Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico’s Policing Crisis

Ed Morales | December 6, 2011

On June 30, 2010, as part of a lesson in democracy, Betty Peña Peña drove with her daughter, Eliza, from the town of Caguas to the Capitolio building in Old San Juan, which houses the island territory’s legislature. They had been to several demonstrations before, particularly those organized by Puerto Rico’s teachers union, of which Betty is a member. This time they intended to join a coalition of university students, community organizations and labor unions at the Neoclassical Revival structure overlooking the Caribbean.

It was the last day of the session, and on the agenda were final arguments on legislation to carry out budget cuts designed to address what right-wing Governor Luis Fortuño had proclaimed a fiscal crisis. The session had been plagued by controversy surrounding the decision by Senate president Thomas Rivera Schatz, who belongs to Fortuño’s pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP), to prevent the general public and independent media from entering the viewing galleries. The imposition of this unconstitutional restriction, coming after months of protest against the government’s harsh austerity policies, brought political tensions in Puerto Rico to a boil.

When Peña arrived with her daughter, the crowd, as many as a thousand or more, was singing and chanting slogans. As if sensing the wet gust of a wind that signals an impending tropical thunderstorm, Peña felt the atmosphere deteriorate quickly. “Suddenly a helicopter came over the ocean, really close to us, and we moved toward the students, who were by a row of parked cars, surrounded by a wall of police, the riot squad and mounted police,” she recalls.

Then a police officer, using a megaphone, ordered the crowd to disperse. In seconds the tactical operations unit—in actions that prefigured many of this fall’s evictions of Occupy Wall Street—began to viciously attack the demonstrators with batons and pepper spray. “They were just hitting people, and then my daughter, Eliza, was on the floor, and they hit me,” she says, beginning to sob. “But the blow didn’t hurt as much as when I saw her on the floor and I saw the police were on top of her.”

“The party in power wants Puerto Rico to be a state, but they don’t know the first thing about American democracy,” says William Ramirez, executive director of the Puerto Rico branch of the ACLU, which is suing the Puerto Rican police on behalf of the Peñas.

The brutality of police conduct that day was the culmination of a wave of violence that, while a problem for many years, has accelerated under the Fortuño administration. It drove Illinois Representative Luis Gutierrez, a Puerto Rican who attended the University of Puerto Rico, to rail against Fortuño on the floor of the House last February. “This year the people of Wisconsin took over the Capitol in Madison; they had 100,000 people there,” Gutierrez told me later. “But they didn’t send in the riot squad! They didn’t close down the Senate. Here, people march to the Senate and what did they do? They called the riot police and they pepper-sprayed, and I’m wondering, why isn’t anybody saying anything?”

In Washington the president and Congress remained silent, but in Puerto Rico people had been speaking up for quite a while. The efforts of Ramirez, along with those of another lawyer named Judith Berkan, helped to spur a three-year investigation of the Puerto Rican police by the Justice Department, the results of which were released this past September 8. Announced at a San Juan press conference hosted by Assistant Attorney General Thomas Pérez and Fortuño, the report found that the Puerto Rico Police Department—the second largest in the United States, with 17,000 officers— had engaged in a “pattern and practice of: excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment; unreasonable force…designed to suppress the exercise of protected First Amendment rights; and unlawful searches and seizures in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

The report details how these violations were systemic, “pervasive and plague all levels of PRPD”; and that there is a “staggering level of crime and corruption” among police officers. It also documented abuses of Dominicans, who tend to live in segregated neighborhoods, as well as a failure to investigate domestic crimes against women and violence against the LGBT community. And the ACLU has documented a decades-long history of abuses of poor Afro–Puerto Ricans. “The Puerto Rico police department is broken,” said Pérez, who promised to transform this report into “a comprehensive blueprint for sustainable reform” by continuing to work with and engage “stakeholders” like the Fortuño government, the police department and the larger community.

But the next step for the Puerto Rican people, its government and the police department is unclear. The DOJ has two choices: initiate a lawsuit and force the PRPD into a consent decree, which is a court-ordered settlement, or settle out of court and enter into a memorandum of agreement. How much cooperation the DOJ receives from the department—and the rest of Fortuño’s administration—in these early stages will determine which of these solutions will be implemented.

“This is the first time ever in our history that an investigatory body has said, ‘Not only do you have a corrupt police department but they engaged in criminal behavior, they violated human rights.’ If nothing else comes out of this report, just getting that is historic,” says Ramirez, a Bronx native who taught at the University of Puerto Rico and is now a permanent part of the island’s political fabric.

Like Ramirez and Luis Gutierrez, Judith Berkan has an intimate bond with the university, where she once taught in the law school. “The police department in Puerto Rico has had plenty of issues, which is at least partly due to their being a quasi-military unit to support US interests in Puerto Rico,” says Berkan, a Brooklyn native who has been litigating cases of police misconduct for thirty-five years. “If you look at the last eighteen years, in fourteen of those the police department has been run by someone from the FBI.”

In the mid-1980s Ramirez began working with residents of the poor San Juan neighborhood of La Perla, where everyone understands the pattern of police impunity. “If they go into my neighborhood to look for a drug dealer, they don’t knock my door down; they just go to the suspect’s house,” Ramirez says. “When they go to La Perla, they break down every door and wreck your house, and possibly beat you up.”

It was a barrage of lawsuits from Berkan’s office—most notably regarding the case of Miguel Cáceres, a father of three who was shot to death by an enraged officer and left to die on a street in a small town—that helped spur the four-year DOJ investigation in 2007. The killing of this unarmed man was a Rodney King moment for Puerto Rico; someone videotaped the shooting, showing it to be a clear case of police abuse.

The Cáceres killing was a textbook case of the systematic problems in the police department, as Berkan laid out in her lawsuit against PRPD officials. The lawsuit revealed that repeated violations of conduct are ignored, that protocols are ignored, that there is no systematic record-keeping or analysis of police shootings and that there are excessive delays in the disciplinary system and no redress for civilians who are victimized.

Enter Fortuño and the State of Emergency  

Long before Fortuño’s rise to power, electoral politics in Puerto Rico had become a game of musical chairs, with ineffectual governance and corruption scandals. But when Fortuño took office in 2008, his PNP party took control of the legislative and judicial branches as well as the executive. And Fortuño used the recession— which had begun in 2006 on the island, at least a year before it hit the mainland—as an excuse to implement what he argued was a mandate for extreme change.

Previously the island’s resident commissioner, or nonvoting representative in Congress, Fortuño is a prominent member of the Republican National Committee and has extensive GOP connections. His former campaign consultant, Annie Mayol, currently his government affairs adviser, worked for Karl Rove during the early years of the George W. Bush presidency in the controversial Office of Political Affairs. Fortuño has been praised by Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich, who featured him on his website the Americano, and has been the subject of a glowing profile in the right-wing webzine Newsmax. While the PNP has usually been conservative, few Puerto Rican politicians have so stridently connected with the far right on the mainland as Fortuño. “Republicans are pointing to his extreme government-budget-slashing priorities as an example of what they’d like to do when and if they regain control in Washington,” says Puerto Rico Senator Eduardo Bhatia, a member of the rival Popular Democratic Party (PDP), which supports commonwealth status.

As soon as he entered office, Fortuño pushed through the infamous Law 7, whose full title is Special Law Declaring a Fiscal State of Emergency and Establishing an Integrated Plan of Fiscal Stabilization to Save Puerto Rico’s Credit Rating. The declaration of a state of emergency allowed the government to implement austerity measures, including the layoff of some 20,000 government employees. Less noticed was that because of the “emergency,” the government could take extraordinary measures to “protect the life, health and well-being of the people.”

“The layoffs start, so what begins to happen is that people begin to protest, and on May Day in 2009 we had 30,000 people marching,” says Ramirez. The first demos were peaceful, but Ramirez and others were concerned, because Fortuño had named José Figueroa Sancha as police chief. As deputy FBI chief in Puerto Rico, Figueroa Sancha had been involved in the 2005 extrajudicial killing of Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, leader of the militant pro- independence group Los Macheteros. Ojeda Ríos’s killing was widely perceived by Puerto Ricans, regardless of their views on the Macheteros, as an improper FBI incursion into local governance. Months later, during a series of FBI raids designed to gather information about Machetero sympathizers, agents stormed a San Juan building. When a crowd of journalists showed up, the FBI pepper-sprayed them, and then hit them with batons while they were on the ground writhing from the effects of the spray. Figueroa Sancha was at the scene as deputy FBI special agent in charge.

Three months after the massive 2009 May Day strike, the police used batons to strike bystanders in the off-campus tavern area of the University of Puerto Rico, and one officer shot a female student with a tear-gas canister, causing a gaping wound. In 2010 a coalition of UPR students—alarmed by the intention of the board of trustees, which is packed with Fortuño acolytes, to increase tuition fees—decided to strike. On May 20 the police attacked a group of about 200 students, union leaders and public employees who were protesting Fortuño’s appearance at a fundraising event in a San Juan hotel. Videocameras caught the images of officers pepper-spraying directly into the faces of protesters, some of them middle-aged women. “The tear gas that they were using was a highly toxic form of CN gas,” says Ramirez. The gas is prohibited by many mainland police departments.

***

By the time of the Capitolio incident, there was mounting discontent over these incidents as well as the banning of the public from the legislature’s observer galleries. “You have to understand,” says journalist and lawyer Oscar Serrano, who is former president of the Puerto Rico Journalists’ Association, “the Puerto Rico Constitution was written after the International Human Rights Declaration of 1948, and it explicitly states that all legislative activities must be open to the public. And the people know this.”

The violence started inside the vestibule, where independent journalists were sitting in to demand access to the galleries. Connecticut native Rachel Hiskes, a UPR graduate student, was sprayed, violently pushed out the door and sent flying down the Capitolio steps after officers kicked an Amnesty International observer who was taking part in the sit-in.

Carmen Yulín, a PDP representative in the House, was also attacked. “I took my badge out, announcing that I was a legislator, and I was pepper-sprayed all over,” said Yulín. “I was thrown across a folding table and had ligaments torn in my rib cage. I was in a half-cast for six weeks.” What most frightened Yulín was that the attack was apparently not accidental. “When I was in the lobby, one of the security guys said, ‘This is for you, Carmen Yulín,’ and they started to hit me. Later I was told by a member of the administration that they weren’t going to rest until they cracked my head at the rally.”

The day after the rally, police superintendent Figueroa Sancha showed no remorse, insisting that he would do the same “today, tomorrow…and next month.” Fortuño accused students of bringing pepper spray and rocks to the demonstration and of not respecting the views of others. He also accused a group of “socialists” of planning to take the Capitolio by force. PNP leaders like Senator Roberto Arango and Fortuño’s chief of staff, Marcos Rodríguez Ema, strongly supported the riot squad’s actions at the Capitolio.

“The government clearly decided that they were going to make it very uncomfortable for you if you demonstrate against their policies,” says Ramirez. “If you show up at a march, you’re going to get beat up and pepper-sprayed. In constitutional law, we call that a chilling effect.”

Immediately after the Capitolio incident, Fortuño announced there would be an investigation, but the results were never made public. Two weeks after the incident the Puerto Rican Bar Association issued a 133-page document detailing police violations, testimonies of victims and its recommendations.

This report predictably fell on deaf ears—a year earlier, when the bar association had accused the police of abusing their powers during the 2009 incident in the university off-campus bar area, it was met with open hostility by PNP officials and PNP law firms, which filed a flurry of suits designed to weaken the association.

Ever since membership became compulsory in 1932, the bar association has inspired frequent attacks because of its function as a forum for civic debate. But the attacks from right-wing Fortuño supporters intensified after he took office, even though its membership contains partisans from all three of Puerto Rico’s major parties. “In 2009, now that the PNP had taken control of both houses of Congress, along with the executive branch, the legislature passed two laws seeking to destroy the bar association,” says lawyer Berkan.

The association was accused by one dissident member of “violat[ing] the law and promot[ing] disobedience,” and the legislation eliminated compulsory membership and cut crucial government funding. “They also imposed a series of draconian restrictions on the Bar Association and prohibited it from engaging in expressive activity related to any political or religious ideas,” says Berkan. This legislation culminated many years of litigation initiated by rightist statehooders, who as “dissidents” within a compulsory bar had argued that they should not be compelled to buy its $80 annual life insurance. In 2006 the firm Indiano & Williams filed a class- action suit arguing that the mandatory insurance program was unconstitutional. Even though the association ended the program two months after the suit was filed, the court found in favor of the plaintiffs in 2008 and assessed more than $4 million in damages. Since the bar association has historically been a forum for political and legal debates in Puerto Rico and is perceived as a cultural institution, many considered this an attack on the cultural heritage of the island territory.

While the attack on the association has been orchestrated primarily by the rightist leadership of the PNP, it shows the unorthodox ties the party has occasionally had with US Democrats. Andrés López, a major fundraiser for the Obama campaign in Puerto Rico and among US Latinos, was a key participant in the class-action suit, and registered Democrat Pedro Pierluisi, the current resident commissioner, led a campaign to discredit Luis Gutierrez’s remarks in Congress.

The Future of Police Reform  

In the aftermath of the DOJ report’s release, it’s clear that Puerto Rico faces a long, difficult road to achieve real reform, and that the efforts of the government appear inefficient, if not downright duplicitous. At the press conference announcing the report, Fortuño insisted that his government had begun taking steps toward reform soon after the 2010 Capitolio incident. While the ruling party produced no report on a par with the one produced by the bar association, in October 2010, after a new scandal involving the arrests of more than seventy officers on drug charges, the governor issued an executive order creating a monitor to oversee the police department and issue a report. Fortuño contracted a former PNP judge, Efraín Rivera Pérez, to compile the report, at a cost of $300,000. The result: a skeletal twenty-one-page missive with no statistics or historical data.

After filing it this past June 30, on the anniversary of Capitolio, Rivera Pérez left to become president of the Puerto Rico Lawyers Association, a new rival to the bar association. No new monitor has been named. “The police monitor’s office in Puerto Rico doesn’t exist right now,” says Ramirez.

On July 2 police chief Figueroa Sancha resigned, citing pressure arising from the island’s crime rate, which has skyrocketed over the past two years. In his place Fortuño named retired National Guard Maj. Gen. Emilio Díaz Colón. In August Díaz Colón made headlines when he denied at a press conference that there was a federal investigation. The next month, days after the DOJ report was issued, Díaz Colón said the PRPD was so fiscally strapped it would be hard to implement change. While this could be taken as an excuse to do nothing, New York–based ACLU researcher Jennifer Turner agrees. “They have very little money allocated outside of payroll, and it’s going to be difficult, for example, to create a computer system to track repetitive conduct by abusive officers.”

Ever since the DOJ report’s release, Fortuño has been on the defensive over the disclosure that his government spent $1.7 mil-lion to hire former White House deputy drug czar Robert Warshaw, whose firm consults with and helps rehabilitate police departments in trouble.

Another disturbing development has been the police violence during a second strike carried out by University of Puerto Rico students, from December 2010 to March 2011—just after Fortuño said he was committed to reform. The government ordered the police and riot squad to occupy the campus, and “violence became like a daily event,” says student leader René Reyes Medina. When students engaged in civil disobedience, police, including high-ranking officers, dislodged them using pressure-point control tactics on the neck and eyeballs that in at least one case caused a student to pass out.

Adriana Mulero, another student leader, was sitting in on campus when the police used these techniques on her. “The policeman who tried to move me applied pressure on my neck, and I felt an intense pain I didn’t expect, and I began to have difficulty breathing,” she says. “Afterwards I was handed off between officers, and they grabbed me by my breasts and thighs. I made a public statement denouncing that as an attack on women. During my second arrest, several of them attacked me by squeezing my neck, saying, ‘This is the one who complained about grabbing her breast!’ and they called me a whore. That hurt even more than when they hit me.”

While the release of the DOJ report would seem to put the police under a microscope for the foreseeable future, the ACLU’s Ramirez is still concerned about violence. “I have no doubt it’s going to happen again,” he says. “The governor uses code words to justify violence against certain groups.”

“In the spring we had a meeting with government officials there,” says ACLU researcher Turner. “And [Fortuño’s chief of staff] Marcos Rodríguez Ema kept stressing that we needed to include the violation of the right of students to study by other students. The attorney general, Guillermo Somoza Colombiani, actually said they were allowed to arrest someone who cursed at one of the officers. He said it was a felony! That’s constitutionally protected speech. You can imagine what the police officers think.”

Rodríguez Ema is widely recognized as the member of the administration most prone to violent and provocative statements. Five months after the governor claimed he’d begun the process of change, Rodríguez Ema was quoted in the press as saying the police should remove student protesters from university grounds by force—a patadas—“and those bandit professors who are inciting them, too!” The day after the DOJ report was released, Governor Fortuño offered this assurance to Puerto Ricans that he was working on reforming his broken policing system: he named Rodríguez Ema as the point man to monitor the overhaul of the police department.

“It’s not my role to tell the governor who is on his team,” said Assistant Attorney General Pérez. “Our role is going to be to attempt to translate our findings into an accountability document. I hope we’ll be successful, and I’d rather fix the problem than fix the blame. If you can’t fix the problem in a sustainable way, we will not hesitate to take appropriate legal action in court.” Those sound like comforting words, but the ACLU’s Turner is concerned. “Because police abuses are continuing in PR, we feel it is important for DOJ to take action as quickly as possible,” she says. “We feel that any agreement between the DOJ and the PRPD needs to be court- monitored…. If it is not subject to court enforcement, the PRPD would fail to deliver on promised reforms.”

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/165013/puerto-ricos-policing-crisis

                                                                                                                                                                         

The Curious Case of Jorge de Castro Font

While San Juan and the rest of Puerto Rico is rocked by the scary standoff at the University of Puerto Rico, a major figure in the island’s political scene is being ushered off the island to the mainland for psychiatric treatment. Ex-senator Jorge de Castro Font allegedly attempted suicide over the last weekend after his arrest for violating his house arrest by attempting to contact his ex-wife. De Castro Font, was recently convicted of corruption and has been tapped as a witness in several pending federal cases. While this sordid saga might seem like just another politician melting down after being caught up in a corruption scandal, the story of Jorge de Castro Font might indicate that he is paying the price for defying his one-time source of power, the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, and its leader, Governor Luis Fortuño.

De Castro Font was arrested by the FBI in San Juan in October of 2008 following the issuing of an indictment by an appointee of George Bush’s scandal-ridden Department of Justice. The DOJ press release’s first paragraph reads like this:

Jorge De Castro Font, 45, a senator in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, was indicted today by a grand jury in the District of Puerto Rico for engaging in a scheme that deprived the people of Puerto Rico of his honest services, a conspiracy to commit extortion through fear of economic harm and under color of official right, numerous acts of bribery and two money laundering conspiracies, Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney for the District of Puerto Rico Rosa Emilia Rodríguez-Vélez announced.

The indictment, essentially for a particularly virulent strain of influence-peddling and extortion, is reminiscent of the kind of thing that got former House Majority Whip Tom De Lay in trouble–he was finally convicted of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering  just a few weeks ago. His close non-indicted associates? Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist, with whom De Lay co-founded the K Street Project, a kind of political cesspool where the confluence of the Republican propaganda and ultra-corrupt lobbying machines form a working definition of America’s heart of darkness. De Castro Font’s resonance with De Lay is buttressed by the fact that both Gingrich and Norquist have been touting Fortuño’s status as the epitome of the New Hispanic Republican, at times proclaiming that Fortuño is presidential material.

Fortuño was elected in 2008 after U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodríguez Vélez, appointed by disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, brought a corruption indictment in March of that year against incumbent PDP Governor Anibal Acevedo Vilá (he was subsequently cleared of all charges) that pretty much cost him the election. Fortuño was close to de Castro Font, since they were key members of the PNP’s inner circle.  But de Castro Font apparently became an expendable loose cannon. Soon after being indicted (just five months after Acevedo-Vilá), de Castro Font stunningly implicated then-candidate Fortuño in an illegal campaign contribution jaunt to Florida. In this interview on Puerto Rican television, he intimates that Fortuño flew with him to Miami in 2004 with a suitcase full of cash for the since-retired Florida U.S. Representative Lincoln Díaz-Balart.

A translated excerpt:

“I am not going to remain quiet.  I am here talking with you. If I was quiet . . . just the other day I said that …to ask him … Luis Fortuño said the other day that he was never with me that he has not seen me in four years. Ask him if he went with me to deliver money to Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Miami . We sat together in first class.”

The money was allegedly from the Fonalledas family, which owns Plaza las Américas, the largest shopping mall in the Caribbean. The Fonalledas remain active in supporting Republican candidates in the U.S. and the NPP in Puerto Rico–Zoraida, the wife of family patriarch Jaime, is the Republican National Committeewoman from Puerto Rico, having been active in supporting Florida Republicans from Jeb Bush to Marco Rubio.

Fortuño, who has been linked to the right wing of the Republican Party through various associations, might very well have benefitted from one of the many corrupt tentacles of the George W. Bush administration, since U.S. Attorney Rodríguez-Vélez has carried out two critical prosecutions: One severely crippled Fortuño’s PDP opponent, helping him become governor, and another effectively silenced an internal party rival who seemed on the verge of revealing information that would severely damage him.

In addition to Fortuño, de Castro Font seemed to have information that would also taint Díaz-Balart and fellow Florida Republican Mel Martínez, both of whom have since mysteriously resigned from office. Just last February, Puerto Rico newspaper Primera Hora ran a story quoting an unnamed source that alleged that Castro Font received messages from representatives of the PNP with the intent of silencing him in regards to testimony about campaign contributions, presumably involving Díaz-Balat and Martínez.

It is worth noting that Fortuño’s former campaign manager and current assistant to the Governor for Federal Affiairs, Annie Mayol, worked for Karl Rove in the Office for Political Affairs during George W. Bush’s presidency, and that Karl Rove is a central figure in the U.S. attorney scandal, in which U.S. attorneys were appointed at the recommendation of Rove and his associates according to their perceived loyalty to the right wing of the Republican Party.

So then it’s not so hard to believe that Jorge de Castro Font is so distressed that he needs psychiatric help.  And it’s not surprising that Francisco Besosa, the judge who has made the decision to send him to the U.S. for psychiatric treatment, and away from the prying Puerto Rican press, was appointed as U.S. attorney by George W. Bush in 2006.

Puerto Rico: Archived posts

National Congress of Puerto Rican Rights Calls Puerto Rico Democracy Inaccurate, Contradictory, and Confusing

For Immediate Release:
National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights calls Puerto Rico Democracy Act: Inadequate; Contradictory and Confusing
Contacts:
David Galarza 917-573-9250
Victor Vazquez 305-926-0904

The National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights (NCPRR), the largest Puerto Rican civil and human rights organization in the United States, has reviewed the Puerto Rico Democracy Act approved by the United States House of Representatives on April 29, 2010.  While attempting, once again, to address the 112 year-old political status of Puerto Rico, the NCPRR finds this legislation woefully inadequate, contradictory and confusing. The NCPRR’s Board of Directors asks the United States Senate to reject this bill and for President Barack Obama to refuse to sign this legislation into law.  Rather, the NCPRR asks the President and Congress to address the serious flaws in HR 2499 and create a law that reflects provisions necessary for full self-determination by and for the Puerto Rican people.
HR 2499, as approved by the House, stipulates that Puerto Ricans will hold a plebiscite in for voters to choose whether to: a) “…continue to have its present form of political status” (in relation to the U.S.) or b) “…have a different political status.”  If voters choose the second option, a second plebiscite is required to choose among four status choices: 1) Independence; 2) Sovereignty in Association with the United States; 3) Statehood or 4) Commonwealth, or status quo. The bill is contradictory, since Puerto Ricans voting to change their status in the first stage, will still have to revisit the status quo option in a second vote, which completely undermines the purpose of the first stage vote.
We applaud Congressman Jose E. Serrano’s (D-NY) legislative effort to “…get the ball rolling…,” but note that the other two Puerto Ricans members of the House of Representatives, Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) and Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill) do not support the bill.  Also problematic is who will be eligible to vote and under what conditions.  According to HR 2499, only “…Puerto Ricans born in the island who comply with…local elections commission regulations” may cast a vote. This restriction bars millions of Puerto Ricans stateside who were not born on the island, but are the children of parents who moved from Puerto Rico.  Cynically, however, this legislation would enfranchise hundreds of thousands of non-Puerto Rican residents of the island.
Another troublesome provision of HR 2499 is that ballots for the plebiscite will only be in English, despite constituting a potential a violation of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, which protects language minorities such as Puerto Ricans to receive ballots in their own language.
The NCPRR seeks a legitimate end to the tragic territorial/colonial status of Puerto Rico.  Since 1981, the NCPRR has supported the right of the Puerto Rican people to self-determination, as outlined under the United Nations Resolution 1514 (XV), which states that “All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they fully determine their political status.”  UN Resolution 1514 sets forth three acceptable options for internationally sanctioned political status.  While HR 2499 includes the three options, it ignores the further UN requirement that the affected people to be fully informed and understand each option prior to a vote.
International law also requires the release of political prisoners for opposing colonial rule to any plebiscite vote.  Currently there are still Puerto Ricans serving jail sentences for political views, including Carlos Alberto Torres and Oscar Lopez.  The NCPRR does not endorse or support the tactics of these prisoners, but they have been in jail nearly 30 years for political acts, and deserve release before any legitimate vote on the political status of Puerto Rico. There is precedent for such release in the case of Nelson Mandela exiting his extended prison term in South Africa prior to a vote on the status of that country.
The NCPRR is troubled by the timing of HR 2499 questions why this issue is being brought forth at this time of strife over immigration?  There is a problem of transparency here.  The day after the bill was passed in the House of Representatives, nearly every media outlet dubbed it the “Statehood Bill.”  Conservative commentators have spoken of the “impending” statehood of Puerto Rico, stirring anti-Hispanic rhetoric amidst the current immigration debates, and causing fear that the US will add two Puerto Rican senators and six members of the House through this legislation.
The NCPRR seeks resolution of the status of Puerto Rico to allow for the unification of the eight million Puerto Ricans who dividedly inhabit the United States. We do not see HR 2499 as a proper means to that end. We call upon the US Senate to reject this bill in its present form, and propose legislation respecting the critical civil and human rights objectives at issue. We further call on President Obama to fulfill his campaign promise to the Puerto Rican people to address this issue in a fair, open and transparent fashion.

Birth Certificate Bamboozle Exposed!

It seems that the misinformation by the PNP, represented in this case by Secretary of State Kenneth McClintock, about the need for new, identity-fraud-proof Puerto Rican birth certificates, has been admitted by Puerto Rico’s usually supportive “paper of record,” El Nuevo Dia. An editorial published Friday, March 5th (re-printed below for further reference when the link dies in a week or so), avers that the “response by [Puerto Rico's] government has been by a certain measure, exaggerated. Although the Secretary of State, Kenneth McClintock, assures that Puerto Rico birth certificates ’cause 40% of all the cases of identity theft in the United States,’ he omits that this percentage corresponds to 8000 cases investigated recently by Federal authorities, out of 10 million cases reported annually in the U.S.” (translation mine)

While this assertion provides a little clarity, it’s still not what was stated in text of the law itself, which–as I reported in both my February 25th op ed and recent blog post, (as well as last Sunday’s Newsday)–is that the State Department says that of 8,000 of passport fraud cases it has studied (still no info on time period studied), 40% have involved the use of fraudulent Puerto Rican birth certificates.

But we still have to give credit to El Nuevo Dia for proving it doesn’t have the same relationship with the PNP that say, the Republican Party has with News Corp. In this editorial they reported several gaping holes in the logic used by the state department and legislators to implement the law, and there may be major announcements forthcoming as to its pending implementation in July.

For now, we’ll revel in the knowledge that the folks on la isla are paying attention to media critiques launched by stateside commentators. Maybe they’ll even be forced to let us vote in the upcoming plebiscite!

Below, the text of the Nuevo Dia editorial and Laura Rivera’s Newsday article (because Cablevision won’t let you see it unless you pay!)

06-Marzo-2010 | EDITORIAL DE EL NUEVO DÍA

PREVISIÓN PARA LAS ACTAS DE NACIMIENTO

Cuando faltan cuatro meses para que entre en vigor la ley que anula los certificados de nacimiento de todos los puertorriqueños, el Gobierno está obligado a aclarar las dudas sobre el impacto del nuevo estatuto en la Isla y en la comunidad de boricuas en el exterior.

Y tiene el Gobierno que asumir el papel de gran facilitador del proceso de expedición de los nuevos documentos tomando las medidas adecuadas para evitar que el día que entre en vigencia la nueva ley se cree un caos en el Registro Demográfico.

Hay instancias en que leyes que se aprueban con las mejores intenciones, traen como colateral disloques innecesarios por la falta de previsión de legisladores y de los responsables de implantarlas. Esto ocurre con la Ley 191, del 22 de diciembre pasado, que anula los certificados de nacimiento expedidos antes del 1ero. de julio de 2010 y que prohíbe que agencia u organización, pública o privada alguna, retenga la copia original del documento, excepto el Departamento de Trasportación y Obras Públicas que, por requerimiento federal, tiene que hacerlo.

La explicación para implantar una ley tan excepcional, ya que no se le conocen precedentes en Estados Unidos, es que las autoridades federales peticionaron al Departamento de Estado estatal mecanismos para atajar el robo de identidad.

La respuesta del Gobierno estatal ha sido en cierta medida exagerada. Aunque el secretario de Estado, Kenneth McClintock, asegura que Puerto Rico “provoca el 40% de todos los casos de robo de identidad con certificados de nacimiento en toda la nación americana”, omite que ese porcentaje es de 8,000 casos investigados recientemente por las autoridades federales, de un universo de 10 millones de casos que se reportan anualmente en los Estados Unidos, según el Federal Trade Commission.

Así las cosas terminamos con una ley que afecta no sólo a 3.8 millones de personas en la Isla, sino a otros 1.5 millones de puertorriqueños nacidos aquí que ahora residen en los estados. Estos últimos se están enterando de la ley mayormente a través de la Internet, grupos comunitarios o familiares, pero la información no siempre es correcta. Esto ha generado un gran desconcierto ante la posibilidad de perder, aunque sea temporalmente, un documento de validación de lugar de nacimiento tan importante en momentos en que han trascendido casos de individuos que, siendo ciudadanos estadounidenses de nacimiento, han sido deportados por error.

Y mientras el Gobierno apuesta a la tecnología y asegura que el proceso de obtener un nuevo certificado es fácil a través de la página digital del Registro Demográfico, lo cierto es que lo que puede obtenerse es la hoja de solicitud. Para completar el proceso, hay que volver a los mecanismos tradicionales de enviar por correo un giro postal de $5.00 por cada certificado, un sobre predirigido con sello y una fotocopia de identificación con retrato que no esté vencida, pero solamente son aceptables la licencia de conducir y el pasaporte. ¿Alguien ha pensado cómo las personas que no tienen licencia o pasaporte probarán su identidad más allá del certificado que se les va a anular?

Según el congresista José Serrano, el esfuerzo hecho por el Gobierno isleño para informar a la diáspora puertorriqueña sobre el impacto de la nueva ley ha sido “pobre” y aseguró que no se ha pensado en el impacto en los nacidos en Puerto Rico que ahora residen en los 50 estados.

El Gobierno tiene que corregir esta terrible situación que abona a la percepción general de miembros y líderes de la comunidad puertorriqueña en el Norte de que no reciben la atención debida de sus compatriotas en la Isla, y que no existen suficientes puentes institucionales para enlazar ambas comunidades.

Mixed reactions to voiding of Puerto Rican birth papers

February 28, 2010 By LAURA RIVERA  laura.rivera@newsday.com

A law that will void the birth certificates of all Puerto Ricans born there has drawn mixed reactions from some local leaders of Puerto Rican descent.

Puerto Rico officials said the law aims to protect Puerto Ricans from identity theft, strengthen national security and curb illegal immigration by reducing identity theft stemming from fraudulent use of the birth certificates.

When the measure takes effect July 1, the birth certificates of 1.5 million people who were born in Puerto Rico and live stateside will be canceled. The Puerto Rico Department of Health and the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration can help process requests for new birth certificates, which cost $5.

Luis Balzac, regional director of the PRFAA’s New York office, stressed that only those who have an express need for the document should request it immediately after July 1.

“We don’t need to rush,” said Balzac, who launched an outreach effort this month to inform the public of the transition.

Suffolk Legis. Ricardo Montano (D-Brentwood) said Sunday he had not received any calls from constituents. “I don’t think it’s a big issue here,” said Montano, of Puerto Rican descent, born in New York. “If it’s administered properly . . . I think it’s a good thing.”

Census figures show more than 79,000 people in Nassau and Suffolk counties are identified as Puerto Rican. It’s unclear how many of those were born in Puerto Rico.

Edwin Melendez, director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College in New York, said the law was “a radical measure” that “creates a bit of a chaotic situation for Puerto Ricans who have migrated to the United States.” “When they’re invalidated, it’s like you’re undocumented in your own country,” he said.

And Hempstead Hispanic Civic Association’s executive director, George Siberon, said: “It troubles me that it [the law] seems to be picking on Puerto Rico as the potential hotbed for terrorism. I don’t know what it was that triggered this.”Puerto Rico officials have said in published reports that 40 percent of identity fraud cases in the United States involve Puerto Rican birth certificates.

The prevalence is actually much smaller. Puerto Rican birth certificates were used only in 40 percent of the 8,000 passport fraud cases investigated by the federal Department of State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, according to a statement appended to the text of the new law.

The regional director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration’s New York office, Luis M. Balzac, confirmed yesterday that the information appended to the law is accurate.

The first statement was attributed to Secretary of State Kenneth McClintock in an Associated Press report.

Anybody Can Be President Pt. 1

Despite, or perhaps owing to his role in massive layoffs of government workers (the latest round completed last Friday), Puerto Rico governor Luis Fortuño is still in the conversation about who will take over the Republican Party, according to this South African blog. There seems to be a growing mania in certain sectors of the press to predict some new Latino political ascendency, but its motivation seems driven more by a clumsy attempt to predict demographic trends. But of course there is still not much coherent understanding of regional differences between Latinos, and almost nothing about the travesty of cutting back the hours of the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian. (Yes, that sure seems to be a photo of my homeboy Tito Matos in the middle.)

The worst may be yet to come, sadly. San Juan mayor (banner of Calle 13 concerts) Jorge Santini wants to be president (of the U.S., no less) as well. Would you trust this man with weapons of mass destruction?

San Juan Mayor Jorge Santini

I would think not.

If you find yourself on la isla at this moment, do your part to build bridges between islanders and Nuyoricans by going to see Spirit Republic of Puerto Rico keeper of the flame Adal Maldonado’s show right now.

And this latest from Jesus Davila, uncovering links between Condeleeza Rice’s State Department, Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, and the untimely death of Filiberto Ojeda Rios (thanks to Panama Alba’s listserve):

(NCM Venezuela)

PUERTO RICO: PAWN IN THE U.S. POLICY TOWARDS VENEZUELA
Jesús Dávila – Translated by Jan Susler

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, January 7, 2010 (NCM) – The operation in which the commando group killed Macheteros commander Filiberto Ojeda in 2005 was coordinated from the office of the then U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, according to unofficial information provided by a political source connected to the agency.

The source also indicated that the Ojeda case was part of Washington’s strategy towards the South American nation and that currently there are in process political and diplomatic actions whose purpose is to confront the attempts to expand the influence of the Bolivarian revolution in Puerto Rico and the rest of the region.

Among the measures being discussed in Washington political circles is the possibility of promoting a Congressional investigation into the activities of Venezuelan diplomats in Puerto Rico, and even ordering the withdrawal of the Consul General of Venezuela in San Juan. The source assured that he had talked about the topic in the Venezuela section of the U.S. State Department led by Moisés Behar.

This affair has a trajectory that dates back to the end of the 18th century, when the U.S. and England agreed to support Latin American independence in exchange for their not challenging the empire’s supremacy over a series of islands, including Puerto Rico. A few years later, Simón Bolívar tried without success to liberate Puerto Rico, which became a U.S. colony at the end of the 19th century as a result of the Spanish American War.

In the past few years, the U.S. has been evaluating the search for a solution to the colonial case of Puerto Rico, and President Barack Obama assures that he will take definitive steps during this term.

The issue of the conduct of the U.S. State Department— according to the source’s information— also connects politicians from the state of Florida as well as Puerto Rico, including the official spokesman of the New Progressive Party in the Senate, Roberto Arango.

The legislator, an important ally of governor Luis Fortuño, has waged an intense campaign against Venezuelan diplomacy in Puerto Rico, and has sought, without success, meetings with the consular office as well as with the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in Washington, to present his complaints.

In fact, during 2009, Puerto Rico was the scene of controversial news related to Venezuela, such as last January, when news emerged about a meeting in San Juan between U.S. officials and Venezuelan opposition businessmen. But the Ojeda case is the first involving a violent death.

The new chain of revelations has been the result of news published last year by the Miami Herald, revealing the supposed Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation of the then Venezuelan consul in San Juan, Vinicio Romero, and his supposed connections to radical groups in Puerto Rico between 2004 and 2005. At that time, the only known operation on this subject in the FBI San Juan field office was the one focused on the capture of Ojeda, commander of the Boricua Popular Army–Macheteros.

NCM News confronted the source with the fact that the U.S. Code provides that when this type of investigation into terrorism is to be carried out on a foreign diplomat, they must not only notify the State Department in Washington, but also the office of the Secretary of State has the legal responsibility to become the link and coordinate everything the agencies do. The source showed no surprise at all and explained that he was always aware this was the case, and he assented when told that this implied that the agency in charge of U.S. diplomacy was present at headquarters in Washington where the bloody deeds were coordinated.

The deeds took place on September 23, 2005, when an FBI commando group assaulted Ojeda’s home in a rural area of western Hormigueros, in an operation where a sharpshooter wounded the veteran military chief and left him to slowly bleed to death. According to the report of the FBI Inspector General, the order not to enter the house until the following day was given directly from headquarters in Washington.

The Inspector General’s investigation concluded that there were errors committed in the operation, but found no criminal responsibility. Similarly, although the attorney at the Justice Department of Puerto Rico determined that the investigation should be continued as a murder case, in the office of the Attorney General they eliminated that part of the report and arranged for its dismissal, having found no sustainable evidence of negligent homicide.

Currently, the only official investigation into the case is the one being handled by the Civil Rights Commission, whose draft is expected to be ready by mid January.

Ojeda’s death had the immediate effect of aborting conversations he was having with the Catholic Church, which explored the possibility of peaceful means for the U.S. to grant independence to Puerto Rico. In fact, the last of the meetings had been cancelled when the Church notified him that they couldn’t guarantee security.

Shortly after his death, U.S. security officials showed the government of Puerto Rico supposed taped evidence which showed Macheteros military training, according to confidential documents. The Macheteros, led by the mysterious “Commander Guasábara” and his Staff, have not carried out any new offensive actions.

Meanwhile, Ojeda, who supported the Bolivarian revolution and who issued a declaration denouncing the 2002 coup against president Hugo Chávez, has received several posthumous honors in Venezuela, and his widow, Doña Elma Beatriz Rosado Barbosa, was received by the Venezuelan leader.

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