Police attack striking students at Univ. of Puerto Rico

While students on strike for a week were holding a peaceful protest on Dec. 20 at one of the entrances to the University of Puerto Rico campus at Rio Piedras, police holding batons and tear-gas canisters charged. Witnesses saw police use their weapons. Students were unable to escape through the streets as contingents of cops, who had been occupying the campus, guarded every route.

With no other choice available, students had to break the entrance gate at Plaza Universitaria, a new building across from the campus entrance, to take refuge there. Police followed the students, beat them at random and arrested at least 12. Four had to be hospitalized.

Videos show students lying on the floor as three and four cops beat them. You can hear police say, “We have to protect the interests of the state” to justify their brutality. (primerahora.com)

Student Ian Camilo said through a bullhorn: “Not the police nor the SWAT team can stop us. We will continue our struggle.” To that the rest of the students responded, “Lucha, sí, entrega, no!” (“Struggle, yes, surrender, never!”).

Since the strike started on Dec. 13, the UPR students have taken their struggle to different parts of the city, transforming traditional musical parrandas — Puerto Rican caroling — into political picket lines.

On Dec. 17 they went to the financial center of the island known as Milla de Oro (Golden Mile) to perform a parranda at the office of Luis Berríos, an adviser to Puerto Rican Senate members from the governor’s New Progressive Party, and at the McConnell Valdés’ law office, which has contracts with the UPR administration to the tune of $200,000 a year.

The UPR administration abandoned UPR’s own legal divisions to outsource some of its legal work to McConnell Valdés, according to Maria Gisela Rosado, president of the Puerto Rican Association of University Professors. This includes pursuing legal cases against striking students and creating last March 7 the infamous Law 7 aimed at privatizing many services, including education. Law 7’s implementation has ruined the university’s economic health.

Students went on Dec. 18 to Plaza Las Américas, the largest shopping mall on the island, with a lead banner that read: “This Christmas and always, the university is for all.” Shoppers applauded and joined the march, showing how popular the strike is.

The school year ends Dec. 23, but students already have holiday plans. Rosalinda Soto Toledo, the mother of one of the members of the students’ National Negotiating Council and a leader of Parents in Support of the UPR Students, spoke with Workers World about these plans.

She said that students and their families, labor unions, UPR-related groups and community-based organizations have formed a coordinating committee that will announce its campaign at a Dec. 22 news conference. Groups from working-class neighborhoods such as Residencial Lloréns Torres will participate as the committee visits all 78 municipalities on the island. They will present mayors and elected officials with the students’ proposal, perform social-cultural presentations and carry out other forms of struggle as December ends. They plan a major united event in January.

Police presence and changing conditions

This strike has been different from the one last spring when the students won all but one of their demands. They continue to demand that the administration eliminate the $800 quota or tuition increase scheduled to begin in January.

But the government has added a new, more virulent and dangerous factor by ordering a permanent police presence inside the 11 campuses. This includes “regular” police, SWAT teams and the “100” police (“Golpe al Punto” or “hit the drug point”). The last are police assigned to the poorest neighborhoods to fight the “war on drugs” using terrorist tactics.

Police follow the students in each and every action they take, threatening them. To try to protect students from police brutality, a special team of lawyers from the Colegio de Abogados (Lawyers Board) and university professors wearing special orange vests, has accompanied students’ mobilizations.

Education attacked as capitalism restructures worldwide

In a YouTube video entitled “Gov. Luis Fortuño, Puerto Rico at Governor’s Mansion CPAC Cruise 2010,” produced by Tea Party organizer Lisa Miller from Washington, D.C., Fortuño pompously reports to his U.S. “peers” his efforts to lower corporate taxes and privatize services and education.

The student struggles in Puerto Rico, Ireland, Britain, Italy, Pakistan, France, Greece, the United States and other places indicate that the automation and restructuring of the capitalist productive forces worldwide has made mass education less necessary to the ruling class of bankers and bosses.

But students, families, teachers, the people of PR want more. They are fighting not only against their own home-grown Puerto Rican capitalists, but against U.S. imperialist power. Public education has a proud heritage on the island. The strike is a fight against imperialism.

¡Viva la lucha de los y las estudiantes y del pueblo puertorriqueño! Long live the struggle of the Puerto Rican students and the Puerto Rican people!

¡Los pueblos unidos jamás serán vencidos! The people united will never be defeated!

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