CERRO MARAVILLA DEATHS Police Cover-up Rocks Puerto Rico
Nelson, Anne
On July 25, 1978 two young independentistas were killed by police on a hilltop in southern Puerto Rico. At the time, the response to the killings broke down along predictable political lines....
...Her book on Puerto Rico will be published next year.disarmed and beaten, then executed as they knelt begging for mercy...
...The two were Puerto Rico's pro-statehood governor, Carlos Romero Barcel6 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1984 Anne Nelson is a journalist who has been covering Latin America since 1978...
...According to Ram6n Rosado, the sole surviving member of the MRA, the group would never have dared to carry out even such a minor activity without Gonzalez Malav6's insistence...
...He was one of a network of agents...
...COINTELPRO concentrated especially on leftist labor unions, the MPI and its affiliated student group, FUPI...
...It could tip the balance against pro-statehood Governor Romero in the island's November elections and play a leading role in relations between Puerto Rico and the United States in the years to come...
...The Puerto Rican Senate's hearings indicated that Gonzalez Malav6 acted improperly in entrapping the two MRA youths, and that the police then killed them without justification...
...They stole seven walkietalkies from the campus police station-the first and only guerrilla operation carried out by the MRA...
...But as Cuba aligned itself with the Soviet Union, Muioz regretfully abandoned his support, and the Puerto Rican Left took note...
...various officers are now standing trial for other crimes ranging from the murder of a New York Hassidic diamond merchant to hijacking a truckload of Oil of Olay...
...The official statements issued the next day reported that the three were attempting to bomb a television tower on the hill...
...The police actions were praised by the governor and cleared by four investigations between 1978 and 1980, two by the Puerto Rican Department of Justice and two by the U.S...
...Security informants operating inside the groups could, under certain circumstances," wrote Hoover in one 1960 memo, "raise controversial issues at meetings, raise justifiable criticisms against leaders and take other steps which would weaken the organization...
...In 1972 this group evolved into the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP...
...Puerto Rico is suffering an epidemic of police corruption and misconduct...
...There was no evidence that the youths had planned to bomb the television tower...
...But the FBI had infiltrators of its own, occasionally, one supposes, working at cross purposes with the island police...
...The Jayuya revolt was put down by the National Guard, and government investigators made mass arrests-including some that were pre-emptive-in an attempt to defuse the violence by neutralizing the group's leadership...
...in REPORT ON THE AMERICAS REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 10Charges against the police range from murder to hijacking cosmetics...
...By 1978 Gonzilez Malav6 was involved with two splinter groups, the MRA and the Anti-Imperialist Armed Forces (FAAI...
...intelligence chief P6rez Casillas had already informed both Governor Romero and the San Juan office of the FBI that an operation was going to occur...
...Prominent nationalist leaders went through a revolving door of federal prisons during the 1950s...
...Police testimony suggests that Gonzilez Malav6 must have been under considerable pressure himself.:He had informed the intelligence division many days in advance that an attack on a federal tower near Cerro Maravilla was in the offing...
...Two Wings of the Same Bird" Tension between the independence movement and federal and commonwealth authorities goes back as far as the Commonwealth itself...
...Department of Justice investigations are also coming under close scrutiny...
...The police, Governor Carlos Romero Barcel6 and the statehood movement defended the action as a blow against left-wing terrorism...
...In that trial, Federal District Judge Robert Takasuki told the jury that the entrapment defense was applicable to a defendant who was induced by government agents or informers to commit a crime that he was "not ready and willing" to commit...
...The police began constructing their cover stories at the scene of the killing itself...
...On May 1st they installed it at a federal post office near the University of Puerto Rico...
...As such, it inherited the attention of the energetic Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) which the FBI had launched in the early 1960s...
...The character of the group changed dramatically with the arrival of a new member, Alejandro Gonzilez Malav6...
...The 20-year-old Gonzalez was a card-carrying organizer of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP) and an outspoken advocate of armed action over words...
...Department of Justice reveal that the FBI also accepted the appointment of Puerto Rican police intelligence chief Angel P6rez Casillas as coordinator between the bureau and the police-the same P6rez Casillas who planned the Cerro Maravilla operation and told his agents that the two youths should not come down alive...
...the Puerto Ricans have perpetually been obliged to go to court to achieve equality under the law...
...they also debated going to Cerro Maravilla, with Gonzilez Malav6 urging them to action and Carlos Soto protesting that it was premature...
...the question is whether that trap was set by legal means...
...Rosado recalls that the night before the Cerro Maravilla incident, the group met to talk about attending a rally in Gudnica the next day...
...A 1979 FBI memo advised that, "A full preliminary investigation [of Cerro Maravilla] was inadvisable as such investigation would be seized upon by elements of the press in an attempt to discredit the government of Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth Department of Justice and the police...
...forces invaded Puerto Rico in 1898, Major General Nelson Miles told the population, "We have not come to make war against the people of a country that for centuries have been oppressed, but on the contrary, to bring you protection . . . and to bestow upon you the immunities and blessings of the liberal institutions of our government...
...It reached a peak in 1950, when nationalists under the quixotic leadership of Pedro Albizu Campos staged an armed revolt in the mountain town of Jayuya, attacked the governor's mansion and made an assassination attempt on President Truman...
...The 1959 Cuban Revolution astounded all of Latin America, and nowhere was the impact greater than in Puerto Rico...
...Newly released documents from the U.S...
...Independentista offices were bombed and leaders attacked by mysterious gunmen...
...As the Cubans-and the MPI/PSP-became more actively proSoviet, these measures were redoubled...
...When U.S...
...The Cerro Maravilla case is complex and remarkable, but it is not unique...
...Carlos Soto, 18, and Arnoldo Rosado, 24, had been long-time independence activists who operated on the fringe of groups at the University of Puerto Rico...
...military facilities and corporate buildings...
...New Light on Entrapment Controversy has raged in the legal establishment for a number of years over the propriety of entrapment...
...challenged by the police, they charged the police position, and Soto and Rosado were killed in the shootout...
...By the time the first rounds were finished in November, two police agents had asked for immunity and presented testimony that stunned the island...
...No arrests were made...
...The Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) had been founded in 1946 by dissenters within Mufioz Marin's PPD to pursue independence through electoral means...
...they were carrying wire and handguns, with the apparent intention of tying up the technician and broadcasting a revolutionary message...
...Unfortunately for Puerto Ricans, those blessings can often be bestowed very selectively...
...The two have been accused of threatening and bribing witnesses, as well as coaching the police agents on their cover story before they made depositions...
...The U.S...
...FBI at Cross Purposes with Police It was in this atmosphere that Alejandro Gonzilez Malav6 became an undercover police agent...
...GonzAlez Malav6 joined both groups within a few weeks of their founding, and the subsequent evidence indicates that he galvanized both into action...
...On the mainland, the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) took a bloody toll with its bombings at the Fraunces Tavern in New York and other sites, reaching a peak of activity in the late 1970s and becoming a priority target for the FBI...
...In April 1978 two members of the FAAI met at Gonzilez Malav6's apartment to assemble a homemade bomb with materials he provided...
...the MRA three...
...There is no evidence that GonzAlez Malav6 himself ever worked for the FBI-indeed, the Cerro Maravilla hearings showed that at one point the FBI had PSP militant Gonzilez Malav6 under surveillance, stumbling Keystone Cops-style over a police intelligence operation...
...Now, more than six years later, the case named Cerro Maravilla has become a major factor in Puerto Rican politics...
...He was recruited at the age of 15, without his parents' knowledge...
...Shortly after taking office, Senate President Miguel Herndndez Agosto launched an independent investigation of the deaths at Cerro Maravilla...
...The two islands had a common colonial history (one poet called them "two wings of the same bird") and at the outset Mufioz Marin was one of Castro's most enthusiastic supporters...
...Now, within months of Castro's takeover, more militant leftists in the PIP broke with their social democratic allies to form the Pro-Independence Movement (MPI...
...In 1976 they formed the Armed Revolutionary Movement (MRA), a group which, despite its name, did no more than meet sporadically over sodas to discuss politics...
...Later that month, GonzAlez Malav6 reported to his superiors that he had used $60 in police operating funds to buy a revolver for Arnoldo Rosado...
...After three years of tedious legwork, the Senate opened televised hearings in the summer of 1983...
...Soon he had penetrated student groups, then the PSP itself, drawing notice as a bombastic orator...
...Gonzalez Malave drove them to the scene in his red Volkswagen...
...The cover-up was to last five years and involve a host of Romero Administration officials...
...Nor is neglect and second-rate treatment from federal agencies in Washington unusual...
...independentista groups retaliated by placing bombs in U.S...
...On July 4th he drove the members of the MRA to the university, again in his own car...
...The third, and potentially most provocative, stage of the Senate hearings-an examination of the coverup-is scheduled to begin in September...
...Like its previous incarnation, the MPI, the party was openly pro-Cuban and pro-Soviet...
...Police were waiting, tipped off by their undercover agent...
...In the aftermath of the Senate revelations, both the Puerto Rican Department of Justice and its federal counterpart have re-opened their investigations, and a flurry of lawsuits have been filed...
...At the same time the MRA was having its last meeting in San Juan, police agents were in place on the hilltop...
...J. Edgar Hoover himself took a personal interest in the program, and encouraged field agents to carry out a series of "dirty tricks," which included mail opening, anonymous slanders and threats and infiltration of the independence movement...
...They highlight a number of serious questions regarding the use of undercover operations by the Puerto Rican police and the San Juan bureau of the FBI, and the politicization of the judiciary system in Puerto Rico...
...During the 1970s political violence increased in Puerto Rico...
...Others, such as Luis Daniel Erazo F61lix and Ren6 V61ez V61ez, were encouraged by their police contacts to take a leadership role in the PSP and simultaneously infiltrate smaller groups that might be violenceprone...
...They surrendered to the police after a brief exchange of fire...
...Anti-Castro Cubans had fled to the island in droves, and some of them struck blindly at the Puerto Rican independence movement as their nearest object of revenge...
...Two key witnesses will be the SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1984 attorneys in charge of the first Puerto Rican Justice Department investigation, Pedro Colton and Angel Figueroa Vivas...
...investigative journalists, notably from the San Juan Star began a dogged pursuit of discrepancies in the official version of the case...
...the families of the victims and the independence movement protested the slaughter of two innocents...
...In 1980, Romero's opposition, the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), won control of the legislature, while Romero regained the governorship by the slightest of margins...
...Three officers from the police intelligence division, informed in advance of the evening action by Gonzalez Malav6, were on hand to observe the bombing, accompanied by two FBI agents...
...Department of Justice...
...According to police testimony, police intelligence chief Angel P6rez Casillas, who led the operation, told his men in the days preceding the killings that "these terrorists should not come down alive...
...The FBI, in other words, was blocking an investigation for fear of laying open to criticism the very institutions it was told to investigate...
...There is no doubt that young Soto and Rosado were led into a trap...
...That agent was Gonzilez Malav6...
...It was under his encouragement that the three MRA militants left for the hilltop, Cerro Maravilla, on July 25...
...The outcome of the John DeLorean cocaine trial was a major new development...
...The FAAI had four members besides Gonzalez Malav6...
...At the same time, the optimism that surrounded Luis Mufioz Marin and his Popular Democratic Party as they pioneered the Commonwealth over those years robbed the nationalists of some of their support...
Vol. 18 • September 1984 • No. 5
