During Puerto Rico’s may 2006 fiscal crisis, the people watched as the Estado Libre Asociado (ELA), or U.S. commonwealth government, fell apart as a model of both economic and political development. 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. 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.
The two Puerto Rican political parties, it became clear, have become little more than brokers, buying and selling influence to the highest bidder. 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. 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.
Unions have been little better at representing popular interests. During the crisis, the labor movement split into three camps, including unions co-opted by the colonial regime that supported the sales tax; independent progressive unions like the Federation of Teachers and others, that demanded a tax on capital, both island-based and foreign; 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? Will unions play a role as the true workers’ representatives or continue to act merely as intermediaries for the employer state? And what kind of organization is necessary to push for popular demands?
The words of Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, leader of the clandestine Ejercito Popular Boricua–Macheteros, inspired many on this issue. 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. authorities after being convicted for participating in a 1983 armed bank robbery. 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.
Not since the late 1990s has there been as strong a popular decolonizing sentiment in Puerto Rico. 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. Navy from the island municipality of Vieques.
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. Nationalist militants from a previous generation like Rafael Cancel Miranda and Lolita Lebrón (who participated in the legendary 1954 attack on the U.S. 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.
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. The prisoners’ release proved that when progressive, pro-independence forces unite, the movement for national liberation can advance.
The political work to liberate the prisoners grew during the struggle against the U.S. Navy. 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 Vieques community and attempted to break the military perimeter. In 1979, the nationalist activist Ángel Rodríguez Cristóbal died in a Florida federal prison after the U.S. Military Police arrested him along with other socialist, religious, and community activists on a Vieques beach.
But it was the death in 1999 of David Sanes, a young man accidentally killed in a U.S. bombing exercise, that united the progressive forces in Vieques. 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. 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. By the end of April 2000, about 500 demonstrators had occupied the Vieques military zone, among them unionists, clergy, and students. 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. After 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.
As a result of these efforts of the social movements, President Bush closed the training camp. 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. The 2005 assassination of Ojeda Ríos and the fiscal crisis that followed forced the movement to continue innovating and to expand its terrain.
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During the Vieques struggle, the activist-attorney Alberto Marquéz noted, “The use and abuse of repressive forces create great indignation among sectors that at first were uncommitted to that struggle. 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. Well, look, they identify, they identify.”
This sentiment reflects much of the post-Vieques organizing, which has been centered among students. In his final interview, Ojeda Ríos had expressed a similar idea. 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. “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. 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. 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 the face of anxiety and cynicism that the government officials, the major 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 began by publishing a magazine called AlterNativa. The first edition, which explains Ojeda Ríos’s political vision and denounces the FBI’s repressive campaign, sold out in a month. The subsequent two issues covered various subjects, including the economy, alternative media, human rights, community work, and the environment. 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.
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). 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. 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.
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. They even strip-searched women and children in public. 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.
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. 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. 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.
Nueva Escuela’s attention thus focuses on communities’ immediate needs, which are always connected to Puerto Rico’s colonial reality. 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, and community organizing. Among the most frequent activities are community movies, theater workshops, and summer camps, educating for a new patria. Nueva Escuela additionally offers political-training camps for youth, who participate in workshops and seminars, while also enjoying the beauty of their island’s natural environment.
Recovering historical memory has also been a major part of the group’s activity. In October 2006, Nueva Escuela published a document on the 1950 Nationalist insurrection led by Pedro Albizu Campos in Mayagüez, in which a group of combatants confronted the police and were chased into Barrio Dulces Labios, a poor, urban community, where they were overwhelmed. The youth of Nueva Escuela went knocking on doors in Dulces Labios, sharing this history with the residents and inviting them to commemorate their community’s heroes. 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.
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. Following this exchange, the community organized an event dedicated to women revolutionaries. About 300 residents participated in this “Rumba Pa’ Dominga.” As pro-independence literature circulated, they offered their memories of Cruz and promised to keep up the struggle. In this way, Nueva Escuela unites the community, recovering its values and promoting popular organization on the margins of the colonial political system. 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.
The collective has also developed work in the Residencial Manuel A. Pérez in San Juan. 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. 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. 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. 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.
After developing this organizing effort, repression against the community and Nueva Escuela grew, and both have appealed to the courts to defend their rights. 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. 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. 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. For this reason, the collective does not disclose the exact number of its members or their identities.
But Nueva Escuela’s most salient accomplishment has been the creation of a democratically organized collective linked to poor and working communities. 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.
1. José Elías Torres, ed., Filiberto Ojeda Ríos: su propuesta, su visión (San Juan: Editorial Callejón, 2006).
2. The entire interview was broadcast by WPAB 550 in Ponce, Puerto Rico. For more information, see Ibid.
Michael González-Cruz is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centro de Investigación Social Aplicada (CISA) at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez.
