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Commemorate the life of Filiberto Ojeda Rios<br>
Thursday, October 13th, 7-9 pm<br>
Women's Building, 3543 18th St., Audre Lorde Room<br><br>
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Join us on Thursday, October 13th to commemorate the life of Filiberto
Ojeda Rios, the courageous leader of the Puerto Rican Independence
Movement who was assassinated by the FBI on Friday, September 23rd,
2005. Filiberto was a founder of the clandestine group, Los
Macheteros and was living in clandestinity at the time of his criminal
murder (see story below for more information).<br><br>
Bring your grief, your rage, your memories, poetry, pictures, art, music
and food to share. There will be videos from Puerto Rico and
t-shirts!<br>
7-9 pm at the Women's Building, 3543 18th St., Audre Lorde Room.<br><br>
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</font><font face="verdana" size=1><b>PUERTO RICO<br>
</font><font face="georgia" size=4>Ojeda’s assassination gives fresh
impetus to the independence struggle<br><br>
</b></font><font face="georgia" size=1 color="#004080">BY ROSE ANA
DUEÑASSpecial for<b> Granma International<br><br>
</b></font><font face="georgia" size=3>CAPITALISM creates its own
gravediggers, as Karl Marx and Frederich Engels explained in the
Communist Manifesto. And the U.S. government, in its latest attack on the
Puerto Rican people’s struggle to free themselves from U.S. colonial
rule, has not only revealed how alive that struggle is, it has given it
new impetus.<br><br>
After the FBI assassinated long-time independence fighter Filiberto Ojeda
Ríos on September 23, rage exploded among Puerto Ricans and others
everywhere, whether or not they identify themselves as
<i>independentistas</i> (pro-independence). Some 300 agents surrounded
the 72-year-old’s home in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico – supposedly to arrest
him for the 1983 robbery of an armored car –, refused his offer to turn
himself in to a well-known journalist, shot him and left him to bleed to
death.<br><br>
Thousands demonstrated against this murder, both on the island and in the
United States itself, where more than 1 million Puerto Ricans live.
Thousands of people attended Ojeda’s wake and funeral, and students and
others took down the U.S. flag from various points around the island in
protest.<br><br>
"Filiberto was a fighter for Puerto Rico in every way, completely
committed to the struggle for independence by any means necessary, and
they wanted to eliminate that symbol," said Rafael Cancel Miranda, a
Puerto Rican nationalist leader who spent almost 27 years in Yankee jails
for fighting for independence, and who spoke in an interview with
<b>Granma International</b>. "They think that by doing so, they can
kill the struggle for independence¼ they are trying to terrorize the
people, to make them afraid."<br><br>
In 1898, the United States invaded and seized Puerto Rico, a
strategically valuable colony – or "commonwealth," as it is
euphemistically referred to. Just like the Spanish colonialists before
it, U.S. imperialism extracted most of the island’s wealth, and used its
people as a cheap source of labor, treating them in a racist, degrading
manner. For many years, Puerto Ricans were forced to speak English and
salute the U.S. flag, and the distorted one-crop sugar economy obligated
many to immigrate to Florida, New York and elsewhere to survive. Puerto
Rican women were forcibly sterilized and Puerto Rican men were used as
cannon fodder in U.S. wars. <br><br>
The island was turned into the biggest U.S. military base in the
hemisphere, a launching pad for U.S. military aggression in the region
and beyond, and after World War II, the smaller island of Vieques, part
of Puerto Rico, became the northern power’s most important land/sea
training grounds. Live bombs and chemical weapons were tested there,
despite untold damage to inhabitants’ health – like an extremely high
cancer rate– and the environment. <br><br>
"U.S. imperialism controls our country socially, politically, and
economically. We are a militarily occupied country - we're saturated by
U.S. military bases. (¼ ) They control the mass media. They control our
schools. They indoctrinate us from the time we're children. They tell you
who to hate and who not to hate. They can even indoctrinate you to hate
yourself," Cancel Miranda noted in a 1998 interview with <b>The
Militant</b> newspaper.<br><br>
But the Puerto Rican people have always struggled and resisted. Ojeda was
executed by the FBI on September 23, the anniversary of Grito de Lares,
the revolutionary 1868 uprising against the Spanish celebrated by Puerto
Rican patriots every year. <br><br>
From the start, the Puerto Rican independence struggle was linked with
Cuba’s, as Cuban national hero José Martí stated in 1892: "The Cuban
Revolutionary Party is constituted in order to gain ¼ the total
independence of Cuba and to encourage and assist that of Puerto
Rico." <br><br>
"Because of its culture, its history, its traditions, and especially
because of the express will of its people, Puerto Rico is a Latin
American and Caribbean country, with its own national identity, which the
Puerto Rican people have known how to maintain despite the colonizing
process they have been subjected to," noted Rafael Dausá, Cuban
Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations in 1998, speaking
before the UN Special Committee on Decolonization. <br><br>
Every year, Cuba speaks in favor of Puerto Rico’s decolonization, and for
six consecutive years, the committee has approved a resolution to that
effect, which is always ignored by the U.S. government, just as it
ignored UN resolutions against South African apartheid, Israel’s
oppression of the Palestinian people, and its own 44-year-old blockade
against Cuba.<br><br>
Instead, the U.S. government and its servile colonial administrators have
always repressed the independence struggle. The FBI framed up and jailed
Nationalist Party founder Albizu Campos in the 1930s, Rafael Cancel
Miranda and his comrades in the 1950s, and the Hartford 15 – which Ojeda
was accused of being part of – in the 1980s, among others. Puerto Rican
political prisoners have always been given the worst treatment, just like
that given to the five Cuban revolutionaries being held in U.S. prisons
today. <br><br>
Three Puerto Rican freedom fighters – Oscar López Rivera, Carlos Alberto
Torres, and Haydée Beltrán – are still in U.S. dungeons after 25 years.
Two more – José Pérez González and José Velez Acosta – have been held
since 2003 for their protests against U.S. military control over
Vieques.<br><br>
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, the FBI and CIA spied on tens of thousands of
Puerto Ricans, putting them on "subversive" lists, and
disrupting their organizations through the infamous Cointelpro operation.
Federal cops were complicit in the 1978 police executions of two young
<i>independentistas</i> at Cerro Maravilla. Just last year the FBI raided
the headquarters of the water workers union in San Juan in the midst of a
hard-fought strike.<br><br>
Despite the repression, a mass campaign to free the Puerto Rican
political prisoners won a victory in 1999 when President William Clinton
released 11 of the 17 held at the time, and the mass struggle to get the
U.S. Navy out of Vieques finally won in 2003. During these years, the
Puerto Rican people have expressed over and over that they are a nation:
<br><br>
<dir>
In 1996, 100,000 people demonstrated in La Nación en Marcha (The Nation
Marching) to protest against Puerto Rico becoming a U.S. state and
against colonial Governor Pedro Roselló’s statement that "Puerto
Rico is not and has never been a nation."
In 1997 and 1998, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans took to the
streets against the privatization of the telephone company in what became
a general strike, chanting "Puerto Rico is not for sale!"
In 2000, more than 85,000 marched to oppose the U.S. Navy in Vieques,
and that same year, some 40,000 turned out for the Grito de Lares
commemoration.
In 2003, thousands celebrated in the streets when the U.S. Navy
officially ended its presence in Vieques.<br><br>
</dir>Cancel Miranda explained that the U.S. government tried to hurt the
Puerto Rican independence struggle by killing Ojeda, who shot back in
self-defense as FBI cops fired more than 100 rounds. <br><br>
"They thought they could strike fear into the Puerto Rican people.
But they have not been able to do so for more than 100 years. They have
massacred us ¼ they have persecuted us, they have jailed us – not by ones
and twos, but by thousands – and they have not been able to defeat us. We
have not been able to remove them from our national territory, but
neither have they been able to defeat us, and Filiberto has given us a
living example of that," he said.<br><br>
"They think that by eliminating him, they are eliminating the
struggle, the cause he defended, but against that, against ideas, there
is no possible weapon."<br><br>
<br>
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