AlterNet: FBI Witch Hunt Stokes Puerto Rican Independence Movement

FBI Witch Hunt Stokes Puerto Rican Independence Movement

By Jessica Pupovac, AlterNet. Posted January 31, 2008.

As an anti-terror task force targets three young Puerto Ricans in New York, people take to the streets.



They say that when Filiberto Ojeda Rios was killed, all of Puerto Rico stood still.

"The financial district shut down," José Lopez, Executive Director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, explained recently in a small café along Paseo Boricua, the heart of Chicago's vibrant Puerto Rican neighborhood.

His eyes lit up as he went on. "Literally all of the banks and offices were closed and people were just standing outside, watching the caravan go by. Usually it is a one hour trip to his tome town of Nagüabo. That day, it took seven hours. Everywhere there were hundreds of people. Little kids made their own signs that said, '¡Viva Filiberto!'. It was an incredible outpouring of love and compassion that really was felt throughout that whole time period."

Filiberto Ojeda Rios was the founder and longtime leader of the Popular Boricua Army, or Los Macheteros, a militant wing of the Puerto Rican pro-independence movement. He was shot by FBI agents in his home on September 23, 2005, at the age of 72, and left to bleed to death.

Although Los Macheteros haven't participated in armed actions for 15 years, the FBI has continued to aggressively pursue their leadership. It is an effort that has led them to the doors of multiple New Yorkers affiliated in some way with the Puerto Rican struggle to wrest control of the island from the U.S. government. Three of those people -- social worker Christopher Torres, graphic designer Tania Frontera and film maker Julio Antonio Pabón Jr. -- were recently handed subpoenas by the FBI/NYPD Anti-Terrorism Task Force, and, after securing a postponement, have been ordered to testify before a grand jury February 1st at the Eastern District court in Brooklyn.

Torres and Frontera were both supporters of the successful struggle to force the U.S. Navy off of the island of Vieques, which was used for decades as a bomb range and weapons testing ground. Pabón's father, meanwhile, is unsure why his son has been targeted, but he believes it might have to do with his coordinating a visit by The Welfare Poets, a radical arts collective and supporters of Puerto Rican independence, to Wesleyan University, where he attended school years ago. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/rights/75196/

It is time to allow Puerto Rico to become an independent country. let the go their own way.

As they have voted in the past?

they have been living in a squalid limbo too long.

Their independence struggle is similar to our own: Taxation without Representation

The Corporate Elite have kept it this way on purpose to keep P.R. wages low

It's an unholy repression. Simple as that.

Even SSI in PR is barely half that in the mainland. I looked into it when I bought my boat as

the only place in the Caribbean that I could live and keep my SSI disability.

I quickly ruled it out when I found out how much I would get.

In past referendums the vote winds up to be split in thirds for independence, statehood or status quo.