A View From The American Left- Puerto Rico May Day Cops Attack Demonstrators For the Right of Independence!

Workers Vanguard No. 1134	18 May 2018

Puerto Rico May Day

Cops Attack Demonstrators

For the Right of Independence!

For the second year in a row, a national work stoppage on international workers day shut down much of Puerto Rico, whose impoverished people have long suffered under the yoke of U.S. colonial oppression. Fed up with relentless attacks on basic needs and public services, thousands of trade unionists, students and other activists took to the streets of San Juan and elsewhere to protest against the latest savage austerity measures dictated by Washington’s Financial Oversight and Management Board, known as the “junta.” This body, established by the Obama administration in 2016, is hell-bent on looting pensions, closing schools and making life post-Hurricane Maria even more miserable for workers and the oppressed, all so U.S. banks and hedge funds can collect on the island’s massive debt. Under the directive of the junta, tuition at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) has more than doubled.

Marching from different gathering points, May Day protesters in San Juan converged on the Milla de Oro (Gold Mile), where the junta and various financial institutions have their offices. Over 1,000 cops in full riot gear, many with motorcycles, lined the city streets and formed barricades. When one contingent made up mostly of students and leftists tried to proceed to the despised Banco Popular headquarters, riot cops and a SWAT team suddenly unleashed an assault of macanazos (nightstick blows), rubber bullets, pepper spray and tear gas. Retirees, union members and their children cried and gasped for air as gas spread throughout the area and police blocked escape routes.

Cops chased protesters all the way back to Río Piedras, where the main UPR campus is located, releasing tear gas in front of a retirement home and storming a residence without a warrant. Some 20 people were arrested and held at several different police stations, making it difficult for activists to assist them. That night, a protest statement in Spanish and English was issued by the Partisan Defense Committee, a legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, which we distributed in San Juan. It declared: “We denounce this campaign of terror. The state wants to silence all those who oppose the starvation measures imposed by the U.S. colonial masters and enforced by the capitalist government of Puerto Rico.”

A few short hours after the cop rampage, Puerto Rican governor Ricardo Rosselló, a lackey of the U.S. colonialists, demanded that union and other May Day organizers condemn the protesters’ “violence.” In response, union leaders in the Pueblo Unido coalition, the main organizers of the Milla de Oro rally, publicly defended all protesters. An emergency demonstration was organized and everyone arrested has been released. In some cases, the state has decided not to press charges. Others arrested have hearings scheduled in upcoming days. Hands off the May Day protesters!

Time and again, the Puerto Rican police, known as La Uniformada, have brutally attacked union protests. Just a few days before the national work stoppage, on April 27, teachers represented by the Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (FMPR) were clubbed and pepper-sprayed while picketing outside the Department of Education. Last November, 21 FMPR members were arrested inside the building, marching to the office of Education Secretary Julia Keleher, who openly touts New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as a model. In that city, unionized teachers, overwhelmingly black women, were thrown on the scrap heap as anti-union charter schools all but replaced the public school system.

Puerto Rico’s teachers are locked in a bitter battle not only for their livelihoods but also for the very existence of public education. Despite the direct experience of police violence in the service of the capitalist forces of privatization, union leaders appeal to the cops as fellow victims of austerity, as fellow workers. The day after the national work stoppage, the head of the Educamos teachers union offered: “If they want our support for their demands for fair pay and that their retirement benefits be honored, they can’t put themselves on the side of the rich and corrupt who have sacked the country and brought us to bankruptcy.”

The cops are not workers or potential allies of working people and the oppressed in any sense. When the cops mobilize for their pay and pensions, it is to be better able to mete out all-sided repression. Puerto Rico is a class-divided society, and the police are a core part of the bourgeois state that ensures the domination of capital over labor. Maintaining “law and order,” they are the front-line enforcers of the system of colonial subjugation and the hired guns of the local bourgeoisie. Whatever their social origins, including those from poor or working-class backgrounds, the cops function as strikebreakers. Police associations have no place in the workers movement.

The ratio of Puerto Rico’s active police officers to residents is more than twice that of the U.S. national average for a reason. From its origins in 1899, the year after the U.S. military invaded and took possession of the country, the Puerto Rico Police Department (PRPD, then the Insular Police) was tasked with helping keep Washington’s colonial subjects under its heel. The PRPD has always backed up the U.S. overlords, including in their decades-long bloody war on independentistas. In the 1937 Ponce Massacre, these cops gunned down 19 independence supporters and wounded more than 200 people.

Last May Day, the PRPD arrested activist Nina Droz on trumped up charges and handed her over to the Feds. After enduring a year of suffering and indignities, Droz remains incarcerated without bail, still awaiting sentencing (see “Free Nina Droz!” WV No. 1128, 23 February). Notably, the FMPR teachers have taken up her cause. Recent marches throughout Puerto Rico demanding freedom for Droz (and for Ana Belén Montes, a U.S. intelligence officer imprisoned for aiding Cuba) have received local media coverage. Our comrades distributed a Spanish-language translation of the WV article in defense of Droz at the May Day protests and on UPR campuses.

Before Hurricane Maria, the U.S. imperialists had starved the country of basic infrastructure and essential resources. Now eight months on, Puerto Rico is a long way from recovery, as witnessed by the extremely fragile state of the electric grid. Over 22,000 Puerto Ricans have not yet even had their power restored. On April 18, Puerto Rico once again plunged into darkness after a simple, avoidable accident by a sub-contractor. Most traffic lights are dead in San Juan, including along the Milla de Oro. Meanwhile, the next hurricane season is fast approaching.

Resentment at the colonial treatment of Puerto Rico was on vivid display on May Day. As revolutionary Marxists, we favor independence for Puerto Rico, which would strike a resounding blow against U.S. imperialism. The fight against colonial oppression in Puerto Rico would necessarily be directed at the local agents of imperialism and could act as a lever for socialist revolution and the establishment of a workers republic. Such struggles would reverberate throughout the Caribbean, Latin America and the U.S.

At the same time, we recognize that many Puerto Ricans are of mixed opinion on the matter of independence; a strongly felt national identity is often accompanied by a fear of losing the ability to live and work in the U.S. (which allows for remittances to be sent back to Puerto Rico), and of plunging into deeper poverty. Therefore, we stress the right of independence for Puerto Rico.

Many more Puerto Ricans now live in the U.S. than in Puerto Rico, forming an important component of the multiracial working class, particularly in New York and Florida. These Puerto Rican workers represent a living link between the struggles of the proletariat in the U.S. imperialist center and its largest colony. The trade unions and workers movement in the U.S. must fight to defend the working masses and students of Puerto Rico against repression and colonial oppression.

Puerto Rico’s unionized teachers have drawn inspiration from recent statewide strikes by educators in West Virginia and other states. The generalized starving of public education is but one example of how the U.S. capitalist ruling class is the enemy of both workers in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico. What is needed is joint struggle against privatizations, for free public education and to cancel the debt, which is choking the Puerto Rican masses.

Struggles against the rapacious American bourgeoisie must be directed toward its overthrow through proletarian revolution. International working-class rule will liberate humanity from imperialist domination and lay the basis for the eradication of poverty. Our perspective is to build Leninist parties in the U.S., Puerto Rico and beyond whose goal is to establish workers power.