On Oct.15, after weeks of planning and preparations, Puerto Rico’s working-class movement staged a demonstration of 200,000 people. The action was called for under the banner of a national work stoppage, or “paro nacional.” Schools and universities were shut down, and municipal and private sector employees took to the streets.
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Demonstrators came from every corner of Puerto Rico in cars, buses and trucks. They gathered in La Plaza De Las Americas, where they formed colorful contingents with flags and banners representing different labor unions and student groups as well as civic, political and religious organizations. Renowned Puerto Rican musical artists like Calle 13 and Ricky Martin were among the celebrities present to support the demonstration.
The magnitude of this mobilization and its defiant character surely impacted the colonial rulers.
University students brought traffic on the main highway to a complete halt for several hours, and demonstrators engaged in numerous confrontations with the police. All major banks were shut down as 15,000 members of the colonial police were mustered.
Several colonial officials contradicted each other when asked whether the
National Guard had been activated to suppress the demonstrations. Despite these denials, there were many indications
that the Guard was indeed placed on some level of alert; protesters, for instance, observed the colonial police deploying heavy equipment and military trucks that are not part out of their routine arsenal.
The work stoppage was called to stop Governor Luis Fortuño’s announced plans for massive firings, beginning with 17,000 government employees this November and possibly extending the layoffs to a total of 30,000—about 14 percent of the public work force. In addition, huge cutbacks in public services such as schools and hospitals are expected. Not surprisingly, Fortuño plans to extend access to U.S. companies, in an attempt to privatize all areas of social and economic life.
Among the most disgraceful actions of the Fortuño plan is the elimination of employees’ seniority rights. Many higher-paid workers, among them those closer to retirement age, have been targeted for dismissal or pressured to retire early. Younger and lower-paid workers are then used to fill these positions. In the public school system, filth and trash now tends to pile up out of control because Fortuño’s plan includes the elimination of custodial workers, which poses potential health risks for both children and teachers.
Fortuño, a U.S. Congress Republican and the leader of the so-called New Progressive Party, represents the far right of Puerto Rico’s bourgeoisie, a social milieu of privilege and wealth that benefits from the U.S. colonial presence. It is this stratum that has historically tried to destroy the peoples’ national identity and still feverishly pushes for complete annexation with statehood for Puerto Rico.
Fortuño is perhaps the most extreme of all the neo-liberal, conservative figures to serve as caretaker for U.S. colonial interest. And now, because of his arrogance he may very well be the most hated colonial governor of all time among the populace.
Economic crisis through the colonial prism
Puerto Rico’s office of governor as well as the San Juan government are not organs derived from a historical process under the control of native Puerto Ricans, but entities installed by the U.S. invaders. Based on existing federal laws pertaining to Puerto Rico’s political-legal status, Fortuño’s actions are merely the dictates of his masters in Washington.
Like working-class families in the United States, Puerto Rican people are being hit hard by the economic crisis. The millions of workers laid off and forced into homelessness due to their inability to avoid foreclosure and eviction, is a phenomenon rooted in the periodic episodes of capitalist economic crisis.
The U.S. government handed over hundreds of billions of dollars to giant banks and corporations, with absolutely no regard for public opinion. But what came to light as a result was that funds do exist to prevent layoffs and homelessness and avoid the closing of schools and hospitals.
In the case of Puerto Rico, a country subjected to colonial rule that dates back centuries, the economic crisis wrought by a foreign invader adds to the significance and meaning of the present situation. Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship to the U.S. ruling class—the center of the present global economic crisis—as well as Washington’s motives for maintaining its colonial dominance are factors that must be taken into the highest consideration.
U.S. rulers would surely prefer to control its colony peacefully and conduct business as usual, without the rebelliousness of the populace. But when feeding and housing the enslaved becomes costly to the enslavers, they will go to extremes to preserve the status quo, even when it works against their own interest.
Outright colonialism creates intricate connections of dependency between the colonized and colonizing country. Whenever an economic crisis breaks out in the United States, it tends to devastate Puerto Rico.
During the Great Depression following the 1929 market crash, while many roamed in the United States in search of work and organized to prevent being brought to a downtrodden state, little was known of the effects that the crisis had on Puerto Rico. Epidemics caused by starvation and growing despair bred rebellion and thus brought about one of the most violent and politically intense periods in Puerto Rican history.
Puerto Rican workers produce an annual average of $26 billion for U.S. corporations. Yet Puerto Rico is poorer than Mississippi, the poorest U.S. state. The cost of living is 25 percent higher in Puerto Rico than in the United States. Workers in Puerto Rico, on average, earn 20 percent less than their U.S. counterparts.
Oppression stirs anti-colonial struggle
The avarice of the imperialist capitalist class and the impositions by the puppet colonial government can only make the broadest sectors of the population more receptive to revolutionary ideals. Over the course of the last 111 years, U.S. colonialist propaganda has made many skeptical—if not fearful—of the historical demand for independence, similarly to how U.S. workers are taught to reject socialism. It is in necessity and the heat of struggle that myths and lies are shattered.
When Fortuño announced his plans to take away the means of subsistence for so many families in order to “balance the budget,” and yet said nothing regarding banks and U.S. companies that have openly robbed Puerto Rico for so long, his words were interpreted by the Puerto Rican masses to mean exacerbation of their plight. It is widely known that lies and corruption are the legacy of the colonial government in Puerto Rico.
Because the colonial government compelled the people to fight, what began as an economic crisis is now evolving to possibly become a political crisis. The colonizers can not resolve this matter by satisfying the wishes of the majority of the people, so these events could potentially weaken the ideological grip of colonialism and give credence to the Puerto Rican struggle for independence and self-determination.
Like in the struggle to get the U.S. Navy out of Vieques in the early 1990s, there is now the potential for broader sectors of the population to become immersed into a struggle that, in every objective definition, is anti-colonial.
For revolutionaries in the United States, any upheaval or affliction the Puerto Rican masses bring upon their oppressors, from the mildest to the most intense, should be applauded for being the expression of a people engaged in resistance. In the spectrum of global class relations, resistance in this colonized and oppressed national entity is in direct conflict with the system of monopoly capitalism itself.
The instinct of the Puerto Rican masses to fight back, and their proud traditions of struggle against all forms of tyranny, provide us with a glimpse of what eventually will be the Boricua contribution towards causing the demise of U.S. imperialism. Their struggles, including that which opposes the policies of the present U.S. puppet Fortuño, shall one day prove to have weakened the foreign stranglehold on the Puerto Rican homeland—an inspiring and favorable circumstance for revolutionaries in this country.
Without imperialism, no people on earth would suffer the depths of colonial oppression. That is why revolutionaries operating within the colonizing country are obligated to render the greatest act of solidarity to the Puerto Rican people: weakening the position of colonialism by building the struggle for socialism in the United States.
