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Articles : MiscellaneousIn Filiberto's Wake, a Free Puerto Rico?
The FBI did not kill Puerto Rican independence leader Filiberto Ojeda-Rios in San Juan on a random day. When agents approached where he was staying on September 23, 2005 – after staking out the place for several days – it was the 137th anniversary of the “Grito de Lares,” the famous Puerto Rican uprising against Spanish colonial rule.
But a group of Puerto Rican artists and independence activists are using that day as a way to spread Ojeda-Rio’s words and life as well as to inspire the cause for the liberation of Puerto Rico.
New York based video artist Vagabond and the Ricanstruction collective have collected a lengthy interview with Ojeda-Rios, which is guessed to have taken place in 1991, in addition to Puerto Rican news footage about him. They are showing what they call Entrevista Clandestina on the 23rd of every month in a different location in New York. The first two showings have been at a community center in East Harlem and Bluestockings, a radical bookstore on the Lower East Side. They hope to have showings in the South Bronx, Brooklyn and other places with large Puerto Rican communities in the future. They plan to have a large event to mark the first anniversary of Ojeda-Rio’s death this September.
Ojeda-Rios was a controversial, eccentric and charismatic figure. As the leader of the Ejercito Popular Boricua, or the Macheteros, he was able to unite the many armed independence factions into an actual political movement, according to Vicente ‘Panama’ Alba, one the organizers of the monthly showings.
In the main interview, Ojeda-Rios denounces what he sees as the colonial manipulation of the Puerto Rican people by the American government.
“This is a timeless interview,” Alba said. In addition to high amounts of crime, he said that there are other problems Puerto Ricans have to face in their daily lives. The unemployment rate is more than 9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Ojeda-Rios was indicted by a grand jury in 1985 for participating in a Wells Fargo bank robbery in 1983. He went underground in Puerto Rico in 1990, but continued to be a voice of the independence movement by giving radio interviews and writing newspaper articles, said Vagabond.
According to an official FBI statement, while gunfire was exchanged on September 23, agents were not sent into the residence until they next day. They found his dead body on September 24. Ricanstruction activists insisted that the FBI did this intentionally so that he would bleed to death.
The FBI found his residence from an informant who later called Rep. Jose Serrano’s (D-NY) office and said he regretted ratting out Ojeda-Rios because he did not realize the FBI would kill him. The FBI conducted further raids on the homes of other suspected independence activists in February according to the office of Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY).
The independence movement in Puerto Rico has long lived in the political margins, as people have voted in plebiscites to remain a U.S. territory rather than become a U.S. state or an independent country. But Vagabond reiterates a point Ojeda-Rios states in the interviews. He thinks that this does not reflect the island’s true attitude because the U.S. will have the final say on Puerto Rico’s destiny no matter what the outcome is. Therefore, people who desire either statehood or independence are not encouraged to vote in the plebiscites. Furthermore, he said, with unemployment and low standards of living on the island, people are afraid to lose U.S. administered benefits such as food stamps and other forms of public assistance.
But people involved in this monthly showing, like New York based artist Yasmin Hernandez, believe the political situation is changing.
While the U.S. media did not cover Ojeda-Rios’ death to any great extent, Hernandez said, there were massive protests against the killing by people of all political orientations. Hernandez heard the news of the protests from her apolitical aunt in Puerto Rico, and said that on her last visit to the island she noticed that there is more anti-American and pro-independence graffiti in the streets.
The Puerto Rican Attorney General’s Office has been looking into allegations of FBI misconduct in the raids. House Democrats on the judiciary committee asked FBI Director Robert Mueller why the FBI did not work more closely with local law enforcement in a public hearing on March 28.
For Hernandez, the silver lining of the raids in Puerto Rico including Ojeda-Rios’ death is that the independence movement has grown in popularity.
“It is now making it fashionable to want revolution,” she said.
And that is why she believes it is important to show these interviews with Ojeda-Rios, because when unjust things happen, “it becomes our responsibility to share it.”
The next showing of Entrevista Clandestina will be on May 23 at 7PM at EL MAESTRO, 700 Elton Ave. at 154th Street in the Bronx.
Posted by atrain
Ari Paul has written for The American Prospect, In These Times, Tikkun, Z, Punk Planet, openDemocracy.net, Reason and other newspapers and magazines. He is also a reporter for The Chief-Leader, a New York weekly covering labor in the city.
FILIBERTO VIVE!
I feel, or have heard, many puerto ricans do not desire freedom and instead want to keep their U.S. connection. There seems to be a significant difference of opinion between boricuas living in the states (who are kind of unaffected by the problems in pr) and those living on the island. I wonder if there are any PR’s reading this from the island and not the states.
@goaldecolombia
Indeed, support for Puerto Rico’s independence can be measured (badly I think) at only 1% of the population. Which is the percent of voters that manage to keep the one leftish party barely alive.
The rest are divided about evenly between keeping the colonial status quo, and the right-wing anexionists. I have posted on my blog, however that the choice of statehood/anexionism is merely an illussion used as a “hot issue” for politicians to get elected.
I believe that no USA government, not even the most liberal one if one should manage to gain power ever again, would ever grant Puerto Rico statehood.
As the island is more profitable to the US and it’s corporations the US will simply keep the status quo while sometimes dangling that satehood carrot ever out of reach.
please read my blog posts here – spanish, here and here .
here’s the basic devil’s advocate argument: hasn’t PR done extremely well compared to its “free” neighbors in terms of standard of living, freedoms, violence, turmoil, etc?
Well yeah, its not blockaded, it gets remittances by the bucketload and has income from all the US military stationed there. Empire has some benefits.
S: exactly, and that’s why a lot of locals don’t want to give up the US association. they say the benefits of empire outweigh rolling alone. frankly, i don’t know much at all about PR politics. but i do know how screwed up the rest of the carribean is. not just cuba. as for your list, you could say the same about most of the region, expect for the bases part.
It’s hard to tell how they would do in a fairer Caribbean.
The US has also been trying to screw over banana farmers on some islands in the recent past, perhaps incidentally, by taking the EU to court over preferential (fair) trade terms that ensured a market for Caribbean grown crops. That’s a difference, another benefit of Empire.
Nobody would rationally choose a form of independence which changed Puerto Rico into a Cuba like pariah state, and shut off trade/aid with the U.S. What does Puerto Rico produce, apart from sportsmen and rubbish pop stars? Maybe US colonialism has left PC in a dependency situation that precludes an independence movement?
I have to admit that i’m no more knowledgeable here than you. Nice to think around it though. The UK could be heading Puerto Rico’s way if Tony’s wet dreams come true.
THE BENEFITS OF EMPIRE?
Empire may have some benefits but cancer rates in Vieques is not one of them, the sterilization of women is not one of them either, or the unemployment, or the damage to the enviornment, or the destablization of Puerto Rico’s economy. Those aren’t the benefits of empire. Nor are political prisoners or assasinations.
The benefits of empire were put into place solely to benefit empire so let’s not get it twisted. The fact that PR’s have found a way to squeeze something out of the nothing that empire offers is more a testament to PR’s than anything else.
The assassination of Filiberto for Puerto Ricans was like the death of Che Guevara to Cubans. Filiberto was the FBI’s number on fugitive unbtil 9/11 for a reason. And it’s not because of the benefits that empire has brought. (Or maybe it is?)
1% FOR INDEPENDENCE?
If you are basing this figure on the plebiscites done every once in a while as some sort of “democratic spectacle” to prove to the world that the US isn’t colonizing PR then you need to know the facts.
The reason that independence gets approximately 5% (not 1%) of the vote in PR when these plebiscites come around is because no matter what way PR’s decide to de-colonize themselves the US congress ultimately decides what it will do with PR. In other words if the whole islands voted for independence then the US congress could say we don’t want to give you independence and. So the vote is not binding and since it’s not binding then “indepedentistas” (supporters of independence) don’t vote in those plebiscites. As a result the numbers you are quoting are not an accurate representation of the independence movement in PR.
The other problem with those plebiscites is that they are not held to the standards of the UN’s De-colonization Resolution 1514.
IRAQUI FREEDOM BUT NOT PURTO RICAN FREEDOM?
The reason so many of you are taking this issue of US imperialism in PR so lightly is because you don’t see a resistance movement in PR and why don’t you? Because the US gov’t doesn’t want you to. How does it look that the bastion of democracry and freedom in the world can lay claim to the oldest colony on the planet? The very same almighty US of A can bring democracry and freedom to Afghanistan and Iraq but can’t see its way to freeing the oldest colony on the planet?
A HISTORY OF STRUGGLE
PR’s Nationalist Party attempted to kill President Truman in the 50’s in an effort to gain their freedom and shot up the house of Congress while it was in session. The FALN (Fuerzas Armads de Liberacion Nationalista) an underground armed resistance movement in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s claimed responsibility for over 108 bombings and actions for the liberation of their nation. The Macheteros blew up 10 fighter jets in the 80’s on the island of PR. Fighter jets that were going on bombing missions in Nicaragua. There is a long history of struggle with the PR independence issue.
Some of you need to research before you opinonate.
For more info check
www.ricanstruction.net