Vol. 76/No. 26      July 16, 2012

Nearly all of the three dozen speakers at the committee’s June 18 hearing—from supporters of independence to a handful who argued for a modified status quo—demanded that the U.S. government release Oscar López Rivera, imprisoned for 31 years on frame-up charges of seditious conspiracy, and two other Puerto Rican independence fighters, Norberto and Avelino González-Claudio.

The resolution was initiated by the Cuban government and backed by the governments of Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela. This is the 13th consecutive year the committee has called for the end of Puerto Rico’s colonial status.

U.S. colony since 1898

In 1952 Washington signed a pact with the governor of Puerto Rico declaring Puerto Rico a commonwealth, in Spanish a “free associated state,” as part of efforts to obscure U.S. imperialism’s subjugation of the island. A year later, at U.S. insistence, the U.N. removed Puerto Rico from its list of colonies.

“Obviously, we are here today because Puerto Rico continues to be a U.S. colony and three men who have dedicated their lives to the independence of our nation are still in prison,” former political prisoner Carlos Alberto Torres testified at the U.N. commission. Torres was released in 2010 after 30 years in U.S. jails on frame-up charges for his pro-independence activities. “In the history of our nation since the U.S. invasion in 1898, thousands of men and women have been imprisoned for the noble cause of independence,” he said, pointing out that Oscar López has been held longer than any of them.

Torres described the hypocrisy of Washington, which “holds itself up to be the most democratic country in the world [and] demands other countries free their political prisoners” while “denying that it is holding political prisoners in its own dungeons.”

The U.S. government would have you believe we are “punished not for our beliefs, but for our ‘criminal’ conduct, and only after ‘due process’ in their courts,” Torres said. But, “we were charged with seditious conspiracy … basically a thought crime. … Colonialism is the real crime, not the efforts to end it.”

Imposition of English

Fortuño and his New Progressive Party are for Puerto Rico becoming the 51st U.S. state, which independence supporters call annexation.

A similar attempt to impose English was made “during the first years of the military invasion of Puerto Rico,” said Héctor Pesquera, co-president of the Hostos National Independence Movement. “Every morning boys and girls were forced to swear loyalty to the invader’s flag and national anthem.” But the attempt failed.

U.S. Congress and U.S. courts impose laws on Puerto Rico that the Puerto Rican people have no say in. Among the affronts to the country’s sovereignty is Washington’s assertion of its right to impose a sentence of death on prisoners tried in federal court in Puerto Rico for alleged crimes on the island, despite the fact that it is banned by the constitution of the commonwealth.

“We have rejected the death penalty, fought its application for more than a century, legislated its abolition in 1929,” Edgardo Manuel Román Espada, from the Puerto Rican Coalition Against the Death Penalty, said. Popular opposition to capital punishment on the island has stayed the imperialists’ hand in actually carrying out any executions.

Debate over upcoming plebiscite

“You cannot choose freely if you are not free,” said Osvaldo Toledo Martínez, president of the Puerto Rican Bar Association, opposing the plebiscite.

U.S. economic control of the island has resulted in “the destruction of the local agricultural, fishing, commercial, and entrepreneurial economy,” Martínez said, ensuring a “captive market” for U.S. companies. The U.S. domination of the market combined with “federal aid” programs, he stated, have fostered a “mentality of dependence” among many in Puerto Rico.

Juan Dalmau Ramírez, secretary general of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, told EFE news agency during the hearing that the plebiscite would be “an important step for generating a dynamic toward decolonization.”

Luis Delgado Rodríguez of the Alliance for a Sovereign Free Association called on the U.N. committee to back the upcoming plebiscite. He claimed that a modification of the current status of Puerto Rico “on the basis of a relationship of mutual respect with the United States” would be a step toward decolonization.

Washington will do what it wants regardless of any plebiscite, said Pesquera in explaining Hostos National Independence Movement “has denounced the process as a fraud and is making a call to tear up or damage the ballots in protest.”

‘We share a common struggle’

Pointing to resistance that has begun in the U.S. to the capitalist crisis, including labor battles by longshore workers in Washington state and sugar workers in the Midwest, Fein said that it is “among these workers that support can be won in the fight to free the Puerto Rican political prisoners and for the battle for the independence of Puerto Rico.”

“The U.S. colonial masters promote the lie that Puerto Rico cannot survive without dependence on Washington,” Fein said. “But the Cuban Revolution shatters that myth.”

In addition to demanding freedom for the Puerto Rican political prisoners, Fein called for the release of the Cuban Five, as did the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico.

“For over a century, Cubans and Puerto Ricans have been fighting together for the independence of its Latin American sister nation,” said Cuban Ambassador Oscar León González, after the U.N. committee adopted the resolution. “The 114 years of colonial domination have not been enough to deprive Puerto Rico of its culture, identity and national sentiment.”  
 
 
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