Puerto Rico's Social Movements: Decolonizing Step-by-Step
González-Cruz, Michael
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007 report : puerto rico
Puerto Rico’s Social Movements:
Decolonizing Step-by-Step
Childen at a nueva Escuela summer camp in Mayagüez perform a play about the Grito...
...As pro-independence literature circulated, they offered their memories of Cruz and promised to keep up the struggle...
...The two Puerto Rican political parties, it became clear, have become little more than brokers, buying and selling influence to the highest bidder...
...whether the decolonization mandate of resolution 1514 should be extended to puerto rico could be discussed as early as the 2008 general assembly, but getting the item on the agenda for a vote will take longer...
...While stagnation and division remain the rule among the political parties and the unions, this kind of issues-based educational organizing may be the key to revitalizing the independence movement in the 21st century...
...yet during the 1980s and 1990s, the committee largely suspended puerto rico from its agenda, with no review between 1992 and 1998 and no resolutions, despite its declaration in 1990 of the international decade for the eradication of Colonialism (redeclared in 2001...
...Offering a bank of talent, from sociologists, psychologists, and social workers to lawyers, teachers, and students, Nueva Escuela attempts to help communities challenge the power of the privileged classes and colonial authorities...
...In this public housing complex, residents and fine arts students from the University of Puerto Rico painted a three-story-high mural depicting Ojeda Ríos...
...The piece denounces the injustices of the classist, racist penal system, linking the class struggle to that of national liberation...
...although the committee has reiterated puerto rico’s right to self-determination over the years, it had not formally requested the general assembly’s review of the issue...
...During the crisis, the labor movement split into three camps, including unions co-opted by the colonial regime that supported the sales tax...
...Puerto Rico at the United Nations t he united nations general assembly may review the question of puerto rico’s colonial status next year, thanks to a resolution passed in June by the special Committee on decolonization...
...Imagine, for example, young people, not pro-independence, but whose daily bread consists of violence, the violence of the ghetto, of the caserío [housing project], drug violence, police violence, persecution, they see the TV footage of repression against those who peacefully protest...
...bombing exercise, that united the progressive forces in Vieques...
...the committee again used forceful language in its 2000 resolution, calling on the u.s...
...The Public Housing administration threatened to censor the mural, and José Tito Román, a resident of the community and student leader, invited Nueva Escuela to offer a talk on the revolutionary vision and mission of Ojeda Ríos and the Macheteros...
...In 1979, the nationalist activist Ángel Rodríguez Cristóbal died in a Florida federal prison after the U.S...
...Nueva Escuela began by publishing a magazine called AlterNativa...
...An educational movement must be forged to promote independence,” he said.2 In mid-2005, after reflecting on the history of the Puerto Rican independence movement, a group of students and professors at the University of Puerto Rico concluded that the most urgent task in advancing decolonization consists in popular education...
...More Than 25 Years: Puerto 1999, president Bill Clinton commuted the prison i n sentences of 12 of 15 puerto rican men and women arrested in the early 1980s, all of them long considered political prisoners and prisoners of war...
...according to reverón, u.s...
...Nueva Escuela ad-organizing ditionally offers political-training camps for youth, who participate in campaign workshops and seminars, while also have included enjoying the beauty of their island’s natural environment...
...navy reached worldwide attention...
...it concluded that this violated puerto rico’s right to self-determination and independence, as described in resolution 1514...
...This policy obliged the Puerto Rican National Guard to join the state police in raids on public housing projects, giving way to a series of operations, most infamously the 1996 Operation Centurion, which practically amounted to the military occupation of 76 of Puerto Rico’s 329 public housing complexes...
...Moreover, the indiscriminate nighttime use of tear gas in buildings had also terrorized children and the elderly, many of whom now suffer from respiratory disease...
...the following year, ramón Medina ramírez, interim president of nationalist party of puerto rico (pedro albizu Campos, renowned nationalist leader, was incarcerated at the time), was accepted as a nongovernmental un observer, with no right to participate in debates, but this observer position was revoked unilaterally and without explanation after the october 30, 1950, nationalist uprising in Jayuya, puerto rico...
...Their initiative, La Nueva Escuela (the New School, lne.alternativalne.org), focuses on educating both children and adults in communities that the colonial regime has impoverished and marginalized for more than a century...
...Ana M. López is an adjunct professor in the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program and Humanities Department at Hostos Community College, Bronx, New York...
...to commemorate their community’s heroes...
...D uring the vieques struggle, the activistattorney Alberto Marquéz noted, “The use and abuse of repressive forces create great indignation among sectors that at first were uncommitted to that struggle...
...This sentiment reflects much of the post-Vieques organizing, which has been centered among students...
...The collective has also developed work in the Residencial Manuel A. Pérez in San Juan...
...delegate who sat up front and listened to all the many presentations...
...puerto ricans have fought and gone to jail for their resistance to colonialism since the days of the spanish empire...
...government to, among other things, halt its military drills there and to “return the occupied land to the puerto rican people...
...thereafter, the case of puerto rico remained under the observation of the special Committee, whose later resolutions reiterated the1978 language...
...Once voters cast their ballots, they don’t return to participate in the party organization and are uninvolved in defining the party’s goals and agenda...
...The most important precedents, in which many of today’s young activists cut their teeth, were struggles that gave way to popular victories: the clemency granted to 12 of 15 Puerto Rican political prisoners and prisoners of war, and the withdrawal of the U.S...
...only after president Clinton’s granting of clemency to 12 puerto rican political prisoners in 1999 did the issue reappear...
...1 their supporters said then, and continue to say now, that they were punished not for what they did but for who they are and what they represent...
...But Nueva Escuela’s most salient accomplishment has been the creation of a democratically organized collective linked to poor and working communities...
...police forces and intelligence agencies...
...Gabriela Reardon is the coordinator of NACLA’s Media Accuracy on Latin America (MALA) Program...
...The major corporations were left free from contributing to this stabilizing of the ELA’s functioning, since in proportional terms, workers in Puerto Rico pay more taxes than the banks, and the colonial constitution obliges the government to pay bondholders before public salaries...
...Nueva Escuela and the Youth of 98, a guerrilla theater group, brought the community together using reggaeton music, videos, and a presentation by Ojeda Ríos’s widow on the Machetero leader’s political thought...
...Its major priority has been to develop a campaign in response to a policy instituted in 1993 under Governor Pedro Roselló known as mano dura contra el crimen (iron fist against crime...
...Out of this event, the Manuela Pérez Collective was organized, through which the community defends its freedom of expression, and aims to improve its quality of life...
...under u.s...
...For many young pro-independence activists in Puerto Rico and the diaspora, his death amounted to a targeted assassination, and he quickly became a potent national icon, especially as the colonial fiscal crisis wracked Puerto Rico nine months after his death...
...it furthermore declared that “steps must be taken to transfer all the power to all the peoples and all the territories which have not gained their independence...
...In September 2006, the lawyer Carlos Torres, a member of the Nueva Escuela collective, was threatened while he was on his way to court in Bayamón, and in August 2007 Roberto Viqueira, a marine biologist, was arrested and illegally searched as he was conducting research in the Bosque Seco (dry forest) of Guánica...
...By Michael González-Cruz D uring puerto rico’s may 2006 fiscal crisis, the people watched as the Estado Libre Asociado (ELA), or U.S...
...But by 1960, following the Cuban revolution and the admission of 16 decolonized african nations to the un, the general assembly adopted resolution 1514 (Xv), which “solemnly proclaims the need to remedy immediately and unconditionally the colonial situation in all its forms and manifestations...
...The words of Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, leader of the clandestine Ejercito Popular Boricua–Macheteros, inspired many on this issue...
...unlike in past years, delegates from numerous Latin american and Caribbean nations—including saint Lucia on behalf of the non-aligned Movement, and especially Cuba and venezuela, which co-sponsored the resolution—voiced their support for puerto rico’s decolonization...
...The 2005 assassination of Ojeda Ríos and the fiscal crisis that followed forced the movement to continue innovating and to expand its terrain...
...puerto rico has welcomed the former prisoners with open arms, and each has not only successfully integrated into civil society, but has joined the ongoing campaign for the release of those who remain imprisoned...
...Most were convicted of being members of the Fuerzas armadas de Liberación nacional (armed Forces of national Liberation), a militant, clandestine pro-independence group that between 1974 and 1980 claimed responsibility for more than 100 bombings, mainly in Chicago and new york, aimed at corporate, military, and government targets...
...the release of hundreds of nationalist party members detained as a result of the 1950 uprising...
...Navy...
...2 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: puerto rico eques community and attempted to break the military perimeter...
...During the weekend, a hundred residents came together with Nueva Escuela to listen to Ezequiel Lugo, a veteran of the insurrection, tell of the fight against the police at the corner of Calle San Juan and Echagüe...
...But the real heart of Nueva Escuela’s initiative has been holding public educational events and establishing committees throughout urban communities, including public housing projects in San Juan, Mayagüez, Guánica, and Toa Baja, as well as rural communities...
...Beginning in 1972, this committee issued a series of reso NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007 report: puerto rico Not since the late 1990s has there been as strong a popular decolonizing sentiment in Puerto Rico...
...in 1953—largely as a result of u.s...
...Nationalist militants from a previous generation like Rafael Cancel Miranda and Lolita Lebrón (who participated in the legendary 1954 attack on the U.S...
...For this reason, the collective does not disclose the exact number of its members or their identities...
...hegemony within the united nations—resolution 748 (vii) approved puerto rico’s commonwealth status, noting that the “puerto rican people had exercised their self-determination,” that the country had “achieved attributes of political sovereignty,” and that “the requirement of providing information to the general assembly will end...
...Congress and was later pardoned by President Carter) were present, along with the leadership of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, Illinois congressman Luis Gutiérrez, Aníbal Acevedo Vilá (now governor, elected in 2004), and an ecumenical religious contingent...
...the committee made specific reference to this effect in 2000, noting that it welcomed the prisoners’ release and expressed its hope that the president “would release all puerto rican political prisoners serving sentences in united states prisons on cases by Ana M. López and Gabriela Reardon related to the struggle for the independence of puerto rico...
...Nueva Escuela promoted the organization of Candelaria Pa’lante, a residents’ collective that fights for their rights with the support of the Puerto Rican Independence Party and a local legal clinic...
...Following this exchange, the community organized an event dedicated to women revolutionaries...
...Among axes of nueva the most frequent activities are comEscuela’s munity movies, theater workshops, and summer camps, educating for educationala new patria...
...By the end of April 2000, about 500 demonstrators had occupied the Vieques military zone, among them unionists, clergy, and students...
...Because neither the colonial political parties nor the unions are capable of mobilizing the poor and working classes, Puerto Rico’s independence movement needed to focus its efforts on organizing them, instead of working narrowly on the status issue...
...these new moves may mark a decisive turning point in the long history of efforts to call for the decolonization of puerto rico within the united nations...
...The political work to liberate the prisoners grew during the struggle against the U.S...
...Other Nueva Escuela members have been harassed by the FBI, but because some of them are public workers, they are reluctant to denounce the FBI’s intimidation...
...today, two of the original 15 pro-independence militants arrested in the early 1980s remain in prison: Carlos alberto 2...
...in the 20th century, successful campaigns led the 1952 presidential commutation of the death sentence given to nationalist party member oscar Collazo, convicted after the 1950 attack on Blair House in washington...
...this year’s hearing was different in several important ways, according to wilma reverón, president of the Committee for puerto rico at the united nations, a group of independence activists who coordinate presentations at the annual decolonization hearings...
...A week before President Clinton pardoned the prisoners in 1999, about 100,000 Puerto Ricans marched in the rain from the Barrio Obrero in Santurce to San Juan, where they gathered at the Federal Courthouse, many of them holding signs with images of the prisoners...
...while a un resolution in favor of decolonizing would be nonbinding—and the united states has made it clear it is not bound by un votes—it would mark the first time a majority of nations rejected the united states’ grip on puerto rico...
...the resulting resolution called for “a democratic process which utilizes a mechanism freely chosen by the puerto rican people...
...the language of the resolutions became more assertive and explicit year after year...
...The authorities used helicopters, heavy arms, and armored vehicles to round up residents and take up positions in all the communities, laying siege to poor, marginal communities and systematically violating their human rights...
...The freeing of the prisoners in 1999 and the triumph of the battle of Vieques in 2003 demonstrated that the Puerto Rican national liberation movement still continues its struggle...
...Navy from the island municipality of Vieques...
...Clinton’s pardon brought international attention to almost 15 years of work done by the National Committee for the Liberation of the Politcal Prisoners and Prisoners of War, headquartered in Chicago, and the educational campaign of the Unitary Committee Against Repression, as well as the groups Ofensiva 92 and the Comité Pro Derechos Humanos in San Juan...
...commonwealth government, fell apart as a model of both economic and political development...
...This had the objective of forcing the FBI and other colonial agencies to respect the civil and human rights of all the citizens of Puerto Rico, wherever they may live...
...Before the eyes of the international press, the FBI invaded the camps on March 4 on the orders of admiral Kevin Green, arresting hundreds of nonviolent activists...
...rule beginning in 1898, there have been some 2,000 political prisoners whose sentences added together come to 11,116 years.2 and there have always been campaigns for the release of those in custody...
...In this way, Nueva Escuela unites the community, recovering its values and promoting popular organization on the margins of 2 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: puerto rico the colonial political system...
...Recovering historical memory national liberation and has also been a major part of the decolonization, group’s activity...
...the 1979 presidential commutations of the nationalist party prisoners Lolita Lebrón, rafael Cancel Miranda, irving Flores, and andrés Figueroa Cordero, convicted after the 1954 attack on u.s...
...delegates in the past have disparagingly observed the hearings from the back of the room...
...and public sector unions under the AFL-CIO that opposed the tax but remained largely immobile as spectators during mass actions...
...With the crisis, the working class, especially the public sector, was confronted with three questions: How viable is the ELA, since it depends on foreign investment...
...statehood for puerto rico, and for the first time all parties agreed that a colonial relationship existed and that the status question had to be resolved...
...After the governor shut down most public operations, leaving about 80,000 employees temporarily laid off, the island’s congress approved a 7% sales tax that enabled the island government to keep up payments to its bondholders, payments that amount to $3.6 billion annually...
...authorities after being convicted for participating in a 1983 armed bank robbery...
...Considering the gravity of the situation, Nueva Escuela developed a complete educational plan that included talks by a volunteer lawyer on civil rights and workshops for youth and children on how to confront illegal police actions...
...The prisoners’ release proved that when progressive, pro-independence forces unite, the movement for national liberation can advance...
...But it was the death in 1999 of David Sanes, a young man accidentally killed in a U.S...
...In his final interview, Ojeda Ríos had expressed a similar idea...
...nonetheless, their sentences averaged together amounted to 70.2 years—about seven times the average murder sentence at the time...
...Well, look, they identify, they identify...
...Unions have been little better at representing Michael González-Cruz is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centro de Investigación Social Aplicada (CISA) at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez...
...Will unions play a role as the true workers’ representatives or continue to act merely as intermediaries for the employer state...
...These colonial parties pursue only their narrow interests, acting as service providers to the great private banking, real estate, and insurance interests, and keeping Wall Street ratings agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s happy...
...as a 1980 Chicago Tribune editorial noted, they had been “out to call attention to their cause rather than shed blood...
...After the young man’s death, the Comité Pro Rescate y Desarrollo de Vieques, led by the teacher Ismael Guadalupe, began a campaign that gained the support of many Puerto Ricans both within and beyond the island...
...The youth of Nueva education, and Escuela went knocking on doors in Dulces Labios, sharing this history community with the residents and inviting them organizing...
...In October 2006, Nueva Escuela published a docu developing a ment on the 1950 Nationalist in-sustainable surrection led by Pedro Albizu Campos in Mayagüez, in which a economy, group of combatants confronted human rights, the police and were chased into alternative Barrio Dulces Labios, a poor, urban community, where they were media, popular overwhelmed...
...none of the 15 were charged with or convicted of hurting anyone...
...In October 2006, Ramón Torres, an activist from the Candelaria housing project in Mayagüez, invited Nueva Escuela to advise the community on citizens’ rights, after a series of raids in which security forces physically, emotionally, and verbally abused residents, searching them and their belongings, vehicles, and homes without court approval...
...Congress and held in prison for 25 years, and oscar Collazo, who served 29 years...
...in 1978, the committee heard presentations defending independence, continuing the commonwealth, and u.s...
...Meanwhile the struggle to rid vieques, an island municipality of puerto rico, of the u.s...
...The subsequent two issues covered various subjects, including the economy, alternative media, human rights, community work, and the environment...
...For the moment, they have successfully defended the mural of Ojeda and another titled Being Poor Is Not a Crime, which also denounces police brutality...
...Nueva Escuela now has a small house that serves as its work center in Barrio Dulces Labios, where workshops on history and culture, as well as social services, are offered...
...In the face of anxiety and cynicism that the government officials, the major courteSy of claridad NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007 report: puerto rico media, and traditional, oppressive education, La Nueva Escuela rises as an alternative of hope and struggle,” says the group’s invitation to its June National Assembly, held in Santurce...
...Nueva Escuela’s attention thus focuses on communities’ immediate needs, which are always connected to Puerto Rico’s colonial reality...
...In addition to this kind of bombing exercise, the Navy also used artillery coated with depleted uranium, which contaminated the island’s flora and marine life...
...the general assembly has not addressed the issue since 1953, when it approved a u.s.-sponsored proposal to remove the island from its list of colonized nations, following the establishment of its “commonwealth” relationship with the united states...
...the island originally appeared in un files in 1946 in resolution 66 (1), which described it as a “nonautonomous territory,” thus requiring the united states to submit an annual report on social and economic conditions to the secretary general, as required by article 73 of the un Charter...
...2 cArmen rodríguez-mArIn NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: puerto rico popular interests...
...this led to the creation of what is now known as the special decolonization Committee...
...After developing this organizing effort, repression against the community and Nueva Escuela grew, and both have appealed to the courts to defend their rights...
...After 2 the arrests, thousands of activists continued to sporadically interrupt military maneuvers in the firing range, and in total some 2000 people were arrested during this Grito de Vieques...
...The first edition, which explains Ojeda Ríos’s political vision and denounces the FBI’s repressive campaign, sold out in a month...
...Another resident shared his memories, telling of Dominga Cruz, a woman from Dulces Labios who survived the Ponce massacre of 1937, in which the colonial police killed about 20 unarmed Nationalists...
...also unprecedented was the attendance of a u.s...
...that is why the president said he was moved to act: because they were “serving extremely lengthy sentences . . . which were out of proportion to their crimes...
...independent progressive unions like the Federation of Teachers and others, that demanded a tax on capital, both island-based and foreign...
...For many, Vieques— 76% of whose land was appropriated by the Navy in 1941—encapsulated the problem of Puerto Rico’s colonial status...
...It had been a site of conflict before, first when the residents who lost their land and were harassed by the troops launched their own struggle, and again in the late 1970s, when independence organizations joined the Vi lutions calling for puerto rico’s case to be reconsidered...
...About 300 residents participated in this “Rumba Pa’ Dominga...
...As a result of these efforts of the social movements, President Bush closed the training camp...
...if a vote takes place, the united states will likely win over european countries that maintain territories (in addition to its usual maneuver of attaining the support of developing nations by threatening to cut off their foreign aid), since the passage of such a resolution would set a precedent that other territories could use to push for their own independence, according to reverón...
...In August 2005, a month before FBI snipers killed him, Ojeda Ríos predicted in his last radio interview that Puerto Rico would face an inflationary crisis, and that the parties would not only protect their narrow interests but even take advantage of the opportunity afforded by the crisis, as indeed they did: Along with the sales tax, Governor Vilá’s proposals included privatizing certain dimensions of the Education Department, as well as electricity, water, and other basic services.1 When Ojeda died—on September 23, the 137th anniversary of the legendary rebellion against Spanish rule known as El Grito de Lares—he had spent 15 years hiding from U.S...
...They even strip-searched women and children in public...
...the committee also heard testimony of repression and harassment committed against pro-independence organizations and people by the u.s...
...And what kind of organization is necessary to push for popular demands...
...Military Police arrested him along with other socialist, religious, and community activists on a Vieques beach...
...Beyond this, the thematic axes of the educational-organizing campaign have included national liberation and decolonization, developing a sustainable economy, human rights, alternative media, popular education, The thematic and community organizing...
...Convicted of seditious conspiracy (that is, of conspiring to use force against the authority of the united states over puerto rico), they had served 16 and 19 years of prison sentences ranging from 35 to 90 years...
...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007 report : puerto rico Puerto Rico’s Social Movements: Decolonizing Step-by-Step Childen at a nueva Escuela summer camp in Mayagüez perform a play about the Grito de lares, an 1868 anti-colonial uprising...
...and finally the 1999 presidential commutations...
Vol. 40 • November 2007 • No. 6
