[News] Political Murder in Puerto Rico

[Anti-Imperialist News]

September 27, 2005


A Matter for Our Movement

http://www.counterpunch.org/hylton09272005.html


Political Murder in Puerto Rico

By FORREST HYLTON

I.

Thanks to many fine African- and Arab-American as well as gay speakers at 
the rally in Washington on September 24, we focused on issues of occupation 
in Iraq and Israel/Palestine, dispossessed people, refugees, and the right 
to return to occupied territories, including parts of Louisiana, 
Mississippi, and Texas. We were reminded of the history of U.S. imperialism 
in the Philippines and informed that President Gloria Arroyo has made use 
of September 11 to criminalize protest and step up counterinsurgency 
efforts there, where US soldiers help man checkpoints. Amiri Baraka called 
on us to institutionalize a national-level anti-imperialist political 
formation in order to raise the movement from lowku to haiku. Meanwhile, 20 
city blocks full of anti-war protestors surrounded the White House. Though 
it received meager press coverage, the protest showed anyone who cared to 
look that the anti-war movement in the U.S. has acquired broad moral 
authority and political legitimacy. This, it seems, arises from its ability 
to express feelings and address questions that matter to the majority of 
people in this country.

The National Rally for Families of War Veterans, in contrast, was attended 
by President Bush, Christopher Hitchens, and a smattering of Republican 
Party faithful. To explain the anti-war mobilization, conspiracy theorists 
charged that as a front group for the World Workers' Party, the ANSWER 
coalition was in cahoots with Pyongyang, Tehran, and other axes of evil; 
that the occupation of Iraq was connected to avenging those who died in the 
attacks of September 11. Clearly, far more military families mobilized 
against the war than for it, and at the protest, foreign occupation was 
linked to domestic racism and inequality. An important minority of citizens 
may be inching toward radical change in structures of political feeling and 
consciousness across racial/ethnic, religious, and class divides.

Even if that proves not to be the case, however, we received a clear 
message -- in the form of political assassination in Puerto Rico -- about 
potential consequences of anti-imperialist struggle on September 23, the 
day on which the nationalist 'Grito de Lares' was proclaimed against Spain 
in 1868. As a speaker from San Juan reminded the few protestors not 
marching on the afternoon of September 24, the colonization of Puerto Rico 
was part of the first wave of US political-military expansion at the end of 
the nineteenth century. Considering the role played by Puerto Rico and 
Latin America more broadly in rise of the U.S. as an imperial power between 
1898 and 1930, as well as the massive presence of Puerto Ricans, 
Dominicans, Mexicans, Ecuadorians, and Colombians in US cities, towns, and 
fields, the lack of Spanish or bi-lingual English-Spanish speakers was 
surprising. It suggests the urgency of deepening ties to progressive forces 
in Spanish-speaking immigrant communities and forging solidarity with 
radical anti-imperialist movements in Latin America.



II.

Distracted by disaster at home and in Iraq, we may not have heard the Bush 
administration's message; news of it was buried at the bottom of p. 16 in 
Sunday's New York Times, and was briefly mentioned in the New York Daily 
News. This being the case in the city with the largest Puerto Rican 
population in the U.S., it seems safe to assume that the story did not 
receive serious coverage in national or local papers. What follows is 
intended as a modest effort to spread the word. It should be complemented 
by a reading of Rafael Rodriguez Cruz's detailed description of the murder.

Basic facts are now established. After being surrounded on a farm near 
Hormigueros, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, was shot by an FBI sniper on September 
23 and left for 20 hours to bleed to death. He was between 72 and 75 years 
old, and while he granted interviews and issued frequent statements to the 
media, he had been living clandestinely since September 23, 1990. Though he 
was high on the FBI's list of most-wanted fugitives (having been condemned 
in absentia to 55 years), it is not clear why the FBI did not simply arrest 
him, as they did his Ojeda Rios's widow, Elma Beatriz Rosado (who was 
released on September 24), or let him surrender to Jesús Dávila, a 
reporter. Unless one assumes, as I do, that the FBI wanted him dead rather 
than alive. That would explain why they did not let medical personnel into 
the area where the operation took place.

We often forget the anti-terrorist hysteria whipped up during the Reagan 
years, especially after Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish neo-fascist, tried to 
assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981; Michael Ledeen and Claire Sterling 
became the sort of overnight experts on terrorism that have proliferated 
since 2001, insisting that a "Bulgarian connection" with Soviet communism 
was behind the attack. Back then, in what Noam Chomsky called the "Second 
Cold War," "anti-terrorism" was used mainly as a weapon in the crusade 
against radical nationalism in the Middle East, Central America, and Cuba. 
Filiberto Ojeda Ríos and those he led into the $7.2 million Wells Fargo 
depot robbery in West Hartford, CT, in 1983, fit snugly under Washington's 
"communist terrorist" rubric.

It was one of the most successful bank robberies in history, and Ojeda Ríos 
had been waging armed struggle against the US since helping found the 
Movimiento Indepndentista Armado (MIRA) in 1967. He was arrested in the 
early 1970s, but escaped, and helped form the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación 
Nacional (FALN) in New York City, renamed the Ejército Popular Boricua-Los 
Macheteros in 1976. Part of Che Guevara's generation, he accepted the 
latter's ideas about the place of guerrilla focos in triggering 
revolutionary change. Like Che, he rejected the cautious, bureaucratic 
reformism characteristic of communist parties in Latin America and regimes 
in Russia and Eastern Europe. Indeed, Dylcia Pagán, a former political 
prisoner who served a 20-year sentence before being granted clemency by 
President Clinton in 1999, described Ojeda Ríos as "our Che Guevara."

As head of the EPB-Macheteros, he once directed a political-military 
operation that blew up nine fighter jets on Muñiz Air Force Base, and was 
eventually captured in a shootout with police in Connecticut in 1985. He 
served three years without trial before being released on bail in 1988-a 
year marked by the spread of the first intifada as well as anti-IMF riots 
in Algeria and Nigeria. He went into clandestinity just as George H.W. Bush 
prepared to launch the first Gulf War against the Iraqi people and the 
multiethnic, multinational oil proletariat in the Middle East. Thus the 
co-ordinates of the political world in which Ojeda had come of age had 
shifted in the direction of counterrevolution, and anti-imperialist 
nationalist -- as well as communist -- projects were pronounced dead. To 
judge by electoral participation and political mobilization in general, for 
a majority of Puerto Ricans, independence seemed a lost cause.



III.

Although the independence movement is internally divided and represents a 
tiny minority of Puerto Ricans, what is striking is the extent to which the 
execution of Ojeda Ríos has caused outrage among those who do not support 
independence. An editorial in New York's largest Spanish-language daily, 
the center-rightwing El Diario/La Prensa, pointed out that "Ojeda's life 
and death are an important part of Puerto Rican history, of the struggle of 
a people to preserve its dignity and of a government that says it is 
struggling for democracy abroad, but which continues to maintain a colonial 
relation with this island of 3.8 million U.S. citizens." Like Hurricane 
Katrina, then, the murder of Ojeda exposed the racist exclusion of people 
who are only formally U.S. citizens, on a day of symbolic significance to 
Puerto Ricans of all political stripes. Antonio Camacho -- who served a 
fifteen-year prison term for his role in the Wells Fargo robbery -- argued, 
"They want to humiliate the people so that we won't celebrate on symbolic 
dates." Puerto Rican governor Aníbal Acevedo Vilá called for an 
investigation, noting his "deep indignation" over the FBI's criminal 
behavior, and appointed Dr. Héctor Pesquera, co-director of the Movimiento 
Independentista Hostosiano -- which denounced a planned FBI operation to 
make 125 arrests of independentistas -- to observe the autopsy and report 
on results. Julio Fontanet, president of the Puerto Rican Bar Association, 
announced the creation of a seven-person investigative commission to 
present findings within 90 days.

As one would expect, repercussions in New York were immediate, as 
Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez called on the FBI to explain its actions, and 
Vicente Alba, the Brigada Vieques, and the Comité Pro-Libertad organized a 
protest rally at 26 Federal Plaza on September 26. An assemblyman from the 
Bronx, José Rivera, said, "In the history of the struggle to de-colonize 
Puerto Rico, there have always been men and women who have said, 
'Presente.' Filiberto Ojeda was one of themand I say to the U.S. Congress 
that they stop playing with the Puerto Rican people, because the status of 
Puerto Rico is behind all this." Puerto Rican nationalist unity -- 
multiethnic, transnational, and cross-class -- is a welcome development in 
brutal times marked by incidents like the assassination of Ojeda Ríos. One 
need not be a follower of Che Guevara, or pine for the days when armed 
struggle seemed, to many, the correct path to revolutionary social change, 
in order to see the significance of such acts for Puerto Ricans, Latin 
Americans, and radical anti-imperialists around the world.

The question needs to be posed: here in the Homeland, does the regime count 
on the silence and ignorance of our growing anti-war movement when it 
carries out exemplary acts of imperial savagery in Puerto Rico? In no small 
measure due to victories in Camp Crawford and after, the anti-war movement 
figures into the presidential calculus, and the killing of Ojeda Ríos 
represents an injury to our movement.

Before taking up armed struggle in 1967, Ojeda Ríos had been a trumpet 
player with the legendary Sonora Ponceña, but after going into 
clandestinity in 1990, he had to leave melody-making to others for fear of 
being captured. Now that he's gone, let's make our voices heard alongside 
the voice of his widow: "FBI out of Puerto Rico!"

Forrest Hylton is author of An Evil Hour: Colombia in Historical Context 
(forthcoming from Verso), as well as co-editor of Ya es otro tiempo el 
presente: Cuatro momentos de insurgencia indígena, the second edition of 
which is forthcoming from Muela del Diablo. He can be reached at 
<mailto:forresthylton at hotmail.com>forresthylton at hotmail.com.


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