<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<div class="container content-width3" style="--font-size:20px;">
<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://wagingnonviolence.org/2019/07/puerto-rico-protests-ricardo-rossello-resignation-activists-next-steps/">https://wagingnonviolence.org/2019/07/puerto-rico-protests-ricardo-rossello-resignation-activists-next-steps/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Leading Puerto Rican activists
celebrate governor's resignation, talk next steps</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Matt Meyer - July 25, 2019</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="content">
<div class="moz-reader-content line-height4 reader-show-element">
<div id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div>
<div>
<div>
<p>By all accounts, the shutdown of Puerto Rico’s
industries, schools, government and
business-as-usual on Monday was an <a
href="https://www.democracynow.org/2019/7/23/puerto_rico_protests_ricardo_rossello_seg1">unexpected
show of popular sentiment</a> 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. </p>
<p>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, <a
href="https://www.democracynow.org/2019/7/25/headlines/puerto_rico_gov_ricardo_rossello_resigns_amid_mass_protests">announcing
that he would step down</a> next Friday. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>“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 <a
href="https://wagingnonviolence.org/2017/06/honoring-oscar-lopez-rivera/">elder
statesman of the island</a>. “Even before the
governor announced his resignation, the fact is that
he was not governing Puerto Rico.” </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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!” </p>
<p>Perez Rivera, a leading force behind the
long-standing empowerment association <a
href="https://www.facebook.com/centromujer.barranquitas">Centro
Mujer Barranquitas</a>, 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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.” </p>
<p>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.” </p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/gacol3337.doc.htm">United Nations
Special Committee on Decolonization noted</a> that
“political insubordination” on the part of the
colonial United States “impedes Puerto Rico’s
ability to tackle its serious economic and social
problems.”</p>
<p>It is therefore not difficult to sympathize with
Oscar Lopez Rivera in his assertion that those who
took part in the strike — <a
href="https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/vb9w9x/these-puerto-rican-women-have-had-it-with-rossellos-corruption-and-lewd-texts">led
in large part by young women</a> — understood that
“they were the majority” and that, by shouting for
an end to the ways things have been, “they were
decolonizing themselves.” </p>
<p>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.”</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://freedomarchives.org/">https://freedomarchives.org/</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>