MURDER ON THE MOUNTAINTOP
Stell, William
MURDER ON THE MOUNTAINTOP BY WILLIAM STEIF The last time I flew into San Juan Airport, I grabbed a taxi to a downtown hotel. As we swung onto the Baldorioty de Castro freeway, the driver told...
...For their trouble, Suarez and Stella were called "damn liars" by the Governor...
...People who are charged with crimes are supposed to be able to defend themselves," says Tipograph...
...Then I asked the driver why we had to swelter...
...All of the implicated policemen have resigned or have been suspended...
...In 1980, its gubernatorial candidate received only some 5,500 votes, and the party, still under strong Cuban influence, is unlikely to field any candidates this year, though it still wields considerable clout among Puerto Rican intellectuals...
...It was a whitewash...
...Three days after the executions, Puerto Rican Governor Carlos Romero Barcelo announced on television that the police had acted in self-defense...
...Except for suspected mafia chieftains, most people who refuse to testify before a grand jury are cited for civil—not criminal—contempt...
...The only admissible evidence, according to a recent appellate court decision, is whether the subpoena was lawfully ordered and whether the defendant complied with it...
...The Governor's Justice Department had twice investigated the case and exonerated the police...
...Now it's time to try something else...
...She was the third justice secretary to resign in five months...
...But when I feel Puerto Rico's unresolved tensions, whether in the grim caserios of San Juan or on the broken sidewalks of the small mountain village of Utuado, I'm not sure Garcia Passalacqua is mistaken...
...He gestured to the caserios—housing projects—on our right and said, "Last evening, just at this time, there was an incident at the stoplight we're coming to...
...Under the U.S...
...He said he saw one of the independentistas alive and crying for mercy as he was surrounded by police after the first volley...
...But Garcia Passalacqua also notes that statehood sentiment has been skidding since 1977...
...A month after the executions, Romero reacted to continuing criticism by ordering his first Justice Department inquiry...
...No one wants to go to jail, but I believe the sacrifice of having to go to jail is worth making," Miller says...
...A hell of a lot of things are more important...
...So they now prey on passing autos...
...The writers are, respectively, a former governor of Puerto Rico, a former chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico, and a former associate justice of the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico...
...Police actions were designed to scare the independence movement, to stop it...
...You're supposed to be on notice of what the possible penalties are for a certain action...
...Romero is still banging the statehood drum, but Cerro Maravilla—and widespread police corruption—have left the Puerto Rican legal and police system in severe disarray...
...I should assume, as leading politicians in San Juan and Washington have assumed, that it is only a matter of time before Puerto Rico becomes the fifty-first state...
...At a November 1983 news conference, Romero said he was "tremendously surprised" to learn that two policemen who had been present at Cerro Maravilla told an executive session of the Puerto Rican Senate's judiciary committee that the two independentistas were killed in cold blood...
...Romero's inner circle scoffs at this analysis, and the San Juan Star's Harold Lidin believes "the edge, the excitement, has gone off the independence movement," despite the Cerro Maravilla case...
...You can't explain why you think you were subpoenaed before the grand jury...
...The policemen could not be indicted for murder because too much time had elapsed...
...Eighty-six years after the United States seized Puerto Rico from Spain, the island is neither a nation nor a state...
...Late in the summer, Senate President Miguel Hernandez Agosto decided the hearings would be televised live on a publicly funded channel, though Romero's allies denounced the broadcasts as a waste of tax dollars...
...A lung specialist, she read an extract of the autopsy report and said, "Manny, do you know that the bullets came from above and passed through the body on a downward path...
...That's when the United Nations Decolonization Committee began to take a hard look at Puerto Rico's political status, the FALN became increasingly active, and the island was hit by a five-month power workers' strike that produced clashes between police and pickets...
...It is a real mountain, 4,000 feet high, about forty-five miles southwest of San Juan...
...If you read all the reports and documents of the case, you couldn't fail to be impressed by the contradictions," Suarez recalls...
...Arnaldo Dario Rosado, twenty-four, and Carlos Enrique Soto Arrivi, eighteen, had commandeered a taxi in Ponce to drive up Cerro Maravilla that July day in 1978...
...There was more pressure on the police to stop the Far Left...
...Criminal contempt is an attempt to use the legal system to institute more and more political internment," says Shelley Miller, one of the two North American women convicted of criminal contempt...
...His associate says the Governor was "not stupid enough to get mixed up in all that...
...Meanwhile, the older independence party, PIP, has been making something of a comeback...
...Under a law passed in 1952 by the U.S...
...today, it is more than 20 per cent...
...For me to have to face myself after collaborating would be something I couldn't do...
...He called a news conference to say he had been moved because he knew too much about Cerro Maravilla...
...In 1967, Romero was a founder of the island's New Progressive Party, a pro-statehood group...
...Suddenly, Washington began to perceive that Puerto Rico, structured to lure industry from the mainland by tax incentives, was a costly colony...
...They were accompanied by Alejandro Gonzales Malave, whom the police had recruited in high school as an informer...
...Some police officers who had been at the Cerro Maravilla scene were given immunity from prosecution and changed their stories...
...Munoz devised the economic strategy of changing Puerto Rico from an agricultural to an industrial island through "Operation Bootstrap," and he governed the island until the 1960s...
...public hearings...
...On July 25, 1978, two young men—Puerto Rican independentistas—were executed on the mountain, death-squad style, by police officers who had laid an ambush for them...
...In January, Romero's legal counsel resigned...
...It also has a remarkably high divorce rate for a nominally Roman Catholic area...
...Sympathy is with the kids murdered by state-hooders...
...Manny Suarez, a reporter for the San Juan Star, says Cerro Maravilla "set back statehood twenty years...
...They escaped on foot...
...The reporters kept turning up new information...
...Their mission was to publicize the cause of independence by blowing up a television tower...
...He says "the presumption is getting stronger that Puerto Rico is and always will be part of the U.S.A...
...As a state, Puerto Rico would be entitled to two Senators and six or seven members of the House...
...I am in and out of San Juan a dozen times a year, and I had noticed the caserios were being improved...
...Last December, Romero's justice secretary, an office equivalent to that of attorney general, resigned over "irreconcilable differences" with Romero over Cerro Maravilla...
...It'll be a stabilizing presence in the Caribbean...
...But when the Federal indictments were handed down, Romero said, "Our position has always been clear in that if there is any evidence of violation of the law, either by private citizens or government officials, in connection with the Cerro Maravilla case, the full weight of the law should fall on those found guilty...
...The Far Left was geared up to go all-out to stop statehood...
...Cerro Maravilla means Marvelous Mountain...
...Death squads and terror have no place in a democracy," Secretary of State George Shultz lectured his hosts in El Salvador last February...
...But the net transfer of funds to Puerto Rico from Washington was $5 billion in 1983, and Garcia Passalacqua notes that Puerto Rico has "the highest rate of drug addiction and the highest rate of suicide in the world...
...Criminal contempt charges are being used "as a shortcut to jailing citizens," they said...
...The practice of charging dissidents with criminal contempt has stirred widespread opposition in Puerto Rico...
...Governor Romero is expected to face former Governor Rafael Hernandez Colon, the Popular Democratic Party incumbent he defeated in 1976 and squeaked past in 1980...
...He believes the sentiment for independence is on the rise...
...But "the insidious thing about criminal contempt is that it has no maximum penalty attached to it," says Susan Tipograph, Shelley Miller's attorney...
...It was a hot evening, but I did as I was told...
...Romero ordered a second investigation that produced a report echoing most of the first inquiry's findings and conclusions...
...Youth unemployment is 28 per cent and more than half the island's families get "food checks," the recent program substituting direct payments for food stamps...
...The armed forces must act with discipline in defense of the constitution, and the judicial system must prove its capacity to cope with the terrorist acts of extremists of the Right and Left...
...Neither of the pro-independence parties has any known connection to the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion National, armed forces of national liberation), the terrorist wing of the independence movement, which has committed bombings and other violent acts in Puerto Rico and on the mainland...
...It took more than five years for these facts to come to light...
...Romero's associate concedes that the police "certainly shouldn't have killed," but adds, "These were misguided youngsters, not nuns...
...Criminal contempt presents a fairly dangerous situation...
...One of Romero's closest associates, who insists on anonymity, says, "You have to consider the context in 1978...
...They discovered that Gonzales Malave was a police spy, that twelve to fourteen police officers were waiting for the trio, that policemen roughed up the hijacked taxi driver and kicked Soto as he lay handcuffed on the ground...
...For the first time in history, two violent independence kids are heroes, martyrs...
...Men came from that caserio there and held up a taxi at the stoplight...
...You can't explain why you did not testify...
...Garcia Passalacqua predicts the November election will see many statehood supporters switching to the cause of Puerto Rican independence—not in sufficient numbers to elect Fernando Martin of the PIP but enough to mark a significant trend...
...This is the only crime where there is no indication of maximum penalty...
...In the years after World War II, when most parts of the world were experiencing decolonization, Munoz effectively tied Puerto Rico to U.S...
...I tend to think Washington already has made up its mind, like the decision for getting rid of the Philippines...
...He was narrowly re-elected in 1980 by 3,000 votes of some 1.6 million cast...
...Since September 1982, nine independentistas have been convicted of criminal contempt for refusing to cooperate with grand juries...
...The police may have overreacted, but terrorism has dropped off in Puerto Rico...
...The other two were unhurt and surrendered...
...aid would almost certainly mean a lowering of living standards, at least in the short run...
...She was right...
...He suggests that many Puerto Ricans look on the executions at Cerro Maravilla as understandable and even justified...
...Civil contempt can carry a jail sentence only for the duration of the grand jury's term-typically eighteen months...
...While statehood advocates, Romero's natural allies, shrug off Cerro Maravilla as a short-run sensation, others believe it has dealt a death-blow to the statehood idea...
...Last June, the Puerto Rican Senate's judiciary committee opened Contemptible Punishment The repression of Puerto Rican independentistas doesn't usually take so crude a form as murder...
...No one knows for sure whether Romero was in on the original Cerro Maravilla plan and the persistent effort to conceal what happened...
...It'll be staunchly pro-American, militarily strong, like Israel...
...The Puerto Rican GNP is the Caribbean's highest, almost $2 billion above Cuba's, though Cuba has three times the population...
...This green and sun-drenched island, half the size of New Jersey, is U.S...
...One change was the addition of heavy iron grillwork outside William Steif, a former national and foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard Newspapers, reports frequently from various parts of the world for The Progressive...
...Matthew Rothschild (Matthew Rothschild is an associate editor of The Progressive...
...Five have been sentenced to three years in prison...
...In 1971, this coalition gave birth to the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP), a tiny Marxist-Leninist group that participated in elections, but with no success...
...Still, the threat of highway banditry adds to the sense I have in Puerto Rico of being in a foreign land—and a menacing one at that...
...On February 6, 1984, ten Puerto Rican police officers were indicted by a Federal grand jury in San Juan for conspiring to cover up the deaths of the two independentistas more than five years earlier...
...It's not the worst sacrifice in the world...
...Eventually, San Juan's much larger Spanish-language newspapers and several television stations caught up with the Cerro Maravilla story...
...flag and without benefit of a lecture from the Secretary of State, Puerto Rico has already had its death squad at Marvelous Mountain...
...Seven of the ten activists charged with criminal contempt are Puerto Rican men...
...Jail is a small sacrifice compared to that...
...He praised their "heroic action...
...One judge already has disqualified himself...
...Independence and the loss of massive U.S...
...the police, who said they had fired from prone positions on the ground, were proved to be lying...
...The trial of the ten indicted policemen, all of whom have pleaded not guilty, is supposed to take place in late spring, if a judge can be found who has not somehow been touched by the case...
...Its three million-plus residents are second-class U.S...
...The charge of criminal contempt in political cases is a recent and ominous invention...
...It's an unlimited discretionary matter for the judge," she adds...
...In September 1980, the head of the special arrest squad was demoted...
...But that assumption has suddenly been undermined by a place, an event, a political phenomenon called Cerro Mar-avilla...
...His wife, a physician, looked at a copy of the first Justice Department inquiry at home one evening...
...One splinter became the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), founded in 1946 as a nonviolent, nationalist group with socialist affinities...
...Congress, Puerto Rico has a political status unique among American territories...
...Criminal contempt" is the Government's tactic of choice against the independence movement...
...As we swung onto the Baldorioty de Castro freeway, the driver told me to roll up the windows and lock the doors...
...the other four await sentencing...
...It is a "free commonwealth associated with the United States," a compromise between independence and statehood that was forged by Luis Munoz Marin, who founded the centrist Popular Democratic Party in 1938...
...He was mayor of San Juan when he was first elected Governor in 1976 by a victory margin of43,000 votes...
...Garcia Passalacqua believes that after the statehood boom—and economic boom— which impelled Romero to political prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an important, subtle shift began in Washington's attitude—a shift away from the inevitability of Puerto Rican statehood...
...Military bases would be leased for ninety-nine years...
...Within days of the deaths, they reported evidence that the police made no effort to order the would-be saboteurs to halt before starting to shoot...
...They were tortured and executed...
...They were forced to their knees, their arms handcuffed behind their backs...
...There was a lot of ferment over political status...
...They haven't been caught...
...The perversion of the institution of the grand jury is a flagrant violation of our freedoms and shocks our democratic conscience," wrote Roberto Sanchez Vilella, Abrahan Diaz Gonzalez, and Raul Serrano Geyls in a letter to The New York Times last August...
...It raises some due process questions...
...Suarez and another Star reporter, Tomas Stella, encouraged by editor Andrew Viglucci, thought there was something fishy about Cerro Maravilla right from the start...
...In this atmosphere, President Carter's White House prepared and issued a statement affirming Washington's commitment to self-determination for Puerto Rico...
...And the idea of independence will continue to gain ground in San Juan—and in Washington...
...territory, but I don't feel at home in San Juan as I do in Austin, Boston, or Chicago...
...Under the guise of investigating bombings in New York and San Juan, the Government has gone on fishing expeditions to drag outspoken Puerto Rican activists before grand juries...
...The next phase of the Senate hearings will commence some time this spring, centering on the coverup...
...The procedure can be commenced on the request of the judge or the prosecutor...
...It's a new ball game...
...They boycotted elections and gradually moved further and further to the left...
...Criminal contempt raises other questions of due process...
...They beat the woman inside the cab and took thousands of dollars worth of jewelry...
...Two and a half months of public hearings captivated the island...
...It's become one of the Government's major weapons in counterinsur-gency against Puerto Rican activists," says Robert Lederer, a national coordinator of the New Movement in Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence and Socialism...
...A tenth activist has been charged but not yet convicted...
...Because of Cerro Maravilla, the prospect of statehood has receded and the likelihood has increased that Puerto Rico may, indeed, become a foreign country independent of the United States...
...The FALN has been decimated...
...He argues the United States "needs a client state in the Caribbean...
...Puerto Rico's gross national product in 1983 was close to $ 13 billion, with per capita income around $3,900...
...I know there are places in the continental United States where a prudent driver keeps doors and windows locked...
...The forty-four-count indictment included charges of perjury in three previous Federal investigations as well as charges of obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence...
...Lawyer-politician Juan M. Garcia Passa-lacqua, author of a forthcoming book on Puerto Rico's political status, believes the Cerro Maravilla case "has legitimized independence...
...three, including Shelley Miller, are North American women...
...Its gubernatorial candidate won only 22,200 votes in 1964, and 82,300 votes (in a much larger electorate) in 1980, but this year's PIP gubernatorial candidate, Fernando Martin, says he expects to receive upwards of 130,000 votes in November...
...And Harold Lidin, author and long-time political reporter for the English-language San Juan Star, says Puerto Rican society is "very conservative...
...The violence is seen to be caused by the police...
...The public's going to get tired of it...
...Fifteen years ago, the Puerto Rican unemployment rate was 10 per cent...
...A few days later, the Puerto Rican police superintendent quit under pressure...
...They pleaded for mercy but there was none...
...You don't have to be indicted," explains Tipograph...
...The success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 spurred radical Puerto Rican activists to form a new movement that embraced independentistas of all political shades...
...The strategic value of terrorism has been seen to be counterproductive...
...The menacing sense of tension I feel among the 1.1 million people of San Juan— and everywhere in Puerto Rico—is the tension of colonialism...
...The independence movement, quite strong in the early 1940s, broke up into frustrated splinters...
...But today's Puerto Rico, says Garcia Passalacqua, has "the indices of a corrupt society whose leaders have become demonstrative of our worst elements...
...A dozen or so police officers awaited the arrival of the independentistas on the mountain and mistakenly wounded Gonzales Malave in the first volley of shots...
...apron strings...
...That sort of contest between a statehood advocate and a defender of the Commonwealth status quo is likely to induce "massive abstention," Garcia Passalacqua says...
...the apartment windows, which made it more difficult for criminals to prey on caserio residents...
...A technician who had been at the television tower testified that he had heard two volleys of shots but had been ordered by a top police official to say nothing about the second volley...
...More often, it is carried out quite legally through the use of grand jury proceedings...
...Puerto Rico is the only place to establish a hegemonic power...
...It's not so different from political internment in South Africa or Ireland...
...Shultz's lecture would have been appropriate in Puerto Rico in 1978—and it may still be so today...
...The Western Hemisphere's last major, outright colony is tugged constantly between the high-tech affluence of the United States and the proud poverty of Hispanic America...
...In 1952, PIP's gubernatorial candidate won 125,700 votes—20 per cent of the total—but that turned out to be a high-water mark...
...The bombings and the killings are seen to be police work, not that of the independentistas...
...In addition, "the Government has created an undefendable act," says Tipograph...
...citizens who have no voice in choosing the President and are represented in Congress by a nonvoting resident commissioner...
...Despite the scandal, Romero is running for re-election, and his inner circle believes he has a good chance of winning...
Vol. 48 • April 1984 • No. 4
