El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  The U.S. officials remained wary of nationalists well into the next decade. Leahy wrote in 1940 that there were on the island “a considerable number of disaffected individuals who would undoubtedly, in the case of war, engage in actual subversive activities and would form a very troublesome 5th column.” According to Leahy, these people were even receiving funds “through the Republic of Santo Domingo and probably Natzi [sic] sources,” which is why military intelligence and the FBI were keeping watch on them.79 The FBI also monitored Puerto Ricans in the United States, with one report noting that there was a “close relationship between the [Nationalist] party and the American Communist organization, particularly in New York.”80

  Leahy was not in the post long, and in 1941 Rexford Tugwell—one of the members of the “Brain Trust,” advisers to FDR—was appointed governor. More sympathetic to Puerto Rico’s plight, he expressed his deep dismay at the state of the island, despite the efforts of the New Deal, later writing in his book The Stricken Land, “This is what colonialism was and did: it distorted all ordinary processes of the mind, made beggars of honest men, sycophants of cynics, American-haters of those who ought to have been working beside us for world-betterment.” However, the relief effort angered him most. He pointed a finger at Congress, blaming it for making the island “beg for [help], hard, and in the most revolting ways.” To Tugwell, this was “the real crime of America in the Caribbean, making of Puerto Ricans something less than the men they were born to be.”81 Congress continued to debate the Puerto Rico question. In 1945, Senator Tydings introduced another bill calling for a plebiscite on the status issue, this time with different economic guarantees, but it was later vetoed.82

  In the meantime, Albizu Campos had grown ill in prison in Atlanta. There had been many calls for his release, from activists in the United States and abroad. Even Tugwell supported it. In 1943, he wrote to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes that he “hoped he [Albizu Campos] will be pardoned and come back to Puerto Rico.” Tugwell believed it was important to demonstrate that Americans were “a people who do not often deprive anyone of the freedom to speak; and especially that we do not fear the advocacy of independence for Puerto Rico.” He also believed that Albizu Campos would now “find that many of his Independista friends here are ready to acknowledge the wisdom of our gradual and rational approach.”83 In the end, Albizu Campos was transferred to a hospital in New York City for treatment and stayed there until 1947. The FBI file on him, however, expressed doubts about his illness. A letter in 1943 from the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to the White House adviser Harry L. Hopkins remarked that “thus far the doctors at that institution have been unable to find any significant physical disabilities.”84 A few months later, another letter from Hoover to Hopkins noted that Albizu Campos “is reported to be using his private room in the Columbus Hospital as the headquarters of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico in New York City and it has been said that he receives many notable visitors and holds meetings in this room, which, according to reliable sources, is paid for by the Communist Party, U.S.A.”85 Albizu Campos would never be free from the scrutiny of the security service, but in 1947 he was released from the hospital, his imprisonment over—for the time being.

  After the end of the Second World War, there had been a shift in focus on the island toward advocating the stimulation of private investment from the United States, especially for industrialization. Legislation was passed to allow tax breaks on some manufactured goods, ushering in an era known as Operación Manos a la Obra or Operation Bootstrap, with the emphasis now being on economic output.86 Manufacturers started to take advantage of available subsidies; other industries, like tourism, also began to attract investment from the United States, and hotels began to go up along the glistening seafront. Wages from manufacturing were good at first, more than doubling between 1953 and 1963, from $18 a week for men to $44, and from $12 to $37 for women.87 It was a promising start, but it soon faltered. While Operation Bootstrap allowed workers on the island to move away from sugar, the overall gains made by industrialization did not outstrip the losses from abandoning agriculture, not least because industrialization made the island even more dependent on U.S. markets.88 The economic boom in the postwar United States meant that it was still often more profitable to work on the mainland, and many Puerto Ricans continued emigrating north.

  In addition to economic expansion during the 1940s, the United States enlarged its military presence on the island. At the start of the Second World War, the U.S. government expropriated two-thirds of the land on Vieques, an islet off the east coast, on which to build a naval base. Prior to this, Vieques had been used for growing sugar, and much of the land was already in the hands of corporations or wealthy individuals. The landless workers switched over to construction and, with the world war raging, the island became part of larger regional efforts to secure the Caribbean against any German influence or invasion.89 In the end, plans for the base were scaled back as the United States turned to the Pacific, and by 1943 Vieques was put on maintenance status, halting the economic boost it had provided.90 By 1947 the plan for the base had changed: it would be used for training and as a fuel depot. Despite this, the navy wanted more land, and the issue of what to do with the families living on Vieques became a heated political question. The United States relented over plans for evictions, and instead the island government would build housing on the small part of Vieques that remained habitable while the base was developed into a site for bomb testing and ammunition storage.91

  Albizu Campos returned to Puerto Rico in December 1947. In celebration, some university students raised the Puerto Rican flag on the day of his arrival; they were expelled.92 Much had happened since he had been away. In 1946, the United States appointed the island’s first Puerto Rican governor, Jesús Piñero. Alongside this, legislation passed that paved the way for Puerto Ricans to vote for their own governor. This effort was led by Muñoz Marín, convincing both his party of the need to change direction and the United States of the legitimacy of such plans—something the government approved in part because the United States, after the Second World War, wanted to be seen to promote democratic values.93

  In June 1948, after the return of Albizu Campos, the Puerto Rican legislature—under the control of Muñoz Marín and his party—passed the Gag Law (known as la mordaza), which made it illegal to show support for independence—legislation directed at the nationalists.94 A few months later, in November, the island voted in Muñoz Marín as its first elected governor, as his party took 61.2 percent of the vote. His heavy brow and tidy mustache would be the face of Puerto Rican politics for decades to come.

  The question of status continued to be unresolved, and Muñoz Marín was now in favor of a plan to give the island its own constitution.95 The 1950 Public Law 600—which would allow the island to draw up such a document, as states in the United States had done—was signed into law by President Harry S. Truman in 1950 but needed to be approved by a referendum. For the nationalists, the constitution was no substitute for independence.96 As debates about the legislation began, high-profile arrests of some leading nationalists again led to bloodshed, and on October 30, 1950, some party activists launched an armed insurrection.97 It started in the southern town of Peñuelas, spreading to at least seven more cities on the island.98 The objective was to cause a political crisis, embarrass the United States, and derail the referendum vote.99 Police stations were attacked, as was the governor’s mansion in San Juan, with Muñoz Marín the intended target. Albizu Campos remained in his home, also the party’s headquarters, which came under siege by police, who fired at the building while others who were in there with Albizu Campos retaliated. Elsewhere on the island, the nationalists were outnumbered and the revolts were quickly put down.100

  The attacks had not quite finished, however. On November 1, 1950, the nationalists Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo had an even larger target in their sights: President Harry S. Truman. The two men had traveled to Washington fro
m New York and tried to shoot their way into Blair House, where Truman was staying during a White House renovation. The plan, as described by the New York Times, “was framed in such ignorance as to suggest insanity.”101 Police shot and killed Torresola, and Collazo was sentenced to death, though Truman commuted this to life in prison. By November 2, the island’s newspapers, which had been full of grisly pictures of the corpses of those who were killed, now had pictures of Albizu Campos being led away by island authorities. He had surrendered after sustained attacks by the police and national guard. In the aftermath of the uprising, one thousand people were apprehended.102

  In the end, the referendum took place in June 1951, and Public Law 600 passed with 76.5 percent in favor, though around 35 percent of registered voters did not turn out.103 A constitution was drafted and another vote in March 1952 approved it, with 374,649 in favor and 82,923 against. From there it went to the U.S. Senate for confirmation. The Estado Libre Asociado (Associated Free State), or Commonwealth, was proclaimed on July 25, 1952—fifty-four years to the day after U.S. troops landed on the island.104

  Albizu Campos had been sent to jail after the 1950 attempted assassination of Truman, but Governor Muñoz Marín gave him a conditional pardon in 1953. He would not stay free for long. On the afternoon of March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists brought guns into the U.S. House of Representatives and opened fire, shouting “¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!” No one was killed, but five representatives were wounded. According to one account, the shooters “shouted for the freedom of their homeland as they fired murderously although at random from a spectators’ gallery.”105 Three assailants—Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, and Andrés Figueroa Cordero—were caught by police, with Lebrón “still clutching the Puerto Rican flag.”106 Police later discovered a letter in her purse, explaining, “My life I give for the freedom of my country. This is a cry for victory in our struggle for independence.”107 The fourth member of the group, Irving Flores Rodríguez, fled the scene but was later found along with the gun he used.

  The photos of the three with police outside the Capitol show a defiant Lebrón, her hair styled away from her face, her gaze determined, and her appearance as polished as a movie star’s. She glared into the camera while two officers each took an arm to restrain her. In the image, as Lebrón’s granddaughter Irene Vilar, would later observe, “the very details of her outfit can be seen: starched shirt and jacket, silver earrings, black patent-leather high-heeled shoes. All this given a glaring majesty by the language of the press.”108

  Dolores “Lolita” Lebrón was born in Lares, the town where the first independence struggle began. Like many Puerto Ricans, she left the island—in her case, in 1941—to work in New York, which she did for a while as a seamstress.109 She returned in 1948 but, as Vilar wrote, “she came back a militant. New York had transformed her.”110 Lebrón remained steadfast during her trial, explaining to prosecutors, “I didn’t come here to kill but to die.”111 She was given a fifty-six-year sentence, serving it at a women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia.

  After the shooting in Congress, Albizu’s pardon was revoked and he returned to prison in the spring of 1954. He spent most of the rest of his life incarcerated, suffering a stroke and claiming for years that he was the victim of radiation experiments that burned his skin.112 He was pardoned again in 1964 because of his poor health and died the following year, his dream of an independent Puerto Rico unrealized.

  With Muñoz Marín in power until 1964, the island settled into its commonwealth status, though another plebiscite was held in 1967 on the issue. Around 60 percent opted for the commonwealth model; 39 percent for statehood; and 1 percent for independence, though nationalists had boycotted the referendum.113 More people from the mainland began to visit the island, and its tourism industry grew. The journalist Hunter S. Thompson moved to Puerto Rico early in his career, in 1960, and stayed a few months working on English-language publications. His novel The Rum Diary exhibits little admiration for what the United States wrought on the island:

  There was a strange and unreal air about the whole world I’d come into. It was amusing and vaguely depressing at the same time. Here I was, living in a luxury hotel, racing around a half-Latin city in a toy car that looked like a cockroach and sounded like a jet fighter, sneaking down alleys and humping on the beach, scavenging for food in shark-infested waters, hounded by mobs yelling in a foreign tongue—and the whole thing was taking place in quaint old Spanish Puerto Rico, where everybody spent American dollars and drove American cars and sat around roulette wheels pretending they were in Casablanca. One part of the city looked like Tampa and the other part looked like a medieval asylum.114

  In 1979, President Jimmy Carter pardoned Lebrón, Cancel Miranda, and Flores Rodríguez,, as well as Collazo, who had been involved in the 1950 attack on Blair House. The sentence of the fourth member of the group that attacked Congress, Figueroa Cordero, had been commuted in 1977 because of his failing health. It later emerged that Lebrón had turned down earlier offers of parole because she would have been required to promise not to engage in “subversive activities.” The release of Lebrón and the others was not universally popular, and the island’s governor at the time, Carlos Romero Barceló, objected to it. One angry resident, Frederick Kidder, who had lived on the island for thirty-five years, wrote against their release, arguing that they had not paid their debt to society because “they do not recognize either society or the debt.”115 The government, however, believed that the “world around them has changed substantially,” that it was a matter of “humanitarian judgment” because they were serving much longer terms than called for by the guidelines of the time, and that they “would pose no substantial risk of … becoming the rallying point for terrorist groups.”116

  As Lebrón left the prison, she called out to some of the inmates, “I’ll never forget you, fight oppression and break the prisons,” before facing the reporters waiting outside the gates.117 From there, she was reunited with the others in New York City. All four received a warm welcome as some four hundred people—many shouting, “¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!”—greeted them at the airport.118 They went on to the United Nations and spoke at a press conference. Holding a dozen red roses that she said were from “the Puerto Rican people,” Lebrón took questions from journalists, including one about recent bombings by an underground group, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation, FALN), which had been demanding the release of her and the others. She told the press: “I am a revolutionary. … I cannot disavow people who stand for liberation, and if they use bombs, what can we do, we are going forward. I hate bombs but we might have to use them.”119 The four left for San Juan, where around five thousand people gathered to greet their arrival, with the crowds chanting, “Lolita Lebrón—an example of courage.”120

  Members of FALN would go on to claim responsibility for some seventy bombings in U.S. cities from 1974 to 1983, killing five, injuring dozens, and causing millions of dollars worth of property damage. One of their most notorious attacks was the 1975 bombing at Fraunces Tavern in New York City which left four people dead. In connection with these events, Oscar López Rivera was arrested, but the charge was for “seditious conspiracy,” or attempting to overthrow the U.S. government. López Rivera was born in Puerto Rico and moved to Chicago at fourteen. He was later drafted and served in the Vietnam War, earning a Bronze Star. Upon his return, he became involved in Puerto Rican activism in Chicago, eventually joining FALN.

  In 1981, he began his seventy-year sentence, but he was not alone in his imprisonment—other members of FALN had also been arrested, with eleven later being freed from prison in exchange for renouncing violence, in a 1999 clemency deal under President Bill Clinton. López Rivera, however, turned down an offer at this time, in part because the negotiations included only some of the group’s imprisoned members. He would have to wait until 2017, when his sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama—controversia
lly, because while some people consider López Rivera a freedom fighter, others call him a terrorist.

  López Rivera told the Guardian in an interview before his release that in its heyday FALN focused on structural targets, not people. “We called it ‘armed propaganda’—using targets to draw attention to our struggle.” He defended the group as “adhering to international law that says that colonialism is a crime against humanity and that colonial people have a right to achieve self-determination by any means, including force,” but said the days of attacks were long over. “I don’t think I could be a threat,” he said. “We have transcended violence.”121

  However, FALN was not the only clandestine group on the island. Throughout the 1980s the Boricua Popular Army, or Los Macheteros (the machete wielders, or cane cutters), was also dedicated to the island’s independence struggle. Founded in 1976, the group claimed responsibility for a number of bombings on the island, including some at military installations. The Macheteros drew wider public attention with their 1983 heist, in which $7.2 million was taken from a Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford, Connecticut. In connection with this, one of the group’s leaders, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos—who had also been involved with FALN—was arrested but managed to jump bail ahead of his trial in 1990. He lived as a fugitive until 2005, when FBI agents tracked him down at his home in Hormigueros, in the west of Puerto Rico, where he died after a standoff and shoot-out. His death took place on September 23, the same day as the Grito de Lares independence uprising in 1868, prompting angry demonstrations by supporters who considered him a hero and those upset by the FBI’s tactics and timing.122 The Macheteros are thought to still be active, and to be operating cells in the United States.