[News] Leading Puerto Rican activists celebrate governor's resignation, talk next steps

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://wagingnonviolence.org/2019/07/puerto-rico-protests-ricardo-rossello-resignation-activists-next-steps/ 



  Leading Puerto Rican activists celebrate governor's resignation, talk
  next steps

Matt Meyer -  July 25, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

By all accounts, the shutdown of Puerto Rico’s industries, schools, 
government and business-as-usual on Monday was an unexpected show of 
popular sentiment 
<https://www.democracynow.org/2019/7/23/puerto_rico_protests_ricardo_rossello_seg1> 
against ruling Gov. Ricardo Rosselló. It was a true national strike, 
spreading from the capital in San Juan to all other major cities like 
Mayaguez, Ponce and Aguadilla.

While Rosselló was resistant to the initial calls and protests demanding 
his immediate resignation last week — following leaks that revealed 
misogynist and homophobic remarks he had made in private — the embattled 
leader finally succumbed on Wednesday night, announcing that he would 
step down 
<https://www.democracynow.org/2019/7/25/headlines/puerto_rico_gov_ricardo_rossello_resigns_amid_mass_protests> 
next Friday.

Despite this success for half a million people who made Monday’s 
national strike possible, longtime Puerto Rican activists have been 
quick to assert that Rosselló’s resignation — and the fissures revealed 
by his blunders — will not easily be reconciled by minor reforms or 
proclamations.

“In our history, I don’t think there has been a moment like this one,” 
noted 76-year-old Oscar Lopez Rivera, widely regarded as the elder 
statesman of the island 
<https://wagingnonviolence.org/2017/06/honoring-oscar-lopez-rivera/>. 
“Even before the governor announced his resignation, the fact is that he 
was not governing Puerto Rico.”

Lopez Rivera, who was called the “Mandela of the Americas” throughout 
Latin America during his more than 35 years behind bars for supporting 
independence, has been living and working in San Juan since winning 
clemency in 2017.

“Many members of Rosselló’s own party, the pro-statehood New Progressive 
Party were not responding to him,” Lopez Rivera said. “The demands 
Puerto Ricans are making right now go beyond the call for his 
resignation: Puerto Ricans want the house of corruption, known as the 
legislature, to be cleaned out. They want the elimination of the Fiscal 
Control Board [created by the Obama administration to oversee the 
island’s economic affairs] and for the odious debt to be audited. Puerto 
Ricans want all public schools to remain public and those that were 
closed to be re-opened.”

Women’s rights organizer Onelia Perez Rivera agreed that Rosselló’s 
resignation would not stop the momentum behind these struggles, noting 
“This protest movement isn’t headed by traditional leaders or by 
conventional left sectors. Young people are here, but also entire 
families have responded to the call with great creativity!”

Perez Rivera, a leading force behind the long-standing empowerment 
association Centro Mujer Barranquitas 
<https://www.facebook.com/centromujer.barranquitas>, said that while she 
and other well-known progressive voices were consulted — due to their 
longstanding and respected critiques of the colonial and capitalist 
system that rules the island — it was the youth who made the protests 
happen. They were the originators, and their outrage was centered on a 
clear understanding that the people will not stand for the corruption 
and indignities of the past.

“Even though we still may not know how to build the new society we want 
to freely live in, we are feeling it! And it feels good,” she said.

Campaign for Human Rights activist Luis Rosa echoed Perez Rivera’s 
sentiments, saying, “Rosselló’s resignation must be seen as a victory 
for the will of the people, a newly found or rediscovered victory of a 
new generation.”

The former political prisoner — who was freed in 1999 after a massive 
international campaign — then offered some perspective: “Those seeking 
to replace Rosselló will promise a world of change, creating compacts 
with community base organizations and proposing everything right up to 
the border of revolutionary change. But the people are clear that the 
core of what we need are three basic things: decolonization, an end to 
our colonial status through a constitutional assembly; health care, free 
for all Puerto Rican citizens; and free public education up through the 
university level.”

Rosa is calling for the creation of a far-reaching think tank that could 
script out a strategy for the work of achieving liberation. “Let us 
create projects that can take independence out of the realm of the 
abstract and intangible or unexplainable,” he said. “We are building 
something we can use to break the fear of change.”

With a national general strike being arguably the greatest weapon an 
occupied and oppressed people can use to overthrow repressive regimes, 
Monday’s dramatic strike was not the only contemporary Puerto Rican 
demonstration numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Huge mobilizations 
have also taken place in response to the privatization and selling of 
Puerto Rico’s nationalized electric industry, U.S. military bombings of 
neighboring Vieques and the incarceration of Puerto Rican political 
prisoners.

While the hyper-colonial nature of Puerto Rico’s specific relationship 
to the United States may lead the course of “regime change” down a 
convoluted path, there are few Americans who understand the intricacies 
of Puerto Rico’s current “free associated state” status. Even most 
progressive people are barely aware that the U.S. occupation of Puerto 
Rico began with direct marine intervention in 1898, and that the U.S. 
military still occupies choice lands throughout the archipelago.

What’s more, Puerto Ricans have been drafted to serve in the U.S. Armed 
Forces and sent disproportionately to the front lines of U.S. wars — 
despite the fact that they cannot vote in U.S. presidential elections, 
have no representation in Congress, and face harsh and extreme 
repression when they exercise rights that may contradict the wishes of 
Washington, D.C. As recently as June 24, the United Nations Special 
Committee on Decolonization noted 
<https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/gacol3337.doc.htm> that “political 
insubordination” on the part of the colonial United States “impedes 
Puerto Rico’s ability to tackle its serious economic and social problems.”

It is therefore not difficult to sympathize with Oscar Lopez Rivera in 
his assertion that those who took part in the strike — led in large part 
by young women 
<https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/vb9w9x/these-puerto-rican-women-have-had-it-with-rossellos-corruption-and-lewd-texts> 
— understood that “they were the majority” and that, by shouting for an 
end to the ways things have been, “they were decolonizing themselves.”

According to Lopez Rivera, Puerto Ricans are calling for “a total 
transformation towards a free and independent nation. And what we are 
witnessing is a movement that can’t be stopped.” Ultimately, he 
concluded, “Puerto Rico will be the nation it has the potential of 
becoming.”

-- 
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