[News] Puerto Rico Student Strike Victory Unleashes Brutal Civil Rights Backlash

[Anti-Imperialist News]

<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd>Maritza Stanchich, Ph.D.

Posted: July 4, 2010 11:40 AM
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd/university-of-puerto-rico_b_635090.html>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd/university-of-puerto-rico_b_635090.html


<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd/university-of-puerto-rico_b_635090.html>University 
of Puerto Rico Student Strike Victory Unleashes Brutal Civil Rights Backlash

As so many Americans gear up for Fourth of July 
fireworks this weekend, the U.S. Territory of 
Puerto Rico roils from a brutal civil rights 
showdown unleashed by a far-right wing 
government, now seemingly hell bent on destroying 
the recent unprecedented victory of a two-month 
long student strike against privatization of 
higher education at the University of Puerto Rico.

The broader implications are crucial on numerous 
fronts, including the struggle to maintain broad 
access to public higher education and efforts to 
rein in runaway neoliberal policies that have 
wreaked havoc on the global economy, resulting in 
draconian austerity measures worldwide. For the 
violence and repression seen in Greece and at the 
G20 in Toronto appears to now be visiting this 
Caribbean island nation of about four million 
U.S. citizens, the homeland of more than an 
additional four million Puerto Ricans in the 
United States, the second largest U.S. Latino group.

While the economic crisis in Puerto Rico--the 
worst since the 1940s, if not the 1930s-has been 
deepening for years, and the current right wing 
government has aggressively implemented a 
hard-line, unpopular neoliberal agenda since its 
broad electoral victory last November, it appears 
as if the recent UPR student strike victory has 
touched off a firestorm, with a police attack on 
peaceful demonstrators at Puerto Rico's Capitol 
building on Wednesday injuring dozens, some seriously.

The UPR strike concluded June 21 after a tense, 
two-month shut down of 10 campuses in a system 
serving nearly 65,000 students at the end of the 
academic year, with an accord that by all 
accounts was an unprecedented strike victory, in 
historic, hemispheric terms. A widely-supported 
student movement remarkable for its coalition 
building across traditionally distinct and even 
contentious social and political sectors 
coalesced against threatened erosion of broad 
public access to the widely-regarded state 
university, as well as its increasing privatization.

With tensions high after police and riot squads 
had attacked and injured students, their parents 
and journalists on at least three occasions, an 
agreement finally reached through judicial 
mediation met with the students' basic demands, 
reinstating cancelled tuition waivers, 
temporarily forestalling a tuition hike or 
imposition of student fees, and protecting strike 
leaders from summary suspension reprisals. The 
accord, signed by a majority of the Board of 
Trustees, though those refusing included the 
university and board presidents, was hailed as an 
achievement in civil conflict resolution, 
especially in light of the history of previous 
UPR strikes that had ended in deadly violent repressions.

Immediately after however, the Puerto Rico state 
legislature, dominated by the extreme right of 
the local Pro-Statehood party, rapidly expanded 
the university Board of Trustees, with the 
governor approving four new appointees, and a new 
but divided board quickly imposed a $800 student 
fee starting in January, and made it permanent, 
reminiscent of the imposition of fees at 
University of California by then Gov. Ronald 
Reagan. The legislature also quickly dismantled a 
long-standing UPR tradition of student 
assemblies, replacing them with private 
electronic computer voting devoid of open debate. 
Other cuts were also implemented affecting 
professors and adjunct instructors, who now make 
up about 40 percent of the UPR faculty, following 
trends in the United States, where 60 percent of 
all professors occupy such increasingly precarious positions.

In a far worse economic straits than the states 
of California or Michigan, Puerto Rico is 
confronting its worst fiscal crisis in decades, 
and UPR the biggest fiscal crisis of its 100-year 
existence. As throughout much of the world facing 
related circumstances, virulent and organized 
opposition to drastic cuts principally directed 
at the working and deteriorating middle classes 
has mushroomed, especially since the current 
global crisis, in Alan Greenspan's own befuddled 
words, was caused by greed-induced corruption 
among the highest echelons of the world economy.

While the neoliberal agenda of Puerto Rico's 
current political leaders look back to the very 
doctrines now being challenged in the United 
States and throughout Latin America, the UPR 
student movement embodies the vanguard of the 
contemporary 21st Century, as reflected by their 
symbols and tactics, including the democratizing 
internet, egalitarian rainbow flags, sustainable 
organic farming, an effervescence of alternative 
arts, and new coalition building among center, 
right and left, in tandem with occupation 
practices inspired by international student 
movements as far as California, Spain, France and Greece.

Though a shocking collective trauma, the violent 
crackdown at the Capitol Wednesday was not 
entirely surprising given the current 
administration's assault on all fronts since 
coming into power, targeting progressive, 
cultural and social welfare institutions and 
agencies with crippling budget cuts, attempting 
to dissolve Puerto Rico's bar association, 
lifting environmental protections to whole swaths 
of protected lands, and passing a now notorious 
law, called Ley 7, that not only dismisses 20,000 
public employees, but declares null and void all 
public sector union contracts for three years, 
with the only recourse to challenging the law 
being to petition the local Supreme Court, now 
stacked with new appointments in the 
administration's favor. The governor has also 
activated the National Guard, amidst criticism 
from groups such the Puerto Rico chapters of the 
ACLU and Amnesty International.

Common in Puerto Rico, however, though unusual at 
most U.S. state universities, is the way 
political parties assume control of UPR 
leadership by appointing a new president, also 
recently achieved. This is in part because the 
UPR is widely regarded as national patrimony, and 
is one of the few places left in the country where dissent may be cultivated.

As opposition to these policies expands, as seen 
in a massive national strike in October which 
drew a quarter of a million workers into the 
streets, so has the government's seeming 
intolerance to any opposition, as Gov. Luis 
Fortuño, Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz 
and UPR president José Ramón de la Torre commonly 
resort to Cold War era red-baiting with media 
campaigns labeling protestors as Socialists, 
Communists, and professional rabble rousers out 
to destabilize the country. The clamp down has so 
far gone as far as banning journalists from 
Senate chambers for four days last week during 
the country's budget sessions, prompting media 
organizations to petition in court to regain access.

"I don't think there is any doubt that the 
intention of this government is to set back civil 
rights," said Judith Berkan, a long-time civil 
rights attorney and a law professor at University 
of Puerto Rico and InterAmerican University in 
San Juan, adding that the administration has 
enacted a staggering number of measures to 
neutralize and debilitate all those perceived as 
a threat to a local oligarchy acting in concert with U.S. interests.

Attempts were made to reach Resident Commissioner 
Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico's non-voting 
representative in the U.S. Congress, and UPR 
President José Ramón de la Torre for comment, but 
they were not available at press time.

The irony that the Pro-U.S. Statehood party of 
Gov. Fortuño is now curtailing the most basic 
press and civil liberties is not lost on UPR 
student strike leaders who witnessed and were 
injured at Wednesday's melee, including those who 
belong to the pro-Statehood party themselves, and 
voted for the sitting governor.

"It pains me as a statehooder that this 
government has not learned the lessons of U.S. 
civil rights struggles of decades ago," said 
Aníbal Núñez, a student at the UPR law school and 
a member of the student negotiating committee.

Núñez acknowledged the participation of students 
affiliated with Socialist groups among strike 
leaders and the student negotiating committee, 
and said they overcame their differences via 
universal concerns for education as a social 
necessity, as they gained each others' respect 
while coalition building together, adding that if 
he could not overcome ideological differences 
enough to collaborate, he would still believe in 
their right to pluralistically exist.

The notion that accessible, quality higher 
education contributes to economic recovery runs 
counter to the widening U.S. trend of students 
graduating with crippling debt, as public 
education has for years now faced diminishing 
state support. A common argument used by the 
administration during the UPR strike was its 
affordable tuition, at less than $2,000 per year 
for undergraduates before the recently imposed 
fees. But while tuition is cheaper than probably 
any other state university in the United States, 
average income in Puerto Rico is also far lower 
than any other U.S. state, with about 48 percent 
of the population living in poverty as defined by 
U.S. federal standards, and the cost of living in 
San Juan at least, far higher than at oft 
compared institutions in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 
or Oxford, Mississippi. This tradition of 
maintaining broad public access to a quality 
state institution of higher learning is a hard 
earned point of pride at UPR, compared to 
institutions that have recently reneged their 
public mission with sudden and steep fee/tuition 
increases, such as at University of California, 
where students also opposed, occupied and met 
with police repression, but could not stave off a 
32% fee hike imposed in November.

As UPR administrators continue to grapple with 
what was a nearly $200 million budget shortfall 
for next year going into the strike, in search of 
additional or alternative money saving and 
raising sources, an emboldened student movement 
will also regroup and weigh all its options. 
Future conflicts may be averted by altering the 
very style of governance at UPR, a top-down and 
paternalistic holdover from the past, as this 
could go a long way toward making students, as 
well as professors and staff who also have large 
stakes at play, part of a give-and-take process.

For come what may in the global fiscal crisis in 
the coming decade, these students are the future 
of new Americas of increasingly porous borders 
and dramatic, rapid demographic, political, 
cultural, informational and economic shifts, as 
the old order, the vestiges of the Cold War in 
Puerto Rico and in South Florida for example, fade into the proverbial sunset.

"We may not hold the power but we have the will 
power," stated law student Núñez, "and given the choice, I prefer the latter."

UPR administrators and Statehood party leaders 
would do well to recognize and reach out to the 
productive potential of this new power, shift 
gears and learn to act on the principles they purportedly hold dear.




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