Lolita Lebron
November 19, 1920 – August 1, 2010

Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebron dies at 89
(AP) – 4 hours ago
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Lolita Lebron, a Puerto Rican independence activist who spent 25 years in prison for participating in a gun attack on the U.S. Congress a half-century ago, died Sunday. She was 89. Lebron died at a hospital in San Juan of complications from respiratory disease, said Francisco Torres, president of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico. She had been hospitalized repeatedly in recent months for her ailments. Lebron was a leading figure in the small but passionate nationalist movement in this U.S. territory. “Lolita was the mother of the independence movement. This is an insurmountable loss,” said Maria de Lourdes Santiago, a member of the Caribbean island’s Senate from the Puerto Rican Independence Party.

Lebron was born Nov. 19, 1920, in Lares, in southwestern Puerto Rico, and moved as a young adult to New York, part of a mass migration from the island to the United States during the 1940s. There she developed her nationalist views and became a follower of movement leader Pedro Albizu Campos. In 1954, she and three other nationalists entered the U.S. Capitol with automatic pistols and opened fire from an upstairs spectators’ gallery onto the crowded floor of the House, firing nearly 30 shots. They unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and Lebron shouted “Viva Puerto Rico libre!” No one died in the attack but five U.S. representatives were wounded, including one congressman who was shot in the chest. Lebron later said that she never intended to kill anyone and that all four nationalists expected to be killed in the assault. She and the others — Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irving Flores and Andres Figueroa Cordero — received lengthy prison sentences. President Jimmy Carter granted them clemency in 1979 and they were released.

“We didn’t do anything that we should regret,” Lebron said upon her release. “Everyone has the right to defend their right to freedom that God gave them.” Back in Puerto Rico, Lebron continued to attend political rallies on the island, where the independence movement holds little sway with voters. The vast majority of people in Puerto Rico favor either becoming a U.S. state or maintaining the semiautonomous status they have now.

Lebron was arrested in 2001 at age 81 when she and five other people cut through a fence on the neighboring island of Vieques to protest the 1999 death of a civilian security guard killed by an errant bomb dropped during a U.S. Navy training exercise. The U.S. has since closed the Vieques bombing range. She was sentenced to 60 days in jail for trespassing. In recent years, Lebron tempered her support for violent struggle. “I think times have changed, and there is no need now to kill for freedom,” she told El Mundo newspaper in 1998. “I would not take up arms nowadays, but I acknowledge that the people have a right to use any means available to free themselves.”

It is 5:00 of the evening of June 30, 2010, groups of students, teachers and citizens asked for entry to the House of the Laws and they were struck and tortured by the Police, there are numerous injured people, while the National Guard is mobilized towards the Capitol Hill. Violent shocks scatter for the whole zone of the Parliament and the repressions continue.

A constitutional coup has just been established in Puerto Rico. After a year in which the present time government under the New Progressive Party (Partido Nuevo Progresista, that attempts to join the Island to the United States trough statehood) tried to and succeeded taking over many institutions that form the base of the democratic government of Puerto Rico, an atmosphere of hostility followed by many reckless actions that threaten public peace had climaxed in violent and aggressive actions of this government against the parties of the opposition, the organized student movement, the labor unions, the press, the environment, as against every area and institution of Puerto Rico’s civil society.

This constitutional coup springs from the Legislative branch of the government under the command of Senator Thomas Rivera Schatz, endorsed by the central government, under the dominance of the Secretary Governor, counselor Marcos Rodríguez Ema, with the obvious intent of having under their grasp and without opposition full control of every agency and organization that rule the judiciary, academic, economic and civil societies. Before this scenario, Governor Luis Fortuño operates without volition, has no opinion, appearance nor public responsibility.

With the complete control of the High Court of Puerto Rico, the University of Puerto Rico Board of trustees, and the alleged control of the news media, among many others, the genuine participation of the People of Puerto Rico in all democratic processes protected by our Constitution is jeopardized.

The events started (trough the rush approval of Law 7 by the Legislature) with more than 20,000 public employee lay-offs, with the allegation that this would alleviate the gigantism of the government and would find the solution of the serious public deficit, that has never been properly evidenced. This decision has caused economical chaos, public services are worse than ever and it has generated despair and gloominess in every Puertorrican family. In this same guise there exists a serious persecution against all artistic institutions of the country, strangling their budgets, trying with this actions to avoid the propagation of art as dissidence. This, while the government favors contracts of obscene sums with hundreds of advisors, contractors and lobbyists associated with their own political party.

The attacks continued in the form of the appointment to the High Court of four Judges with a well known affiliation with, and militancy for the governing political party, achieving a majority of votes in favor of the actual government on all decisions made in this Forum, on individual basis. The government went on repressing and eliminating student participation on the procedures of the State University, suppressing tuition exemption rights for outstanding athletes and artists, among others; forcing the students from all eleven campuses of the University of Puerto Rico to declare a strike that lasted 60 days, generating ample support from the people of Puerto Rico and around the world.

The students on strike were successful on their achieving their demands trough negotiations that involved a First Instance Court and an appointed negotiator; however, these accords were are trying to be invalidated by Secretary of government Rodríguez Ema who said that these accords “are not worth the paper in which they were written”

This event preceded the Central government’s action of proposing a hasty law, that was signed with no revision within hours, adding four additional members to the Board of trustees of the University of Puerto Rico. These additions to the Board are unconditional members of the governing political party The students of the State university, who on a great majority depend in Federal grants, now face an annual recurring fee of $800.00, fee they will not be able to pay and that they will not pay, forcing the students to return to their strike. With this strategy, the Central government risk the accreditation of the State University and as a consequence, the government would be able to privatize it’s assets.

Following this same direction, the government of Puerto Rico will attempt to sell and to divide for speculation a strip of land where stands the Karst formation, on the northwest of the Island. This area collects one third of our water supplies for the entire population; nonetheless, the government intends to put this area into private hands that would build a toll expressway over this zone that is rich ecologically and economically.

Passing up many other events, the budget of Puerto Rico was approved, together with countless laws which favor privatization, the dissolving of professional associations and the distribution of public funds into private hands, without the pertaining and compulsory hearings of public participation, reaching the extreme of turning off the microphones of the opposing political party members, in a despotic fashion.

The events climaxed last week when the FBI in Puerto Rico arrested Senator Héctor Martínez, NPP, on charges of bribe, the selling of influences and other charges. Martinez is Senator’s Rivera Schatz right hand on the Senate. A public squabble reached the news between the Senator and the FBI, with the Seantor fending the alleged innocence of Senator Martínez,, who has been directly associated with drug traffic and who was filmed while committing bribery.

Then, last in his many violent and reckless acts, the president of the Senate, Rivera Schatz, using force and a real padlock, censored the access of the cameras and the news media to the Senate sessions, depriving the People of Puerto Rico of direct information about the discussions and voting sessions that were taking place about this year’s budget and other matter). The events resulted in verbal and physical violence between senators, rising indignation between the people to a point of and almost unsustainable state of outrage and wrath.

Counselor Rivera Schatz has taken virtual control of the country with his tyrannical and fascist ways; and it cannot be discarded that from these same seats, this same week, acts of persecution and acts of violence will be started against other sectors of the People, all approved by the Secretary Governor of Puerto Rico.

It is 5:00 of the evening of June 30, 2010, groups of students, teachers and citizens asked for entry to the House of the Laws and they were struck and tortured by the Police, there are numerous injured people, while the National Guard is mobilized towards the Capitol Hill. Violent shocks scatter for the whole zone of the Parliament and the repressions continue.

This factual deed of control of the political power from within the Puertorrican Nation violates all elementary principles of democracy and of participation of the People in the government, for which we proclaim to the World the actual situation of contained violence that exists in our People and that is about to explode against these two politicians that had taken by assault the power in our Country. Even though in Puerto Rico there are no conditions for an armed struggle of the People because of the obvious disparity of the opposing sides, a revolution of cultural and of student affirmation is starting to take the streets and to retrieve the spaces stolen away by the originators of this coup.

We exhortat all communications media of the World to divulge and expose the current situation of the Puertorrican Nation and we ask of you, therefore, your total solidarity.

Composed by Roberto Ramos-Perea, Puertorrican Playwriter
(With the active collaboration, comments and support of more than a hundred Puertorrican citizens.)