil outfits, mining, and railroad companies.

Wilson was a super bigot who segregated government lunchrooms. He had “Birth of a Nation,” a film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan, shown in the White House.

Wilson’s Navy Secretary, Josephus Daniels, helped overthrow Wilmington, North Carolina’s Black elected government in 1898. An estimated 300 Black people were killed.

Every worker needs a rifle

Just as Wilson refused to do anything about lynchings, he did nothing to stop miners and their families from being killed in Colorado. The Ludlow massacre horrified the country.

Victor Berger — the socialist member of Congress from Milwaukee — got up in the House of Representatives and urged every worker to get a rifle. The Cleveland Leader wrote, “The charred bodies of two dozen women and children show that Rockefeller knows how to win!”

Enraged strikers in Colorado attacked mines being operated by strikebreakers. President Wilson sent in U.S. troops to break the strike.

The heroic strike was finally defeated. But, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company was forced to sign a contract with the United Mine Workers in 1933.

Decades later, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, a grandson of Big Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, had 30 Attica prisoners massacred in 1971.

Poor and working people in Mexico, Palestine, and the United States have the same enemy: the billionaire class whose headquarters is Wall Street.

Always remember the Ludlow, Veracruz, and Attica massacres. Fight like hell for Gaza and all of Palestine.