[News] 15, 000 March to End Police Occupation of University of Puerto Rico

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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

Associate Professor of English, University of Puerto Rico
Posted: February 14, 2011 08:53 AM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd/20000-march-to-end-police_b_822735.html?view=print



<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd/20000-march-to-end-police_b_822735.html>15,000 
March to End Police Occupation of University of Puerto Rico

Student protests at University of Puerto Rico 
have broadly mobilized the public against the 
police occupation of the campus with about 15,000 
marching along the main thoroughfares around the 
urban campus Saturday shouting "¡Fuera Policía, 
Fuera!" (Get Out Police, Get Out!), in response 
to police brutality during last week's volatile start of the semester.

A campus melee Wednesday of apparently 
indiscriminate police brutality led to more than 
25 student arrests, including some who were not 
protesting, and with serious injuries reported. 
The day culminated with leaders of the professors 
organization APPU (Asociación Puertorriqueña de 
Profesores Universitarios) calling a 24-hour work 
stoppage, which was then supported by the staff 
union HEEND (Hermandad de Empleados Exentos No 
Docentes), to the chants of a crowd of about 
1,000 students occupying the iconic clock tower 
housing Chancellor Ana R. Guadalupe's office. All 
the students arrested that day were later 
released without charges. Thursday afternoon, the 
Hermandad extended the walkout another 24 hours, 
leaving the campus desolate for a second consecutive day on Friday.

Saturday's march also followed Friday's 
resignation of University of Puerto Rico 
president José Ramón De La Torre, following his 
attempt to end the police occupation of the 
campus. The president's resignation highlights 
fissures in the forces now dominating the 
university, and further spread the 
incontrovertible belief that the university has 
completely lost its autonomy and is under direct 
government control, with top administrators 
serving as instruments to perhaps dismantle and 
radically restructure the institution. Many of 
UPR's most prestigious intellectuals have long 
conjectured that the government had planned to 
provoke a strike on purpose, to foment a violent 
scenario that would justify even closing the 
institution altogether. The strike began after a 
series of administrative and governmental 
provocations in December in the face of student 
demands to negotiate an imposed fee of $800 this 
semester, and $400 thereafter, as stipulated by 
accords ending a two-month strike on 10 of 11 campuses this past spring.

"The president's resignation shows a significant 
split over the purported need for the police 
occupation as well as the imposed fee," said Omar 
Ramírez, president of the General Student 
Council, referring to a letter made public 
shortly after the president resigned, in which he 
requested Police Chief José Figueroa Sancha 
remove the police from campus. In the letter, De 
La Torre also reconsiders the role of distinct 
sectors in resolving the conflict, such as the 
professor and staff unions, and acknowledges the 
help of only one politician, Senate Speaker 
Thomas Rivera Schatz, seen as a future competitor 
to Gov. Luis Fortuño, though also from the 
right-wing flank of the Statehood Party. Schatz 
is credited for creating a scholarship fund to 
offset the fee, though also perhaps intended to 
ease the transition to a privatized university. 
The former UPR president may also be protecting 
his reputation in the event of worse bloodshed or deaths in the conflict.

Gov. Fortuño on Friday was in Washington, D.C., 
during this latest juncture in the UPR crisis, 
attending a Conservative Political Action 
Conference, which gathered such right-wing 
notables as The National Rifle Association, The 
John Birch Society and The Tea Party.

Also on Friday, came news that Gov. Fortuño had 
named a commission to assess the university for 
restructuring, with appointees known to be openly 
hostile to the institution. These include former 
UPR president under the Commonwealth Party José 
M. Saldaña, who repeatedly published flagrantly 
demagogic Op-Ed pieces in the local press leading 
up to the strike, demonizing in particular the 
Colleges of Humanities, Social Sciences and 
Education as hotbeds of communist 
revolutionaries, in discourse reminiscent of 
certain right-wing 20th-century Latin American 
dictators. These colleges, like their 
counterparts in Business Administration and 
Natural Sciences, are in fact markedly 
heterogeneous in political temperament, and the 
institution as a whole, like many others of its 
size and ilk, is quite conservative throughout. 
In contemporary U.S. terms, Fortuño's axmen seem 
to operate discursively as a Latino Tea Party.

"We appear to be in the first stage of a 
democratic dictatorship, a new absolutism," 
observed UPR Humanities professor Rubén Ríos Ávila.

As institutional venues for redress constrict, 
the courts and civic unrest remain sites of 
active opposition to Fortuño's policies. Last 
Monday, student leader Giovanni Roberto's summary 
suspension was reversed on appeal, and the same 
case deemed the chancellor's edict against all 
protest and assembly on campus unconstitutional. 
Hence Wednesday's campus protests occurred while 
the prohibition was annulled. By the end of the 
week, however, the university won an appeal, and 
the case will now be again appealed on his behalf.

"Some of the most deeply rooted constitutional 
principles are at stake in this case after the 
administration of the University of Puerto Rico 
encroached on fundamental rights by establishing 
an absolute prohibition on free speech and the 
right to free assembly within the UPR campus," 
said attorney Frank Torres-Viada in a prepared statement.

Other reported abuses include police sexual 
harassment of female students, with one such 
incident instigating a campus confrontation early 
last week. A complaint of excessive force against 
females being arrested was also filed in a 
governmental women's advocacy agency, with the 
petite student movement leader Adriana Mulero 
Claudio, who was particularly roughed up on Wednesday, filing the claim.

Potential violence from riot police was averted 
on last Monday's first day of classes when 
members of the Hermandad union and onlookers 
formed a human chain between student protesters 
giving speeches and riot police who had 
completely surrounded them and were moving in to 
make arrests. The riot police retreated after 
professors, staff and public alike spontaneously 
involved themselves in a show of collective moral force.

During Saturday's march more than 10,000 
protesters at one point engaged in a civil 
disobedience sit in, periodically shutting down a 
highway, in solidarity with more than 150 
students who had been arrested for such acts 
weeks ago. The march drew members from 72 civic 
and political organizations, and seen 
participating were professors from the College of 
Natural Sciences, notables from the arts, 
seniors, community groups from housing projects, 
clergy, Vieques activists, even members of the Fortuño administration.

"I'm conservative and I work for this 
government," said one woman wearing a floppy hat 
to protect herself from identification and 
reprisals. "But I grew up in a small town, and I 
owe my economic betterment to my UPR education, 
and my children were also educated here," she 
added. "What the government is doing is just plain wrong."

With public higher education in dire straits 
elsewhere -- most recently Missouri cut 116 
academic programs throughout its public higher 
education system -- the very survival of this 
most prestigious university in Puerto Rico, the 
largest center of higher learning in the 
Caribbean and largest Hispanic-serving 
institution in the United States seems to be hanging in the balance.

But a major shakedown is one thing, and a blood 
feud quite another. As the second week of the 
semester begins, the UPR administration continues 
to insist it can ensure the safety of students 
and employees with a militarized campus, while 
the alarming sound of helicopters and sirens 
belie such claims. The administration argues the 
police must remain to prevent striking students 
from attempting to shut down the campus, yet that 
could be averted with real negotiation of the 
student fee, which never happened as had been 
agreed. Ultimately such entrenched polarization 
holds everyone hostage, and those who believe 
they can "win" such a conflict with brute force 
will surely prove to be sorely mistaken, and 
hopefully not tragically so. So the video here by 
student Luis R. Rosa wisely portends, with a 
haunting mother's cries as her only daughter is 
beaten by police, as we, too, viscerally bear witness.





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