United States House Resources Committee
Hearings on proposed legislation concerning the status of Puerto Rico
Statement from the Puerto Rican Political PrisonersSubmitted April 19, 1997
Four years ago, a petition for our unconditional release was submitted to the Clinton administration by Ofensiva 92, a human rights organization championing our release. The resolution of this petition is still pending. At this particular historical juncture, the people of Puerto Rico are about to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the 1898 United States military invasion and conquest of Puerto Rico. Although the U.S. has implemented minor changes in the relationship, including its title, the colonial status of Puerto Rico has not changed in a century. This fact has been recognized by successive U.S. administrations, members of U.S. Congress, and the leadership of all the political parties in Puerto Rico. The president has recently called for an inclusive democratic process to resolve the relationship. Pending legislation claims to be an effort to decolonize. Such action -- decolonization -- is not only generally recognized by international law as the most fundamental of all human rights; the United Nations General Assembly has called for an end to colonialism by the year 2000. Even more to the point, through its Decolonization Committee, the United Nations has specifically applied Resolution 1514(XV) to the case of Puerto Rico.
This political panorama characterizing the second half of the decade of the '90s differs significantly with that existing during the decades of the '70s and '80's, when the acts leading to our imprisonment took place. During those years the criminalization of independence and the systematic harassment of supporters of independence and their sympathizers was official government policy, out of which grew COINTELPRO. In Puerto Rico and the United States, the government targeted supporters of independence, including the unconstitutional practice of creating dossiers and conducting surveillance of over 100,000 innocent people, dubbed "subversives", merely because they believed in independence. The policy included dirty tricks, such as pitting organizations against each other, fabricating criminal charges, police entrapment, and other COINTELPRO-type activities, which persisted long beyond the supposed end of the program. Our early attempts at community organizing were frustrated and disrupted by the implementation of such practices, which we also saw implemented against other progressive movements. Many of us were deeply affected by the murder of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, who many of us knew and had worked with. The same government policy also included assassinations of Puerto Ricans as well.
It is within this totality of circumstances, with all other avenues for exercising self-determination foreclosed, that a group of individuals decided to resort to exercise the right of self-determination due all nations, and, concretizing the right accorded by international law to all colonial subjects to use all means at their disposal, waged a struggle against colonialism. During our trials, the U.S. courts, whose jurisdiction we refused to recognize, ignored our assertions of international law. The trials proceeded, some in our absence, and the courts meted out the politically punitive, disproportionate sentences we are serving.
At this juncture, we want to express our disposition to participate in reaching a just and dignified political solution to our colonial problem. If the U.S. Congress and the executive branch of the U.S. government desire to reach a political solution through a truly democratic process, we are disposed to participate in that process, a process which is necessary for reconciliation to take place, for healing one hundred years of wounds to begin.
This process could best begin with a gesture of goodwill on the part of the U.S. government, in releasing us from prison so that the inclusive process includes those of us who have sacrificed all for that to which every nation, including Puerto Rico, is entitled -- independence from colonialism.
Seventeen years of prison have not dampened our commitment to our people, who we hope to rejoin in efforts to rebuild our families and contribute to our communities. We bring a wealth of skills which are much needed--we are teachers, craftspeople, mechanics, plumbers, artists, counselors, computer technicians and healers. The hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs each year to keep us in prison would be better spent on creating jobs in our communities, programs in our schools, health care in our neighborhoods.
Finally, although it is obvious that there is a world of distance between acts like the assaults on innocent civilians in Oklahoma City, at the Olympics, and more recently in Atlanta, and our own struggle for independence, we want to intentionally express that distance. Invoking the right under international law to use all means available does not mean we used them with no respect for human life, even when colonialism is a disrespect for the human life of a nation, a crime perpetrated against all citizens, regardless. It has always been the practice and purpose of groups participating in the independence struggle to take all possible measures to ensure that innocent people are not harmed. Our actions, for the most part symbolic, have had the objective of focusing the attention of the U.S. government on the colonial conditions of Puerto Rico, and not of causing terror to the citizens of the U.S. or Puerto Rico. However, that is not to deny that in all liberation processes, there are always innocent victims on all sides. In the case of Puerto Rico, there are fewer caused by those who struggle for independence in comparison with other liberation movements, taking into consideration as well the disproportionate size of the contenders. In our case, as with all those who seek justice, we learn from past experiences with a sense of self-criticism, always in the context of our just cause, seeking to end colonialism, a crime against humanity. Activities caused by other contradictions as a result of the system that predominates in the United States cannot interfere with the efforts for our release or the struggle to end our colonial situation.
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