Workers World Party salutes the Puerto Rican movement
People all over the U.S. are learning about Puerto Rico's
struggle against colonization through the heroic Vieques
struggle against Navy occupation and the struggle to free the
16 Puerto Rican political prisoners. This is shaking the
generals in the Pentagon and their political spokespeople in
Washington. They can no longer ignore the fighting spirit of
the Puerto Rican nation.
Workers World Party, a multinational socialist organization,
gives our whole-hearted support to the people of Puerto Rico in
this just battle. We salute those who have spent weeks and
months camping on Allende beach, those challenging the Navy in
Mount David, those taking on this injustice in Yayí
beach, all the organizers of the Committee for the Rescue and
Development of Vieques and all the courageous people of Puerto
Rico.
For 101 years, the United States ruling class has exploited
Puerto Rico for its own economic and military ends. U.S.
companies pay Puerto Rican workers a fraction of what their
fellow workers in the U.S. earn. The Pentagon sends Puerto
Rican young people to die in its military adventures. It
contaminates the island with its vast military bases and
nuclear waste.
Millions of Puerto Rican people have been forced to migrate
to the U.S., where they struggle against racist oppression.
Yet the Puerto Rican people as a whole have never once been
allowed the right to self-determination; instead their
relationship with the colonizer has been imposed through
repression and intimidation.
Pentagon is vulnerable
The mass mobilization against the Navy occupation of Vieques
comes at a crucial moment for the Pentagon. It is in the
process of transferring the Southern Army of the U.S. Southern
Command to the Roosevelt Roads base in Puerto Rico.
The Southern Command is the arm of U.S. intervention in
Latin America. With Colombia on the verge of revolution and
Venezuela asserting its independence from U.S. imperialism, the
Pentagon needs its intervention forces free to mobilize at a
moment's notice.
At the same time, the Pentagon is on the defensive following
the Navy's killing of Vieques resident David Sanes in
April.
The righteous rage of the Puerto Rican people has already
forced the Pentagon to put its bombing exercises in Vieques on
hold.
Clinton makes concessions
Feeling the strength of the people, Clinton has been forced
to recognize the 16 political prisoners and the political
nature of their incarceration. The U.S. administration will try
in every way to use the release of the Puerto Rican freedom
fighters as a bargaining chip against those who want an end to
the military occupation of the island.
But we are confident that the Puerto Rican people, drawing
on their long experience with treacherous U.S. rulers, will
ultimately defeat this ploy and win real freedom--for the
political prisoners, for Vieques, and for the entire Puerto
Rican nation to live without colonizers.
Workers World Party supports the struggle of oppressed
peoples for freedom from imperialist intervention and
domination--from Iraq to Yugoslavia to Puerto Rico. We
recognize that since the days of Spanish colonialism, the most
valiant fighters for Puerto Rican self-determination have
struggled for independence--getting the foreign oppressors
out.
Just as we work inside the U.S. today for the freedom of
African American political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, we have
supported the struggle to release Lolita Lebron and the other
Puerto Rican Nationalist fighters. Just as we worked
hand-in-hand with Puerto Rican activists organizing the 1976
Bicentennial Without Colonies demonstration and the July 25,
1998, actions against 100 years of U.S. colonialism, so we
continue to give our wholehearted support to this historic
struggle for freedom.
It is the Party's deep conviction that the greatest act of
solidarity that peoples in the U.S. can render to the
liberation struggle in Puerto Rico is to do away right here
with this social and economic system that perpetuates wars,
military occupations and colonialism.
¡Vieques sí, Marina no! ¡Que viva Puerto
Rico libre!
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