Commemorations are being held across Puerto Rico today to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Pedro Albizu Campos, popularly known to many as Don Pedro, the former head of the Nationalist Party and leader of the Puerto Rican independence movement. Albizu Campos spent some 26 years in prison for organizing against U.S. colonial rule. He was born in 1891, seven years before the U.S. invaded the island. He would go on to become the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard Law School. Once he returned to Puerto Rico, he dedicated the rest of his life to the independence movement, becoming president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party in 1930. It was a position he held until his death in 1965.
In 1936, Albizu Campos was jailed along with other Nationalist leaders on conspiracy and sedition charges. His jailing led to protests across Puerto Rico. On Palm Sunday, March 21st, 1937, police shot and killed 21 Puerto Ricans and wounded over 200 others taking part in a peaceful march to protest Albizu Campos’s imprisonment. The event became known as the Ponce massacre. After his eventual release, Albizu Campos was arrested again in 1950, just days after a Nationalist revolt began on October 30th.
Pedro Albizu Campos would spend almost the rest of his life in prison, where he repeatedly charged that he was the subject of human radiation experiments. Photos taken of him in prison show his body covered with welts.
José Serrano talking:
one of the things I hear in Congress a lot is, we can’t resolve the status of Puerto Rico until Puerto Ricans decide what they want. Well, no, they didn’t invade us; we invaded them. And in my case, “we invaded them” gets very complicated, since I was born there, and now I’m a member of the U.S. Congress. So—but part of me invaded the other part of me, I guess.
And Pedro Albizu Campos was a man who stood up for what he believed was right and what a lot of Puerto Ricans felt was right, if not necessarily—and this is a tricky thing to say—if not necessarily outright independence, then outright respect and outright dignity and understanding that we’re a colony. And I believe that a lot of people who may not support independence act and demand from Washington based on his desire to act and demand from Washington. He asked for independence. Others ask for statehood. Others ask for an enhanced commonwealth. But I think it all stems from the fact that there was this Puerto Rican who dared challenge the system. So now it’s easier to challenge Washington, because he dared do it such a long time ago. And so, I, as a person who came here when I was very young, grew up in New York, living in the state, being born in Puerto Rico, I have the highest respect for him. And I’ve said it forever. And some people criticize you for that. But he stood up when people would not stand up, and he paid a big price.
We’re still trying to find out—when we got those FBI files—and Juan González was the first person I called to look at the files, because I don’t know how to read that kind of stuff, he does—you know, we found a lot of things we didn’t know. And there are still things we don’t know. We don’t know how much he was tortured in prison. We don’t know other people that were killed during that period of time. And we also, sadly, found something out, and I’ll close with this, that a lot of names were crossed out, because a lot of people we thought, or they thought, were with them were actually not with them, and those names are of people who at that time were still alive. But the FBI gave to me over a million documents, of which my—two sets. One set I sent to Hunter College, which has done great work with, and one set I sent to Senate of Puerto Rico, which I understand has sitting somewhere in a basement, doing nothing with it.
I was a member of the Appropriations Committee, and I was what’s called a ranking member. I was the top Democrat. We were not in the majority, so the Republican was the chairman. And I was asked by my friends from the Independence Party—Manuel Rodríguez Orellana, a dear friend of mine, said, “Why don’t you ask him about the behavior towards Puerto Rico?” We both thought that we would get a hemming and hawing from the director of the FBI.
Louis Freeh shocked me off my chair and left me, the first time in a long time in politics, without a follow-up question, because I said, “About the belief that the Puerto Ricans have been persecuted for years and the independence movement persecuted, is there anything you can tell us?” He says, “It was true, and I’ll release the documents to you.” And that shocked me. And that started that whole thing that led to your investigation, to your reporting. And I understand Nelson has been kind enough to say that some of that research went into his books also.
Nelson Denis talking:
Campos was the greatest patriot in Puerto Rican history. He was a series of firsts. He was the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard, first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard. ut he didn’t give the valedictory address, did he, even though he was the valedictorian.
He was the valedictorian of the law school. And there was just a prevailing—and it wasn’t even perceived as racism; it was just the modus operandi of the time. I was just almost considered a given that we’re not going to have a person of color delivering the valedictorian speech. And so, that was sort of a defining moment for him, when he could see, you know, basically how things were run.
He started—he refused all sorts of corporate sinecures and very, very elegant offers to open up a one-man office in Ponce. He basically practiced poverty law, but he also became the head of the Nationalist Party. He advocated, organized, editorialized, but he was ignored. It’s like he didn’t exist, until in 1935 he led an islandwide agricultural strike that ended up doubling the sugarcane workers’ wages. And then the United States took very serious attention.
It was at that point that they completely militarized the island police force. They sent in a new governor, General Blanton—an Army general, Blanton Winship, a policeman named E. Francis Riggs, whose father was the president of the Riggs National Bank, which had colonial investments all over South and Central America. the violence started immediately thereafter. In 1935, they shot—
The Riggs Bank was finally defunded, and it was terminated, when it got caught laundering money for Augusto Pinochet in Chile. It was—there was a term called filibustering. The word “filibuster,” which you’ll appreciate, Congressman, meant to go down to South America and start a fake revolution, which was actually a disguised right-wing takeover. Those revolutions had to be financed. An the Riggs Bank was one of the principal sources of money exchange to finance these revolutions, so places like the United Fruit Company could come in and take over a government.
So, E. Francis Riggs comes to basically oversee the colonial investments in Puerto Rico. And when his police force shot, assassinated three Nationalists in broad daylight in Río Piedras—it became known as the Río Piedras massacre—he had an immediate press conference to explain and contextualize to the island what this was all about. And he said, nakedly, bluntly, to everybody, this was his intent. He told the entire island that if Albizu Campos continued to, “agitate” the sugarcane workers, there would be war to the death against all Puerto Ricans.
the wealthiest club in San Juan. It was the equivalent of Mount Quarantania, where the devil takes you to the top of the mountain and says, “All this shall be yours, if you will just come with me.” And they took him to El Escambrón, this very famous, as you said, a very elaborate casino in San Juan, and E. Francis Riggs, the police chief, offered Albizu Campos $150,000. And this is not apocryphal, it’s not fringe journalism. It was reported in the pages of El Imparcial and El Mundo the next day, and there were multiple witnesses there. It was written in his wife’s autobiography. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars if he would basically back off of the sugarcane strike and sort of soften his nationalist demands. Albizu Campos rightfully and politely refused the offer and said that his island wasn’t for sale. That offer was repeated to Luis Muñoz Marín, and he took it. He became the governor of Puerto Rico.
José Serrano talking:
Just very briefly, when we looked at those documents, that you looked at with me, the first page is unique and shows the sickness of the people they were dealing with at the FBI at that time. It’s a gentleman, whose name I forget, writing to Herbert Hoover and saying, “Keep an eye on Albizu Campos. This man speaks many languages. He’s very intelligent. He could win the next election. he knows about Army intelligence.” In other words, if you take all that today and present it for a candidate running for president, he’ll get elected. So, the first question is: So where was the problem? The problem obviously was that he was intelligent enough to alert people. And that was considered making trouble, when in fact they were simply alerting people to the suffering and the mistreatment of Puerto Rico as a colony.
Hugo Rodríguez talking:
Pedro Albizu Campos is very important in Puerto Rico because he, Pedro Albizu Campos, gave us back our worth for the identity. Remember that when the United States invaded us, they tried to colonize us not only through the economics, but as well in the education process. They tried to press on us American values and to erase all Puerto Rican and Spanish inheritance from us. The tried to take our Spanish language. And in that point in time, Don Pedro Albizu Campos gave us back that pride of being a different identity, of being a different nationality. And the politics in Puerto Rico, not only for the advocates of independence, but for all the politics in Puerto Rico, are to be written before and after Pedro Albizu Campos, because no one, even the advocates for statehood, will deny the value of our identity, will deny the value of our cultural values and our language. And that is one of the most important contributions that Pedro Albizu Campos did to Puerto Rico.
I believe it is important, as well, that in order to understand Pedro Albizu Campos and those characterizations of terrorism that have surrounded some media around him, you have to understand the time in which he lived. The 1950 event, the insurrection of 1950, and the attack to the Congress in 1954 was in the context of the establishment in that decade of the Estado Libre Asociado. That was not another thing that—a disguise of the colony. And let me tell you something, to accentuate the farce, they gave a name in Puerto Rico for the colony, Estado Libre Asociado. But the proper translation to that name, that would be Free Associated State. They didn’t give that name in English; they put commonwealth of Puerto Rico. And together with that effort, the United States were trying to take out Puerto Rico from their list of territories and colonies of the United Nations. And in that context, and in the context of a cruel persecution of the independence movement, is that Don Pedro Albizu Campos made the insurrection of 1950 and that happened the events of the attack to the Congress in 1954. Of course, Don Pedro knew that he would not defeat the United States by sending four people to the Congress, revolvers at hands, and open fire once inside the building. But what he wanted was to focus the attention of the world on the farce, on the deceit that was happening in Puerto Rico, and to demonstrate before the world, and to show before the whole world, the colonial regime of Puerto Rico.
Nelson Denis talking:
at that time, you have to—if you make an empathic leap to the ’50s and earlier, you have to realize that Puerto Rico was—let’s call it a nation. It was a nation separated by an ocean, a language, a culture, 400 years of Ibero-American history. If you say that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, what happened in Puerto Rico never happened at all. You could literally shoot 17 people during the Ponce massacre and then deceive the mainland, claiming that the police had acted in self-defense. They even rearranged the corpses. They choreographed the setting, à la Leni Riefenstahl, and created a different reality and told—and somehow created the reality that the Puerto Ricans were shooting themselves. Similarly, in the 1950s context, President Truman said that this was—dismissed everything, even though there had been an assassination attempt against him, as a incident between Puerto Ricans.
Well, this incident involved the deployment of 5,000 National Guard troops, the arrest of 3,000 Puerto Ricans and the bombing, in broad daylight, of two towns. The New York Times reported it as—that Jayuya looked like an earthquake had hit it. Yeah, the earthquake was a bombing. But The New York Times said that the Nationalists had burned their own town. Within this context of repression, there was an additional law, La Ley de La Mordaza, Law 53, which made it, from 1948 to 1957, illegal to utter a word, sing a song, whistle a tune, say anything with respect to the independence of Puerto Rico. Even if you had a Puerto Rican flag in your own home, that was a felony, and you could be arrested for 10 years.
You had carpetas. Over 100,000 Puerto Ricans had secret FBI files open on them. They’re the ones that Congressman Serrano had released, 1.8 million pages of secret police surveillance. Under these conditions, you couldn’t even get word off the island. The information was controlled by, say, half a dozen AP and UPI wire service reporters.
So, within that context, Albizu Campos realized—he had FBI agents following him all over the island, about a series of 25 of them, in platoons, so at any given time there were six FBI agents. They had to do something very striking. They had to engage in some dramatic gesture to galvanize the world’s attention. It was modeled, actually, after the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916. So the idea wasn’t to defeat the most powerful empire on Earth; it was just to confront that reality and have especially the U.N. decolonization committee realize that there was a serious problem in Puerto Rico, because there was a referendum vote coming up to create the commonwealth. So there was a great urgency that kicked in. It wasn’t fanaticism. It wasn’t Reds. It wasn’t the way that even we heard it on this newscast. It was a very specific and necessary action to let the world know the seriousness of the conditions in Puerto Rico.
They had an islandwide—islandwide, I’d say eight towns. They tried to secure guns by attacking police precincts. It started with a prison breakout, led by Correa Cotto, a somewhat famous criminal. As the police were then chasing these fugitives, 110 fugitives, around the island, they attacked in these eight towns, particularly in Utuado and Jayuya. The idea was to attack the police precincts and then retreat to Utuado, which is a very centrally located town nestled in some mountains, and hold out for a period of a week or two, so that they could get word out during that period of time to the world. It was more of a symbolic act. It wasn’t really a military act. So, the point was to get that word out. And it was for that reason that the United States suppressed it immediately. The reprisals were across the board. Three thousand Puerto Ricans were arrested. Two towns were bombed in broad daylight. And the only word that you heard in the United States was that they were these fanatics in Puerto Rico and that it was an incident between these fanatics.
Not only that, but that was in that context that the attack of the Nationalists on Blair House occurred. It was during that same uprising.
When Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, two Nationalists, because communication had been cut from the island to the United States about what was happening, they figured they would go to Washington and attempt to assassinate President Truman, who at that time was staying at the Blair House, because the White House was under reconstruction. And they had a shootout right outside of the Blair House with a couple—and actually killed one officer and wounded another.
the ironic context of this is that George Orwell’s 1984 had been published just in 1949, and it was a huge, best-selling hit in both the United States and Great Britain in 1949. And yet, in 1950, we have this Orwellian circumstance in Puerto Rico, where you have this islandwide revolution, and you have President Truman napping in his underwear up in Washington, and people try to come—try and shoot him. And yet they dismiss it as an incident between Puerto Ricans, as if nothing was wrong in Puerto Rico. It was an Orwellian situation on the island, and people didn’t even realize it.
Hugo Rodríguez talking:
Today, the Puerto Rican Independence Party will unveil a plate in a building that is located at Old San Juan, in the streets—in the corner of the streets Sol and Luna. That building was the headquarters of the Nationalist Party in the decade of 1950s. Afterwards, there will be a mass in the cathedral in honor of Don Pedro Albizu Campos.
I believe that Pedro Albizu Campos is not forgotten here. We have him very present, because Don Pedro is a symbol for all of us. His lessons, enriched by a life full of sacrifice, is an inspiration and is an example for all of us, the advocates for independence. He suffered jail. He suffered torture in jail. The body of evidence demonstrates that he was burned with radiation in jail. And he never took a step back in his struggle in favor of independence. So that example of perseverance is an inspiration for all of us in Puerto Rico.
Nelson Denis talking:
You have a situation where a man is in jail for 25 years and followed by FBI agents. His body was so stripped with or striped with burns that he looked like he had been flipped over on a barbecue grill. You had Orlando Damuy, the head of the Cuban Cancer Association, a world-renowned radiologist, who went and diagnosed him as having been undergoing radiation. You had a Geiger counter that broke when it was approached—when it was put in proximity to his body. You had an X-ray film with a paper clip on it, that when it was placed on his skin, the paperclip irradiated on—the image, onto the X-ray film. It was incredible.
there’s a woman named Eileen Welsome, who won the Pulitzer Prize for a book called The Plutonium Files. She found, and the United States government disclosed, and they agreed, that there had been undisclosed experiments conducted for about 30 years, from the 1940s—or 30 years, to the ’70s, of 16,000, that were found, 16,000 unwitting subjects, including many prisoners, of, specifically, radiation studies. It was called TBI, total body irradiation. And Albizu Campos apparently was one of those subjects. And you see how cravenly, how the governor of Puerto Rico—who, by the way, La Princesa, the prison where he was at, is almost directly contiguous with the governor’s mansion. They’re within a hundred feet of each other. This was happening in full knowledge and complicity of the United States government.
I read the FBI files, where you had a Chinese wall around Albizu Campos so that nobody can get through it, so no doctor could come and confirm what everyone knew, which was that he was being slowly killed in this island. And they wanted to do it under conditions where it wouldn’t be known, because they didn’t want to create a martyr. This is how they treated—they figured if they could declare Albizu “the King of the Towels,” “El Rey de las Toallas,” and treat him like a madman, then, by inference, the Nationalists were also crazy. But now the truth is very evident, that there was a widespread—it was a—unfortunately, it was a conspiracy. And this is not a conspiracy theory. It is now known that this was the attitude and the way that they treated our leadership in Puerto Rico.
José Serrano talking:
one of the things that’s painful there, when you see, is no one can deny the importance of Luis Muñoz Marín in Puerto Rican history and in economic issues and so on, but there you see what the FBI was able to do—and it was the FBI more than anyone else—to divide Puerto Ricans, to where Albizu could have been a natural ally for the very liberal Muñoz Marín, yet it didn’t turn out that way. It turned out that Muñoz Marín basically snitched on him and told on him and sort of hurt him in so many ways.
And the other thing, too, which is interesting, is, for good or for bad—and I think for good—how much we’ve grown. In those days, to say anything positive about the flag or Albizu Campos would have gotten you into a lot of trouble. Here we are discussing it today. Here there are commemorations in the Bronx, you know, in Washington, in Puerto Rico, and it’s not seen as anything. And lastly, Albizu’s legacy allows for people then to go to Congress and to the president and get political prisoners out of jail—the first group that Bobby García worked on; the second group that Nydia, Luis Gutiérrez and I worked on, the Oscar López situation, Rivera López situation. All those things would have not have happened if he had not set that kind of mode and that kind of tune.
Nelson Denis talking:
there was La Ley de La Mordaza, the law of the muzzle, Public Law 53, which was modeled after the 1948 anti-Communist Smith Act. But in Puerto Rico, it was applied just to suppress nationalism or any talk of independence. If you breathe one word about independence, under that law, you can go to jail for 10 years. Well, this speech was delivered in the jaws of the lion. He had an agent, an FBI agent named Jack West, whose job it was to have—create newsreel footage of every speech that he gave all over the island. It was being transcribed and recorded everywhere he went. So when he gave this speech, he was practically daring the American empire to arrest him. He was playing brinkmanship with his own leadership in order to inspire the entire island.
His wife, Laura, who he met when he was at Harvard, about the attacks on their house, very similar to the attacks that occurred against Malcolm X. And she talks about numerous attacks that she believes the FBI were behind on their home.
It happened in Aguas Buenas. It happened in Ponce. And that was one of the reasons why he developed the Cadets of the Liberating Republic, Los Cadetes de la República. It was a youth arm of the Nationalist Party, but they were also stationed as bodyguards around Albizu Campos. And that is how I came to know some of this, in addition to the FBI reports, was that one of my—Juan José Cuadrado [phon.] was one of those bodyguards, and that’s how I came to know some of this information over the years. But the hostility was continuous. And the FBI hounded this man to every corner of the island. Anyone that even spoke with him was immediately debriefed, meaning interrogated, by the FBI. And it could be a felony just to talk to Albizu Campos.
José Serrano talking:
and where the FBI was very successful, as you know, Juan, was that it criminalized the independence movement. The independence movement, prior to that act, that behavior by the FBI, was a legitimate political movement that actually ran candidates. And it reached the point where its percentage began to get high, and then it was turned, because in one of the first page—one of the first reports on Albizu Campos says he could win the next election, his party could make great gains in the next election. Well, that’s the American way. And yet they painted it as such a negative thing that they criminalized the whole movement.
[There was this book by Luis Ferrao, which came out in the early ’90s, which also raises issues of the negative aspects of the nationalist movement under Albizu, the fact that there were some neo-fascist tendencies, according to Ferrao, that Albizu was a backer of Franco during—the civil war in Spain became a huge issue even among Puerto Rican Nationalists, with some members of the Nationalist Party siding with the Republicans against the Falangists, and that—and also that Albizu also was a staunch defender of Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, even after the massacre of Haitians in—the massacre of thousands of Haitians in 1937.]
Nelson Denis talking:
there’s a term in the law called habeas corpus, and it simply means “produce the body.” So, this is another instance of George Orwell being alive and well in the history of Puerto Rico and in the footprints of history, because where is this evidence of his being a fascist? If you have a law, a gag law, that says that—that totally abrogates the First Amendment rights of everyone on that island in order to shut one man up, who’s the fascist? If you have police dossiers on 100,000 Puerto Ricans, that they don’t even know about and that could destroy their families, their careers, their reputations, who’s the fascist? If you have two towns that are bombed in broad daylight and 3,000 Puerto Ricans arrested within the space of the week, who’s the fascist?
So, all I can say is, you know, you can—that game, you could get away with it before, but unfortunately now, the cat is out of the bag, and it’s called truth. And the truth—and I commend Congressman José Serrano, who brought this information, is in those FBI documents. They unwittingly became the Boswell of Puerto Rican history, because now it is out. All we have to do is connect the dots of that history, and we can see the calumny and the—just the outright inversion of history. But now, history is being written by the people who lived it, the Nationalists themselves. And I thank the congressman for making that possible.
José Serrano talking:
1954 shooting. it was a group of folks who came to Washington. There was a woman, Lolita Lebrón, involved. And I single that out, because in a very macho society, especially in the ’50s, to have a woman play a leading role was something that really showed the commitment and the courage of these folks. What was great to me was not only—not just what happened there, but what was great was how later on the Puerto Rican people, in general, decided that they had spent enough time in jail, that what they had done, whether they agree with it or not was not important, it was that they had to be released. And that happened, and I think that’s part of our growth as a people, that we understand there are people, like Juan said, with schools named after them. It doesn’t mean necessarily that you subscribe to that style. But that attack was by that group of folks. And there are some people who, up to recently, about, I think, five, six years ago, there were a couple members of Congress who had been pages, and there are pictures of them carrying people out. The claim was—and I believe it—that the idea was to shoot up in the gallery. Well, that’s— To shoot into the air. that’s marble. And so it ricochets off of that. But I don’t think that anyone ever admitted or it was said that they intended to hurt anyone. They wanted to make a point.
Nelson Denis talking:
I have a theory, which I have to be careful about, but I noticed that the net result of all of it was that Albizu Campos was simply put back in jail. And that Drew Pearson interview that we saw earlier, Drew Pearson afterwards said, himself—he faced the camera, and he said that the FBI and Secret Service knew about this potential plot to the attack on Congress, but they didn’t do anything about it. It is my belief that there was an inner circle working that actually wanted this to happen, so that they would have an excuse for jailing Albizu Campos all over again, because Albizu Campos had nothing to—he didn’t issue the order for that to happen. That happened independently from New York. There was a lot of frustration. There was a sense, again, that the plebiscite had made Puerto Rico a commonwealth, but that it was actually a cover for a colony. But what I noticed was that no real—there was no real result. Nothing changed between the United States and Puerto Rico, except that Albizu Campos, who had been pardoned for just a few months, went back into jail. And they could not prove, therefore, that he was being radiated, because he no longer had access to the doctors in order to prove it.
[There was one trial first that was a hung jury, a trial where the jurors were seven Puerto Ricans and five Americans, on the federal district court in San Juan.]
second trial is not apocryphal. There was an artist named Rockwell Kent, who recounted very specifically an affair that he went to at the governor’s mansion, with Governor Blanton Winship, where attorney—the U.S. attorney, Snyder, showed him the jury list of who he intended to be impaneled the second time, because in the first trial the jury had consisted of 10 Puerto Ricans and two North Americans, or two American expats, which was actually demographically correct, because that is about the right demographic sampling of what should be a representative jury. The second jury was almost entirely North Americans, and they flipped it around. It was something like 10 North Americans and two Puerto Ricans, both of whom had family that worked for the government, and so they had a conflict of interest. So, in the—they had a hung jury on the first one, and then this guy, Snyder, shows Rockwell Kent who the jurors are going to be for the second one.
Before the interviews of the jurors actually occur. same set of facts, completely different result. And it was—to tie that into a larger history, while he was still in jail in Puerto Rico awaiting the appeal, because he ultimately lost the appeal and went to Atlanta penitentiary, that was when the Ponce massacre occurred, because that was a peaceful march in favor of Albizu Campos, who was still on Puerto Rico. And so, to link those two, when they marched in favor of Albizu Campos’s freedom is when they slaughtered the 17 Puerto Ricans in the Ponce massacre.
José Serrano talking:
ironically—and this is something that you singled out to me when you read those files in my Washington office—no one can deny, sadly, as great as he might have been, that Luis Muñoz Marín played a major role in sort of making life miserable for Albizu Campos. And yet he didn’t know, himself, as the files show, that under that period of time he was under watch by the FBI—his personal life, his drinking style, what songs he liked, where he went, who he went with. It was all being watched, while he, himself, was playing a role, supposedly, in helping them watch the other guy.
Nelson Denis talking:
He died as a hero. It was tragic, because he underwent a cerebral thrombosis while in prison, that was brought on—and it’s pretty clear there was a direct causal relationship between the years of the radiation and the blood pressure and his declining health. It is documented in the FBI reports that the congressman got released and that I read. There’s hundreds of pages with medical reports showing his declining health. When he had that thrombosis, which is essentially a stroke, he wasn’t taken to—he didn’t receive any medical care for 48 hours. When a person has a stroke, you rush them to the hospital. The fact that he was under the dominion and control of the U.S. government, essentially, and they waited while this man had a stroke to take him to the hospital shows the hostility, the environment that he was in.
From the prison to the hospital. He then—because of that, he was semiparalytic and mute. He couldn’t speak, which is exactly what they wanted. And he couldn’t move on his right side. And this was as of 1957. He spent the next seven-and-a-half years still in jail, and then they finally released him when it was clear that he was at death’s door. And it really didn’t behoove the authorities to have him die in jail, because then he will be a complete martyr. So they let him go—well, “let him go.” He was—you know, he couldn’t even walk at that point. And the FBI files show that his phone was tapped, that they were following him, even under those conditions, because they were concerned that he would instigate, somehow, yet another revolution.
So, when he passed away, 70,000 Puerto Ricans lined the streets of San Juan. They had black little ribbons all over the streets in Old San Juan. And he was a given a hero’s farewell. But it will always be remembered that he was a lonely voice that was never heard, and he’s only now starting to get his due.
José Serrano talking:
it’s ironic and sad here that we continue to ask the FBI to release the files on what happened to him in prison. And it was not that difficult to get the ones that you so kindly speak about, but these other ones are totally gone. We also want to know about the son of Juan Mari Brás, who was an independence leader whose son was killed. And to this day, we don’t know who killed him or for what. In Puerto Rico. And then there’s the last one, which was a gentleman who used to—and it’s ironic that we talk about it now—but is a gentleman who used to provide trips to Cuba, and he was killed. I believe his last name was Varela. And he was killed. And these are unsolved mysteries that the FBI has information on, but it won’t release to us.
— source democracynow.org
Nelson Denis, author of War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony. He is a former New York state assemblyman and served as the editorial director of El Diario, the largest Spanish-language newspaper in New York City.
Rep. José Serrano, Democratic congressman from New York. He successfully pushed the FBI to declassify records regarding the Bureau’s activities targeting independence activists. He was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico.
Hugo Rodriguez, undersecretary of relations with North America for the Puerto Rican Independence Party.