Remembering the 1954 Puerto Rican Attack on Washington
02/03/2015
- Opinión
On March 1, 1954, Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irvin Flores and Andrés Figueroa walked into the U.S. House of Representatives building and began shooting. They fired thirty shots and wounded five U.S. Representatives. They were arrested and spent 25 years in prison. The purpose of their armed attack was to call the world's attention to the colonial plight of Puerto Rico and the U.S. government´s repression against its independence movement.
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Puerto Rico has been occupied by the United States since the U.S. war with Spain in 1898. Since then, the U.S. Congress has exercised sovereignty over the island nation. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens but the island's residents have no voice or vote in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections.
In the first half of the 20th century, the Puerto Rico Nationalist Party called for independence, leading the opposition against the U.S. occupation. The Puerto Rican government — then headed by U.S. governors appointed by the president of the United States — responded to the party's actions with repression, culminating in the Rio Piedras and Ponce massacres, in 1935 and 1937 respectively. In the latter incident, a peaceful march of Nationalists, or members of the Nationalist Party, was fired upon by the police, resulting in 19 deaths and over 100 injuries. It was described by the American Civil Liberties Union as “cold-blooded murder.” In response, members of the Nationalist Party turned to armed struggle, assassinating U.S. counterinsurgency specialist Francis Riggs, and attempting to shoot governor Blanton Winship, who had ordered the Ponce massacre.
The 1954 attack on the U.S. Congress came in the wake of major reforms in the Puerto Rico political system, which allegedly were to put an end to colonialism and send the occupied country on the road to formal democracy and self-determination. These reforms were intended to placate the United Nations Decolonization Committee, which was then beginning to ask Washington questions about the case of Puerto Rican self-determination. During this period, which spanned the late 1940's and early 1950's, Puerto Rican voters were allowed for the first time to choose a governor, and to vote for a constitution.
But the U.S. campaign to repress and exterminate the independence movement continued apace, targeting even the legal, non-violent Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP). Repressive legislation, modeled on the anti-Communist Smith Act of the United States, made it largely illegal to advocate in support of Puerto Rican independence. In the 1950's, those who did were incarcerated merely for speaking in public, as proven by the publicly available transcripts of their court trials.
The Nationalists were practically alone in denouncing the democratic and constitutional reforms as a farce.
The March 1954 attack was not the first time that Washington D.C. heard the gunfire of Puerto Rican independence fighters. On November 1, 1950, two Nationalists tried to assassinate president Harry Truman. One of the assailants, Griselio Torresola, died in the act. The other, Oscar Collazo, was wounded and went on to spend 29 years in jail.
The response from the FBI and local colonial authorities was harsh and vindictive. During the 1950´s, hundreds of supporters of independence were incarcerated. Some would remain in prison for two decades. Even today, the FBI holds a special grudge against Puerto Ricans, and particularly those in favor of Puerto Rican independence.
In the 1970's allies of the Puerto Rican independence movement suggested that Collazo — the survivor of the 1950 attack — and the incarcerated members of the 1954 assault request a presidential pardon. They refused on the grounds that they would only accept unconditional freedom. If anyone should beg for pardon, they said, it is the U.S. government. In 1979, Washington finally capitulated. That year, President Jimmy Carter gave them an unconditional pardon. The five returned to Puerto Rico, welcomed as heroes.
Today the onlysurvivor of the 1954 attack is Cancel Miranda, who remains lucid, extroverted and outgoing. To this day, he remains an active member of the Puerto Ricanindependencemovement.
https://www.alainet.org/pt/node/167910?language=es
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