Vol. 77/No. 26 July 8, 2013
The committee, in a unanimously adopted resolution, reaffirmed “the inalienable right of the people of Puerto Rico to self-determination and independence” from U.S. rule. The resolution was introduced by Cuban Deputy Ambassador Oscar León González and co-sponsored by the governments of Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The June 17 hearing was marked by broad protests recently in Puerto Rico and the United States demanding the U.S. government free Puerto Rican independence fighter Oscar López Rivera, who has been incarcerated for 32 years. The majority of the 40 speakers at the hearing called for his release.
“It is incomprehensible that the United States will issue declarations of concern regarding the health of political prisoners in other countries and at other times, but has not freed Oscar López on humanitarian grounds,” said Osvaldo Toledo García of the American Association of Jurists. “Oscar has the support of the majority of Puerto Ricans, both in Puerto Rico and the United States.”
“Freedom for Oscar López Rivera! Freedom for the Cuban anti-terrorist heroes, our brothers, and for all those imprisoned in the cause of liberty,” said Gerardo Lugo Segarra of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico, referring to the five Cuban revolutionaries framed up by the U.S. government. (See box below).
Stepped-up activity for Oscar López
Fernando Laspina, executive director of El Maestro, a pro-independence Puerto Rican cultural center in the Bronx, addressed the hearing as a spokesperson for the Coordinating Committee to Free Oscar López Rivera. He reported on stepped-up activity in the U.S. On June 9, he noted, the committee organized a Free Oscar López float hosted by Local 1199 of the hospital workers union in New York’s massive Puerto Rican Day Parade. The day before, hundreds in Manhattan’s El Barrio signed petitions for López’s release.The final speaker testifying at the hearing, Clarisa López Ramos, Oscar Lopez’s daughter, described the obstacles her father’s jailers have callously imposed on family members’ efforts to visit him over the years. She has helped organize a monthly protest of 32 women — one for each year of López’s incarceration — on a bridge in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to demand his release.
Elda Santiago, wife of political prisoner Norberto González Claudio, also spoke. Arrested in Puerto Rico in May 2011, González was extradited to the U.S. and held without bail until his conviction on “conspiracy” charges in November 2012. In an unsuccessful effort to break his morale, he has been “segregated from the rest of the prisoners,” Santiago noted. “Medical treatment is delayed and communications with the family are kept under surveillance and censored.”
One consequence of U.S. colonial rule is the imposition of capital punishment in federal cases despite the fact that such a penalty is barred by Puerto Rico’s constitution, noted Carol Sosa Santiago of the Puerto Rican Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Federal trials in Puerto Rico, including those where defendants face the death penalty, are conducted in English, a language only a small minority of the population speaks fluently, she said.
Colonial plebiscite
Many speakers referred to the Nov. 6, 2012, nonbinding referendum in Puerto Rico on the island’s colonial status — the fourth such vote in 45 years. A few speakers, advocating either statehood or the current commonwealth status, pointed to such votes as a vehicle to achieve their goal.“So-called plebiscites administered in a colony can only benefit the colonial authorities,” said independence fighter Juan Antonio “Papo” Castillo of the Puerto Rican Diaspora Solidarity Coordinating Committee, based in Worcester, Mass.
“A successful fight for Puerto Rico’s independence is also in the interests of the vast majority of the people of the United States,” Tom Baumann said on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party. Working people in the United States and the people of Puerto Rico “have a common enemy — the U.S. government and the capitalist ruling class it defends. And we share a common struggle — to get those exploiters off our backs.”
Baumann, Socialist Workers candidate for mayor of Miami, noted the increased receptivity to the fight for the release of the Puerto Rican political prisoners and the Cuban Five he has found while campaigning door to door in working-class neighborhoods.
Following adoption of the resolution by the U.N. decolonization committee, Cuban Ambassador León took the floor. He pointed to Oscar López as an example of “Puerto Ricans who remain unbroken” in standing up to the U.S. colonial rulers. “Oscar embodies the same virtues of our five comrades imprisoned for defending their people,” he said. The people of Puerto Rico “can count on our unwavering solidarity” in the fight to free the political prisoners and for independence.
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