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<h2><font size=3><b>
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maritza-stanchich-phd">Maritza
Stanchich, Ph.D.</a></b></font></h2><font size=3>Associate Professor of
English, University of Puerto Rico<br>
Posted: February 14, 2011 08:53 AM <br>
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<a href="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</a>
</b></font></h1><font size=3>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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
"We appear to be in the first stage of a democratic dictatorship, a
new absolutism," observed UPR Humanities professor Rubén Ríos
Ávila.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
"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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br>
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