[ The only just future for my home is not statehood, but full
independence from the United States. But the future of a free Puerto
Rico doesn’t need to be utopian, or easy, to be just.]
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LET PUERTO RICO BE FREE (LONG ARTICLE)  
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Jaquira Díaz
September 20, 2022
The Atlantic
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_ The only just future for my home is not statehood, but full
independence from the United States. But the future of a free Puerto
Rico doesn’t need to be utopian, or easy, to be just. _

Photographs by Christopher Gregory-Rivera,

 

In 2017, as summer ends, when news anchors first mention the oncoming
Hurricane Irma, the people go to the big-box store or the Econo
supermarket just a few minutes from home. They try to stock up, but by
the time they arrive, the lines are long and most of the shops are
running low. They get what they can: some food, a few gallons of
water, a portable gas-powered hot plate in case they lose power. They
refill their prescriptions and then fill the gas tank after waiting in
an hours-long line at the Puma station.

When Irma moves north of Puerto Rico and across the Caribbean, it
brings heavy rains, flooding, power outages. And then, two weeks
later, Hurricane María approaches the archipelago. On September 20,
the storm makes landfall, knocking out the electrical grid and leaving
the entire population in the dark. It passes through Yabucoa and
Humacao and Comerío, and the water levels in Río de la Plata begin
to rise. Flash floods destroy many of the houses. Roads and bridges
collapse.

The days following María bring only more misery, and there is a
general understanding that everyone is up against something bigger
than a storm. People lose family members. They desperately hunt for
drinking water, collecting it from wells and natural springs and any
other source they can find. They endure President Donald Trump, who
spends the weekend after the storm at a golf tournament
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tweeting that his critics in Puerto Rico are “politically motivated
ingrates.” They watch him toss paper towels
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hurricane survivors when he finally does visit, in early October—a
performance before the world, meant as a humiliation. Eventually he
will propose trading Puerto Rico for Greenland
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As the days become weeks, there is more rain; there are more floods.
People live without power for months. They watch that same president
deny that many people have died, even as thousands never come home.
The people work with their neighbors to secure blue tarps onto roofs.
Every day, more tarps go up, house after house. When people stand on a
terrace watching the town below, they see an ocean of blue-covered
houses. They clear debris from the road. They shovel mud out of their
living rooms, their kitchens, their bedrooms, their bathrooms. They
try to salvage family pictures, wedding albums, birth certificates.
The storm carried so much away, dropped other people’s things inside
their homes. In a bedroom is someone else’s desk lamp, a
neighbor’s charcoal grill. All over the sloped back garden:
children’s clothing, toys, shingles from a nearby roof. People clear
fallen trees, bamboo, garbage. They clean and clean, but the job never
stops. They wait for FEMA. They wait for FEMA.

For months, they live in survival mode, dealing with an
archipelago-­wide mental-health crisis, a shortage of drinking water,
delayed or unavailable medical services. They endure obstacles created
by the U.S. government. The military arrives, the National Guard
mobilizes, but the Trump administration blocks access
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more than $20 billion in hurricane-relief aid and recovery funding.
María, the people learn, is the deadliest hurricane to hit Puerto
Rico since 1899, but nobody can agree on the true death toll
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The official count, announced in December, is 64, but a study the
following year by _The_ _New England Journal of Medicine_ finds a
fair estimate to be more than 5,000
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Photos of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Mar
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Nine months after María, people still have no electricity. They stop
waiting for FEMA. Instead, they look to their neighbors. They take
care of one another. This is how it has always been. Every day, it
becomes more and more obvious that the current government
structure—Puerto Rico as a de facto colony of the United States,
despite the official language referring to it as a
“commonwealth”—is a failure. There is no benevolent American
savior coming to help Puerto Rico. Every day, people see that there is
only _them_, doing everything for themselves. Every day, more of them
come to understand that Puerto Rico has always stood on its own. This
is why I believe that independence, not statehood, is the path we must
pursue.

Oscar

Every year, no matter where I’m living, I visit family in Puerto
Rico. Sometimes I spend whole summers there, sweating my ass off,
driving up and down narrow mountain roads, splitting my time among San
Lorenzo and San Juan and Humacao and Comerío. After a couple of weeks
in the mountains, of days walking the cobblestone streets, feeding
flea-bitten satos with wagging tails, mosquitoes leaving galaxies of
red down my arms and legs, the coquis singing me to sleep at night, I
start to feel more like myself, like the woman I’m supposed to be.
Soon, I can’t remember what life is like without roosters screaming
in the early morning, the neighbor’s donkey braying, wild parrots
flying overhead, the peacocks train-rattling down the hill.

Last year, on my first trip back since the corona­virus pandemic
began, I visited my Tío David, a Catholic priest. When Hurricane
María hit, my uncle lived in Comerío, a mountain town about an hour
south of San Juan, near the center of the main island. He was based in
the church there. Our family lost contact with him when the power and
cellphone service went down. I spent six weeks listening for his name
on walkie-talkie apps, reading lists of survivors, texting and
emailing and calling, until finally one day I found him and heard his
voice again. He didn’t leave Comerío, even as I sent supplies and
begged him to fly to Ohio, where I lived at the time. “There’s too
much work to do here,” he told me. “People need help.”

In time, he transferred to a Catholic church in Yabucoa, on the
southeastern coast, one of the towns hardest hit by the storm. When
Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico, it entered through
Yabucoa, with winds of up to 155 miles an hour. Tornadoes tore through
as well, and the rains led to landslides. More than 1,500 houses were
damaged. So were most of the local businesses in el pueblo, as well as
major structures like Yabucoa’s baseball stadium and city hall. The
recovery has been slow.

It was late morning when I pulled up to the church. The sun was
shining, the city center bustling with pedestrian traffic, the narrow
streets busy with cars and bikes and scooters. Tío David and I drove
around, taking it easy on the hills and turns, keeping an eye out for
pedestrians. A pack of satos walked right in front of my Kia, bolting
when I slammed on the brakes.

The city center is small, but Yabucoa is spread out over 10 barrios.
Hills, then the valley, then cliffs overlooking the ocean. This is
where he plans to retire, Tío David told me: close to the sea, close
to family and friends and his church. The people take care of one
another in Yabucoa, he said, as they did in Comerío; the people, not
the government, will ensure Puerto Rico’s recovery.
 

Left: Oscar López Rivera at his office in Río Piedras. Right: His
painting of the independence activists Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, Pedro
Albizu Campos, and Juan Antonio Corretjer. (Christopher Gregory-Rivera
for The Atlantic)
I told him that I would soon be meeting with Oscar López Rivera to
talk about the prospect of Puerto Rico’s independence. He knew
Oscar, he said. Everybody knew Oscar. In May 2017, a few months before
the hurricanes, López Rivera had been released from prison in the
U.S., where he had been confined since 1981 after his conviction on
charges of seditious conspiracy. The sentence was commuted by
President Barack Obama in one of his last acts before leaving office.
For decades, particularly in the United States, López Rivera was seen
as a terrorist because of his involvement with the Fuerzas Armadas de
Liberación Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation), or FALN, a
militant organization whose campaign for Puerto Rican independence in
the 1970s killed five Americans and wounded dozens of others. But to
many people in Puerto Rico and among the diaspora, he was regarded as
a political prisoner, the embodiment of resistance. After his release,
he was greeted by crowds from all over Puerto Rico—cheering,
singing, carrying flowers and Puerto Rican flags. The University of
Puerto Rico’s student choir serenaded him outside his daughter’s
apartment building. Tío David was among those who celebrated his
return, in part because he believed it was a sign that change was
coming.

María was not just a natural disaster; it was a political event that,
I believe, is provoking a historic shift.

The United States seized Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898, during the
Spanish-American War. Today, although Puerto Rico has its own national
identity, its official political status is neither as a U.S. state nor
as a sovereign nation but rather as, technically, an “unincorporated
territory.” That status was supposedly determined with the input of
Puerto Ricans. But the deck has always been stacked. In 1952, two
years after Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to assassinate Harry
Truman, the U.S. endorsed a plebiscite to settle the question of the
archipelago’s status. However, only two options were available to
voters: the establishment of limited self-­governance under American
colonial authority—the “common­wealth” option—or continued
direct administration as an actual colony. Back then, Puerto Ricans
chose the commonwealth option. Most politicians in Puerto Rico—and
those people wired into the American social and economic system—now
favor statehood. The political consensus in Washington is that, as a
practical matter, the most likely future for Puerto Rico is an
indefinite continuation of the status quo. Independence is not an
official choice.

 

The author’s uncle, Padre David Díaz Matos, says Mass at Capilla
Nuestra Señora del Carmen, a church in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico.
(Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The Atlantic)
A few days after my visit with Tío David, I met López Rivera in the
city of Río Piedras. Around the corner from López Rivera’s office,
I walked past a mural depicting the 19th-century Flag of
Lares—created to be the flag of a free Puerto Rico once it gained
independence from Spain—along with López Rivera’s face and the
words ¡liberación ya! The same flag hangs inside López Rivera’s
small office, surrounded by portraits of the Afro Puerto Rican
independence activist Pedro Albizu Campos; the Cuban revolutionary Che
Guevara (the FALN was supported by Cuba’s Communist government); and
the Puerto Rican writer and activist Consuelo Lee Tapia, together with
her husband, Puerto Rico’s national poet, Juan Antonio
Corretjer—all painted by López Rivera himself. In a studio behind
the office, López Rivera showed me more of his work: Frida Kahlo in
tones of black and muted red. Another portrait of Corretjer. Back in
the office, he offered me a seat and made coffee.

Read: Puerto Rico’s power struggle
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Since his return to Puerto Rico, López Rivera has again assumed the
role of activist, protesting the private takeover of the publicly
owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority by a new Canadian American
company, Luma, known for its unreliable service and repeated rate
hikes. The takeover has brought Puerto Ricans into the streets. López
Rivera has also spoken out against PROMESA, the Puerto Rico Oversight,
Management, and Economic Stability Act, signed by Obama in 2016.
Puerto Rico had been plagued by a debt crisis that would soon be
worsened by ballooning pension-fund liabilities, losses from the
state-owned power company, and a mass migration of taxpayers and
workers to the United States after Hurricane María. Because of its
political status, Puerto Rico is denied many of the legal and fiscal
tools granted to states and other sovereign entities to restructure
debts or seek relief. PROMESA created a financial-oversight board made
up of unelected officials who have the authority to overrule Puerto
Rican lawmakers—which they did when they forced Puerto Rico to
accept the new power company. The oversight board is known by everyone
simply as “la junta.” It has slashed pension funds, closed
hundreds of schools, cut funding to the University of Puerto Rico, and
created a work requirement that people have to satisfy before they can
qualify for food assistance.
 

The baseball stadium in Yabucoa was severely damaged in 2017 by
Hurricane María, and ultimately had to be razed. (Christopher
Gregory-Rivera  //  The Atlantic)
We spoke about the protests during the past few years, when Puerto
Ricans came out against la junta’s austerity measures and then
forced Governor Ricardo Rosselló to resign after hundreds of leaked
messages on the Telegram app showed him and his associates engaging in
sexism and homophobia—and perhaps political graft and corruption.
Many of the protesters on these occasions have loudly and publicly
demanded independence.

The quest for independence has a long history in Puerto Rico, going
back to Spanish colonial times. The U.S. has spent more than a century
discrediting independence movements on the archipelago and at times
criminalizing them. Pro-independence sentiment has not always been
openly expressed. In a _Washington Post_ /Kaiser Family Foundation
survey conducted in Puerto Rico in 2018, only about 10 percent of
respondents said they favored independence. But I am not alone in
believing that support for independence is growing. In the 2020
gubernatorial election, two parties advocating for self-determination
and decolonization—one of them calling for full
independence—­collectively garnered more than a quarter of the
vote. Hurricane María was not just a natural disaster; it was a
political event that, I believe, is provoking a historic shift.
Americans do not appreciate the sheer scale of the trauma. To give one
example: In the three months after María, a Puerto Rico Department of
Health hotline received approximately 10,000 calls from people
considering suicide
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huge increase over the previous year. Of those, almost a third said
they had already tried—­an even greater increase. María also made
it clear to ordinary people, during the worst disaster in the
archipelago’s modern history, that self-sufficiency and,
essentially, self-governance were the only things Puerto Ricans could
truly rely on.

 

Recovery from Hurricane María continues, slowly. Two years after the
storm, in San Isidro, a homeowner began the task of rebuilding.
(Christopher Gregory-Rivera  //  The Atlantic)
n search of jobs, many were forced by María to leave. Puerto
Rico lost 135,000 people
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the six months after the hurricane—this out of a population of a
little more than 3 million. For those still living on the archipelago,
the challenges continue to mount. Changes to Puerto Rico’s tax code
since 2012 have reduced corporate tax rates to just 4 percent, and
have exempted all interest and dividend income, encouraging rich
non–Puerto Ricans to take up residence. In recent years, Puerto Rico
has become a destination for disaster capitalists—real-estate
developers and cryptocurrency investors looking for a tax haven.
“There are foreign­ers buying up all the property,” López Rivera
told me. “Puerto Ricans are being pushed out, displaced.”
Approximately 43 percent of all Puerto Ricans live below the poverty
line and struggle to find work. The median household income is
$21,058, less than half the median income in Mississippi, the poorest
American state.

Read: The situation in Puerto Rico is untenable
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“La Operación”

There are constant reminders

in Puerto Rico of its powerlessness. On April 21, the U.S. Supreme
Court upheld a law
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denies Supplemental Security Income benefits to Puerto Ricans who are
blind or disabled, even though Puerto Ricans are ostensibly U.S.
citizens. Vieques and Culebra—two small islands that are part of the
archipelago—were long used by the U.S. Navy for bombing practice and
munitions dumping, and the Navy left behind thousands of bombs,
grenades, and other live ordnance. The devastation on Vieques and
Culebra—including contamination of the groundwater by hazardous
substances, such as perchlorate—is so significant that the U.S.
Government Accountability Office estimates the cleanup will continue
through 2032.

Even Americans familiar with some of Puerto Rico’s history may be
unaware of major episodes—for instance, the U.S.-imposed
population-control policies, starting in the 1930s, that promoted the
mass sterilization of Puerto Rican women and used Puerto Ricans for
medical experiments.

In 1937, under Blanton Winship, the U.S.-appointed governor, Law 116
came into force, creating the Puerto Rican Eugenics Board and
subsidizing the sterilization of Puerto Ricans. Sterilization,
particularly of poor women, had been proposed by the U.S. government
as a solution for the archipelago’s rising unemployment rate, which,
according to the colonial government, was caused by overpopulation. In
the 1920s and ’30s, according to the historian Laura Briggs, “the
term _overpopulation_ had acquired another meaning, one that blamed
excessive sexuality and fertility for the poverty of [Puerto Rico] as
a whole.”

In truth, blame for the archipelago’s unemployment and poverty lies
with the United States. After taking control of Puerto Rico, the U.S.
disrupted the coffee industry, which employed much of the working
class, devaluing the currency and inflating the cost of coffee
production. American sugar companies supplanted Puerto Rican coffee
growers, converting about half of all arable land into sugar
plantations and displacing small landholders. In a variety of ways,
the economy was upended. By the 1930s, more than a third of Puerto
Ricans found themselves out of a job and without an income. Panic
about “overpopulation” was used to indict Puerto Ricans for their
own dispossession.

The idea of overpopulation drove the eugenics regime. From 1937 to
1960, when Law 116 was repealed, the Puerto Rican Eugenics Board
directly forced 97 sterilizations by means of tubal ligation or
hysterectomy, but many thousands of other women were effectively
coerced into the same procedures—led to believe that sterilization
was reversible, or told that they would not be employed unless they
had been sterilized. When healthy pregnant women arrived at hospitals
ready to deliver their babies, many were turned away unless they
agreed to be sterilized after giving birth. It became common practice
for women to have “la operación” following delivery, even after
the repeal of Law 116. The 1982 Fertility and Family Planning
Assessment, published in the journal _Population Today_, found
that 41 percent of married women in Puerto Rico had been sterilized
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childbearing age had the world’s highest sterilization rate. Decades
later, the sterilization rate in Puerto Rico is still among the
highest. “They wanted to exterminate us,” López Rivera
maintained.

I was born in one of Puerto Rico’s government housing projects, El
Caserío Padre Rivera, in Humacao. El Caserío was a small community,
most of us Black and brown, all of us born into poverty. Police raids
were frequent, harassment routine. Most of the women were sterilized.
My mother held a job at a factory in Las Piedras, working long shifts
making electronic parts. She’d had three children by the time she
was 22. I recall a conversation we had a few months into the pandemic,
about her life as a young mother—and how she, like so many other
women in Puerto Rico’s public-housing projects, had been sterilized.

“I loved being a mother,” she told me. “I would’ve filled the
house with babies.”

“Then why did you get la operación?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Everybody told me to get it. All the women
were getting it. Your father said I should. The nurses.” She paused,
took a deep breath. “And I wanted to go back to work.” Her
supervisors had never explicitly said she needed to get la operación,
she told me, but she remembered that it was just understood.

My mother was sterilized after giving birth to her third child. Back
then, la operación was a part of life. You went into the hospital to
give birth, and you came home with your baby and with your tubes tied.
There were never any conversations about informed consent or about
potential risks. Sterilization was just what you did.

Puerto Rico became a proving ground for medical experiments. In the
early 1950s, as the in­famous Tuskegee syphilis study
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being conducted on Black men in Alabama, experimental pharmaceutical
contraceptives were tested on unknowing Puerto Rican women. The
project was funded and guided by Clarence Gamble, the heir to Procter
& Gamble and a prominent eugenicist. Gamble established birth-control
clinics across Puerto Rico and sent nurses and social workers to
recruit women from the predominantly Black and brown housing projects
for “perhaps one of the most notorious abuses of medical power in
birth control technology’s history,” as the scholar Nancy Ordover
writes in her book, _American Eugenics_
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consent, doctors gave progesterone injections and dispensed the
world’s first birth-control pills to poor women from rural and
poverty-stricken communities. What would become known as “the
pill” was, at the time, “a highly experimental drug administered
without controlled dosage,” Ordover writes. The women suffered
serious side effects, such as nausea, headaches, and bleeding, but
were disregarded when they reported feeling ill. During the clinical
trials, three women died.

The Gag Law

From the start, the fight for Puerto Rican independence was
in­extricable from the movements in the archipelago to abolish
slavery and demand racial equality. In 1856, the Afro Puerto Rican
diplomat and doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances helped found a secret
abolitionist society to liberate enslaved people by securing their
passage to other countries or paying for their freedom. At the same
time, the society promised freedom to enslaved people who joined the
independence movement, and the struggle against Spanish colonial rule
was embraced early by many Black Puerto Ricans. For their efforts,
Betances and others were exiled to the Dominican Republic by the
Spanish crown. Working abroad, Betances and his partner, Segundo Ruiz
Belvís, founded the Revolutionary Committee of Puerto Rico, which
demanded both abolition and independence—­together. From the
Dominican Republic, the group plotted an uprising. In September 1868,
pro-­independence rebels carried out their plans, but the revolt was
quickly quelled by the Spanish. Betances fled to New York. The
uprising, still commemorated, is known as El Grito de Lares
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Slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873.
 

El Hombre Redimido (“Man Redeemed”), a monument in the city of
Ponce commemorating the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873
(Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The Atlantic)
In 1897, Spain granted Puerto Rico a form of sovereignty under a
statute called the Carta Autonómica, but when the United States
seized the archipelago the following year, it dissolved the new
Parliament and brushed aside the new charter, establishing its own
colonial government. Under military occupation, Puerto Ricans saw
their land taken, their industries destroyed, their currency devalued.
They were forced to live as subjects of a nation whose Supreme Court
had just promulgated the racist doctrine of “separate but equal.”
Six months into the occupation, the same troops that had been called
to fight in Puerto Rico were mobilized in Wilmington, North Carolina,
where they helped massacre Black citizens and elected officials amid
the violent overthrow of the city’s multiracial government
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white supremacists.

In 1917, the U.S. Congress passed the Jones Act, which granted a form
of second-class citizenship to most people born in Puerto Rico. Within
weeks, it passed a second law making Puerto Ricans eligible for the
military draft. In the months that followed, some 20,000 Puerto Rican
men were conscripted for service
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World War I. The Jones Act did not grant Puerto Ricans the same rights
as most other U.S. citizens. Then as now, they did not have any voting
representatives in Congress, and could not vote in presidential
elections.
 

Left: One of 19 Puerto Ricans killed in the 1937 Ponce Massacre; the
facts were initially covered up by U.S. authorities. Right: Suspected
nationalists and sympathizers are rounded up after an uprising in
1950. (Archive PL / Alamy; Bettmann / Getty  //  The Atlantic)
This injustice—as well as his own experience in the U.S.
military—­inspired the work of Pedro Albizu Campos. After serving
as an officer in the Army during the war, he graduated from Harvard
Law School
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returned to Puerto Rico to practice law. He took up activism against
the U.S.-owned sugar industry, leading union strikes on plantations
and representing workers in lawsuits. He joined the new,
pro-independence Nationalist Party and was elected its vice president
in 1924 and its president in 1930.

The United States saw the independence movement as a threat and used a
range of suppressive tactics against it, including FBI surveillance,
long-term imprisonment, and the torture of pro-­independence
political leaders. In 1935, on the campus of the University of Puerto
Rico in Río Piedras, the police shot and killed four members of the
Nationalist Party and a young bystander in what is now known as the
Río Piedras Massacre. A year later, two Puerto Ricans were accused of
murdering the American chief of police in Puerto Rico as retaliation.
The suspects were arrested and executed without trial at the police
headquarters in San Juan. Shortly afterward, Albizu Campos and several
other Nationalist leaders were convicted of conspiring to overthrow
the United States government and sent to federal prison, where Albizu
Campos would remain for a decade.

When the U.S. seized Puerto Rico, its people saw their land taken,
their industries destroyed, their currency devalued.

In March 1937, the same year Governor Winship introduced the
sterilization law, hundreds of Puerto Ricans in the city of Ponce
gathered for a march organized by the Nationalist Party to commemorate
emancipation in Puerto Rico and to protest the incarceration of Albizu
Campos. Under Winship’s orders, police opened fire on the peaceful
protesters: families with children; students; parishioners who had
been celebrating Palm Sunday, marching with music and palm fronds. The
police shot into the crowd and kept shooting for almost 15 minutes. As
they walked by the dead or dying, they beat them with clubs. The
police killed 19 people and wounded more than 200. Most of those who
died were shot in the back while running away. An extensive cover-up
followed, with Winship claiming that the protesters had shot first and
the police had only returned fire. An investigation by the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights determined that the governor was lying
[[link removed]] and that evidence
had been fabricated. Winship was removed from office but never
prosecuted.

Albizu Campos returned to Puerto Rico in 1947. A year later, the
U.S.-appointed governor signed Law 53, La Ley de la Mordaza. It is
widely referred to as the Gag Law, and it made flying Puerto Rican
flags, even privately, illegal. The Gag Law also made it a crime to
sing the Puerto Rican national anthem; to speak out against the United
States; and to speak, organize, or assemble in favor of independence.
Law 53, which violated the First Amendment, was in effect for nearly a
decade, until it was repealed in 1957. It essentially empowered
authorities to penalize Puerto Ricans just for being Puerto Rican.
 

In 1975, the Puerto Rican nationalist group known as the FALN carried
out a lethal bombing at a New York restaurant, Fraunces Tavern—one
of many attacks. (New York Daily News  //  The Atlantic)
In response to the Gag Law and the attempted suppression of
pro-independence sentiment, the Nationalists planned a series of
revolts. In October 1950, after a firefight that killed three
Nationalists in the town of Peñuelas, Albizu Campos called for an
insurrection. Nationalists rose up in several towns over the following
days. On November 1, after particularly serious revolts in Jayuya and
Utuado, the governor called in the Puerto Rican National Guard and the
U.S. Air Force. American military aircraft flew over the two
municipalities, dropping bombs over the pueblos, flattening homes.
According to police estimates, 28 people were killed and 50 were
wounded.

After Jayuya and Utuado had been retaken by the government, National
Guardsmen patrolled the streets with pistols, rifles, and bayonets
[[link removed]].
In Utuado, after a group of Nationalists surrendered, the prisoners
were walked to the local police station and ordered to remove their
shoes and belts. Behind the station, the police lined them up, their
backs to the wall—the youngest only 17, pleading for water—and
shot them, killing five.

That same day, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola boarded a train
from New York to Washington, D.C. Torresola’s family lived in
Jayuya; his sister had been wounded in the uprising and his brother
had been arrested. Twenty-four hours later, in an effort to gain
international attention for the cause of Puerto Rican independence,
Collazo and Torresola attempted to assassinate President Truman
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Blair House, across from the White House, where he was living at the
time. Following the Nationalist uprisings, thousands of people
supporting independence were jailed. Albizu Campos was arrested again,
and this time sentenced to 80 years in federal prison.

Underground

This is the world that Oscar López Rivera grew up in. Born in San
Sebastián, in 1943, just a few years after Albizu Campos’s first
arrest, López Rivera moved to Chicago with his sister at the age of
14. His father followed with the rest of the family a few years later.
López Rivera was drafted into the Army and in 1965 was sent to
Vietnam. He earned a Bronze Star, but came to see the war as an
extension of the same colonial logic that had governed life in Puerto
Rico—the powerful doing whatever they wanted, because they thought
they could. “I kept on making myself promises about coming home and
doing everything that I could do to transform Puerto Rico into an
independent nation,” he told me. Back in Chicago, he began a career
as an activist for tenants’ and workers’ rights and as an advocate
for Puerto Rican communities. He co-founded a high school and a
cultural center. In 1972, the United Nations’ Special Committee on
Decolonization urged the U.S. to recognize the “inalienable right of
the people of Puerto Rico to self‐­determination and
independence.” Around this time, López Rivera first met the
activists who would become members of the militant and clandestine
pro-independence organization known as the FALN.

The FALN first emerged publicly in October 1974, when it set off
bombs in New York City
[[link removed]]:
two in Rockefeller Center and two on Park Avenue, as well as a car
bomb in the Financial District that covered nearly two blocks in
debris. No one was hurt—the bombings took place around 3 a.m., when
the streets were empty. But then, later in the year, a bomb left in an
abandoned building injured a New York City police officer. A month
later, in January 1975, the FALN claimed responsibility for a
lunchtime explosion at Fraunces Tavern, a restaurant and historic
landmark in the Financial District. Four men were killed and at least
44 people were injured. One of the dead was the father of young
children; the wife of another victim was pregnant. The attack,
according to the FALN’s written statement
[[link removed]], was in
retaliation for a bombing in Puerto Rico in which two independence
activists had been killed and 11 people injured. Over the next decade,
the FALN orchestrated more than 100 bombings or incendiary attacks in
New York; Washington; Newark, New Jersey; San Juan; and Chicago.

In 1980, the FBI identified and arrested 11 members of the group. They
were charged with seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S.
government as well as with a number of related crimes, including
weapons possession. All of the men and women were convicted. They were
sentenced to prison terms ranging from 55 to 99 years. López Rivera
was not arrested with the original group, and no evidence was found
directly tying him to any of the bombings—­­to this day, he denies
involvement in actions that killed or injured anyone. But the FBI said
that, a few years earlier, it had found bomb-making equipment in an
apartment López Rivera frequented, and he was named a co-defendant
with the 11 others. López Rivera was already on the run, hiding in
safe houses in Chicago. He was finally arrested during a traffic stop
in May 1981. At his trial, Alfredo Méndez, a member of the FALN who
had become an FBI informant, testified that López Rivera had been his
trainer, teaching him how to make gun silencers and bomb-detonation
devices. López Rivera was convicted and sentenced to 55 years in
prison. After he served six years, an additional 15 years were added
to his sentence for his alleged role in planning an escape. He spent
12 years in solitary confinement.

sue

EXPLORE

IDEAS [[link removed]]

LET PUERTO RICO BE FREE

The only just future for my home is not statehood, but full
independence from the United States.

By Jaquira Díaz [[link removed]]

Photographs by Christopher Gregory-Rivera

[Boy with Puerto Rican flag as cape]

Christopher Gregory-Rivera

SEPTEMBER 20, 2022

SHARE

In 2017, as summer ends, when news anchors first mention the oncoming
Hurricane Irma, the people go to the big-box store or the Econo
supermarket just a few minutes from home. They try to stock up, but by
the time they arrive, the lines are long and most of the shops are
running low. They get what they can: some food, a few gallons of
water, a portable gas-powered hot plate in case they lose power. They
refill their prescriptions and then fill the gas tank after waiting in
an hours-long line at the Puma station.

When Irma moves north of Puerto Rico and across the Caribbean, it
brings heavy rains, flooding, power outages. And then, two weeks
later, Hurricane María approaches the archipelago. On September 20,
the storm makes landfall, knocking out the electrical grid and leaving
the entire population in the dark. It passes through Yabucoa and
Humacao and Comerío, and the water levels in Río de la Plata begin
to rise. Flash floods destroy many of the houses. Roads and bridges
collapse.

[[link removed]]

American Eugenics - Race, Queer Anatomy, And The Science Of
Nationalism [[link removed]]NANCY
ORDOVER,U OF MINNESOTA PRESS

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Read: Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands brace for Hurricane Irma
[[link removed]]

The days following María bring only more misery, and there is a
general understanding that everyone is up against something bigger
than a storm. People lose family members. They desperately hunt for
drinking water, collecting it from wells and natural springs and any
other source they can find. They endure President Donald Trump, who
spends the weekend after the storm at a golf tournament
[[link removed]],
tweeting that his critics in Puerto Rico are “politically motivated
ingrates.” They watch him toss paper towels
[[link removed]] at
hurricane survivors when he finally does visit, in early October—a
performance before the world, meant as a humiliation. Eventually he
will propose trading Puerto Rico for Greenland
[[link removed]].

As the days become weeks, there is more rain; there are more floods.
People live without power for months. They watch that same president
deny that many people have died, even as thousands never come home.
The people work with their neighbors to secure blue tarps onto roofs.
Every day, more tarps go up, house after house. When people stand on a
terrace watching the town below, they see an ocean of blue-covered
houses. They clear debris from the road. They shovel mud out of their
living rooms, their kitchens, their bedrooms, their bathrooms. They
try to salvage family pictures, wedding albums, birth certificates.
The storm carried so much away, dropped other people’s things inside
their homes. In a bedroom is someone else’s desk lamp, a
neighbor’s charcoal grill. All over the sloped back garden:
children’s clothing, toys, shingles from a nearby roof. People clear
fallen trees, bamboo, garbage. They clean and clean, but the job never
stops. They wait for FEMA. They wait for FEMA.

For months, they live in survival mode, dealing with an
archipelago-­wide mental-health crisis, a shortage of drinking water,
delayed or unavailable medical services. They endure obstacles created
by the U.S. government. The military arrives, the National Guard
mobilizes, but the Trump administration blocks access
[[link removed]] to
more than $20 billion in hurricane-relief aid and recovery funding.
María, the people learn, is the deadliest hurricane to hit Puerto
Rico since 1899, but nobody can agree on the true death toll
[[link removed]].
The official count, announced in December, is 64, but a study the
following year by _The_ _New England Journal of Medicine_ finds a
fair estimate to be more than 5,000
[[link removed]].

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* [An illustration of a woman in high heels and a colorful suit; her
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using the mouth as the "O."]
[[link removed]]
How About Never?
[[link removed]]
ANNA HOLMES [[link removed]]

Photos of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Mar
[[link removed]]ia
[[link removed]]

Nine months after María, people still have no electricity. They stop
waiting for FEMA. Instead, they look to their neighbors. They take
care of one another. This is how it has always been. Every day, it
becomes more and more obvious that the current government
structure—Puerto Rico as a de facto colony of the United States,
despite the official language referring to it as a
“commonwealth”—is a failure. There is no benevolent American
savior coming to help Puerto Rico. Every day, people see that there is
only _them_, doing everything for themselves. Every day, more of them
come to understand that Puerto Rico has always stood on its own. This
is why I believe that independence, not statehood, is the path we must
pursue.

_Oscar_

every year, no matter where I’m living, I visit family in Puerto
Rico. Sometimes I spend whole summers there, sweating my ass off,
driving up and down narrow mountain roads, splitting my time among San
Lorenzo and San Juan and Humacao and Comerío. After a couple of weeks
in the mountains, of days walking the cobblestone streets, feeding
flea-bitten satos with wagging tails, mosquitoes leaving galaxies of
red down my arms and legs, the coquis singing me to sleep at night, I
start to feel more like myself, like the woman I’m supposed to be.
Soon, I can’t remember what life is like without roosters screaming
in the early morning, the neighbor’s donkey braying, wild parrots
flying overhead, the peacocks train-rattling down the hill.

Last year, on my first trip back since the corona­virus pandemic
began, I visited my Tío David, a Catholic priest. When Hurricane
María hit, my uncle lived in Comerío, a mountain town about an hour
south of San Juan, near the center of the main island. He was based in
the church there. Our family lost contact with him when the power and
cellphone service went down. I spent six weeks listening for his name
on walkie-talkie apps, reading lists of survivors, texting and
emailing and calling, until finally one day I found him and heard his
voice again. He didn’t leave Comerío, even as I sent supplies and
begged him to fly to Ohio, where I lived at the time. “There’s too
much work to do here,” he told me. “People need help.”

Explore the Special Preview: November 2022 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

View More [[link removed]]

In time, he transferred to a Catholic church in Yabucoa, on the
southeastern coast, one of the towns hardest hit by the storm. When
Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico, it entered through
Yabucoa, with winds of up to 155 miles an hour. Tornadoes tore through
as well, and the rains led to landslides. More than 1,500 houses were
damaged. So were most of the local businesses in el pueblo, as well as
major structures like Yabucoa’s baseball stadium and city hall. The
recovery has been slow.

It was late morning when I pulled up to the church. The sun was
shining, the city center bustling with pedestrian traffic, the narrow
streets busy with cars and bikes and scooters. Tío David and I drove
around, taking it easy on the hills and turns, keeping an eye out for
pedestrians. A pack of satos walked right in front of my Kia, bolting
when I slammed on the brakes.

The city center is small, but Yabucoa is spread out over 10 barrios.
Hills, then the valley, then cliffs overlooking the ocean. This is
where he plans to retire, Tío David told me: close to the sea, close
to family and friends and his church. The people take care of one
another in Yabucoa, he said, as they did in Comerío; the people, not
the government, will ensure Puerto Rico’s recovery.

[Oscar Lopez Rivera in his office]

_Left_: Oscar López Rivera at his office in Río Piedras. _Right_:
His painting of the independence activists Filiberto Ojeda Ríos,
Pedro Albizu Campos, and Juan Antonio Corretjer. (Christopher
Gregory-Rivera for _The Atlantic_)

I told him that I would soon be meeting with Oscar López Rivera to
talk about the prospect of Puerto Rico’s independence. He knew
Oscar, he said. Everybody knew Oscar. In May 2017, a few months before
the hurricanes, López Rivera had been released from prison in the
U.S., where he had been confined since 1981 after his conviction on
charges of seditious conspiracy. The sentence was commuted by
President Barack Obama in one of his last acts before leaving office.
For decades, particularly in the United States, López Rivera was seen
as a terrorist because of his involvement with the Fuerzas Armadas de
Liberación Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation), or FALN, a
militant organization whose campaign for Puerto Rican independence in
the 1970s killed five Americans and wounded dozens of others. But to
many people in Puerto Rico and among the diaspora, he was regarded as
a political prisoner, the embodiment of resistance. After his release,
he was greeted by crowds from all over Puerto Rico—cheering,
singing, carrying flowers and Puerto Rican flags. The University of
Puerto Rico’s student choir serenaded him outside his daughter’s
apartment building. Tío David was among those who celebrated his
return, in part because he believed it was a sign that change was
coming.

María was not just a natural disaster; it was a political event that,
I believe, is provoking a historic shift.

The United States seized Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898, during the
Spanish-American War. Today, although Puerto Rico has its own national
identity, its official political status is neither as a U.S. state nor
as a sovereign nation but rather as, technically, an “unincorporated
territory.” That status was supposedly determined with the input of
Puerto Ricans. But the deck has always been stacked. In 1952, two
years after Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to assassinate Harry
Truman, the U.S. endorsed a plebiscite to settle the question of the
archipelago’s status. However, only two options were available to
voters: the establishment of limited self-­governance under American
colonial authority—the “common­wealth” option—or continued
direct administration as an actual colony. Back then, Puerto Ricans
chose the commonwealth option. Most politicians in Puerto Rico—and
those people wired into the American social and economic system—now
favor statehood. The political consensus in Washington is that, as a
practical matter, the most likely future for Puerto Rico is an
indefinite continuation of the status quo. Independence is not an
official choice.

[The author's uncle saying Mass]

The author’s uncle, Padre David Díaz Matos, says Mass at Capilla
Nuestra Señora del Carmen,
a church in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico. (Christopher Gregory-Rivera
for _The Atlantic_)

A few days after my visit with Tío David, I met López Rivera in the
city of Río Piedras. Around the corner from López Rivera’s office,
I walked past a mural depicting the 19th-century Flag of
Lares—created to be the flag of a free Puerto Rico once it gained
independence from Spain—along with López Rivera’s face and the
words ¡liberación ya! The same flag hangs inside López Rivera’s
small office, surrounded by portraits of the Afro Puerto Rican
independence activist Pedro Albizu Campos; the Cuban revolutionary Che
Guevara (the FALN was supported by Cuba’s Communist government); and
the Puerto Rican writer and activist Consuelo Lee Tapia, together with
her husband, Puerto Rico’s national poet, Juan Antonio
Corretjer—all painted by López Rivera himself. In a studio behind
the office, López Rivera showed me more of his work: Frida Kahlo in
tones of black and muted red. Another portrait of Corretjer. Back in
the office, he offered me a seat and made coffee.

Read: Puerto Rico’s power struggle
[[link removed]]

Since his return to Puerto Rico, López Rivera has again assumed the
role of activist, protesting the private takeover of the publicly
owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority by a new Canadian American
company, Luma, known for its unreliable service and repeated rate
hikes. The takeover has brought Puerto Ricans into the streets. López
Rivera has also spoken out against PROMESA, the Puerto Rico Oversight,
Management, and Economic Stability Act, signed by Obama in 2016.
Puerto Rico had been plagued by a debt crisis that would soon be
worsened by ballooning pension-fund liabilities, losses from the
state-owned power company, and a mass migration of taxpayers and
workers to the United States after Hurricane María. Because of its
political status, Puerto Rico is denied many of the legal and fiscal
tools granted to states and other sovereign entities to restructure
debts or seek relief. PROMESA created a financial-oversight board made
up of unelected officials who have the authority to overrule Puerto
Rican lawmakers—which they did when they forced Puerto Rico to
accept the new power company. The oversight board is known by everyone
simply as “la junta.” It has slashed pension funds, closed
hundreds of schools, cut funding to the University of Puerto Rico, and
created a work requirement that people have to satisfy before they can
qualify for food assistance.

[The damaged baseball stadium in Yabucoa]

The baseball stadium in Yabucoa was severely damaged in 2017 by
Hurricane María, and ultimately had to be razed. (Christopher
Gregory-Rivera)

We spoke about the protests during the past few years, when Puerto
Ricans came out against la junta’s austerity measures and then
forced Governor Ricardo Rosselló to resign after hundreds of leaked
messages on the Telegram app showed him and his associates engaging in
sexism and homophobia—and perhaps political graft and corruption.
Many of the protesters on these occasions have loudly and publicly
demanded independence.

The quest for independence has a long history in Puerto Rico, going
back to Spanish colonial times. The U.S. has spent more than a century
discrediting independence movements on the archipelago and at times
criminalizing them. Pro-independence sentiment has not always been
openly expressed. In a _Washington Post_ /Kaiser Family Foundation
survey conducted in Puerto Rico in 2018, only about 10 percent of
respondents said they favored independence. But I am not alone in
believing that support for independence is growing. In the 2020
gubernatorial election, two parties advocating for self-determination
and decolonization—one of them calling for full
independence—­collectively garnered more than a quarter of the
vote. Hurricane María was not just a natural disaster; it was a
political event that, I believe, is provoking a historic shift.
Americans do not appreciate the sheer scale of the trauma. To give one
example: In the three months after María, a Puerto Rico Department of
Health hotline received approximately 10,000 calls from people
considering suicide
[[link removed]]—­a
huge increase over the previous year. Of those, almost a third said
they had already tried—­an even greater increase. María also made
it clear to ordinary people, during the worst disaster in the
archipelago’s modern history, that self-sufficiency and,
essentially, self-governance were the only things Puerto Ricans could
truly rely on.

[man rebuilding his home in San Isidro]

Recovery from Hurricane María continues, slowly. Two years after the
storm, in San Isidro,
a homeowner began the task of rebuilding. (Christopher Gregory-Rivera)

In search of jobs, many were forced by María to leave. Puerto
Rico lost 135,000 people
[[link removed]] in
the six months after the hurricane—this out of a population of a
little more than 3 million. For those still living on the archipelago,
the challenges continue to mount. Changes to Puerto Rico’s tax code
since 2012 have reduced corporate tax rates to just 4 percent, and
have exempted all interest and dividend income, encouraging rich
non–Puerto Ricans to take up residence. In recent years, Puerto Rico
has become a destination for disaster capitalists—real-estate
developers and cryptocurrency investors looking for a tax haven.
“There are foreign­ers buying up all the property,” López Rivera
told me. “Puerto Ricans are being pushed out, displaced.”
Approximately 43 percent of all Puerto Ricans live below the poverty
line and struggle to find work. The median household income is
$21,058, less than half the median income in Mississippi, the poorest
American state.

Read: The situation in Puerto Rico is untenable
[[link removed]]

_“La Operación”_

there are constant reminders in Puerto Rico of its powerlessness. On
April 21, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law
[[link removed]] that
denies Supplemental Security Income benefits to Puerto Ricans who are
blind or disabled, even though Puerto Ricans are ostensibly U.S.
citizens. Vieques and Culebra—two small islands that are part of the
archipelago—were long used by the U.S. Navy for bombing practice and
munitions dumping, and the Navy left behind thousands of bombs,
grenades, and other live ordnance. The devastation on Vieques and
Culebra—including contamination of the groundwater by hazardous
substances, such as perchlorate—is so significant that the U.S.
Government Accountability Office estimates the cleanup will continue
through 2032.

Even Americans familiar with some of Puerto Rico’s history may be
unaware of major episodes—for instance, the U.S.-imposed
population-control policies, starting in the 1930s, that promoted the
mass sterilization of Puerto Rican women and used Puerto Ricans for
medical experiments.

In 1937, under Blanton Winship, the U.S.-appointed governor, Law 116
came into force, creating the Puerto Rican Eugenics Board and
subsidizing the sterilization of Puerto Ricans. Sterilization,
particularly of poor women, had been proposed by the U.S. government
as a solution for the archipelago’s rising unemployment rate, which,
according to the colonial government, was caused by overpopulation. In
the 1920s and ’30s, according to the historian Laura Briggs, “the
term _overpopulation_ had acquired another meaning, one that blamed
excessive sexuality and fertility for the poverty of [Puerto Rico] as
a whole.”

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In truth, blame for the archipelago’s unemployment and poverty lies
with the United States. After taking control of Puerto Rico, the U.S.
disrupted the coffee industry, which employed much of the working
class, devaluing the currency and inflating the cost of coffee
production. American sugar companies supplanted Puerto Rican coffee
growers, converting about half of all arable land into sugar
plantations and displacing small landholders. In a variety of ways,
the economy was upended. By the 1930s, more than a third of Puerto
Ricans found themselves out of a job and without an income. Panic
about “overpopulation” was used to indict Puerto Ricans for their
own dispossession.

The idea of overpopulation drove the eugenics regime. From 1937 to
1960, when Law 116 was repealed, the Puerto Rican Eugenics Board
directly forced 97 sterilizations by means of tubal ligation or
hysterectomy, but many thousands of other women were effectively
coerced into the same procedures—led to believe that sterilization
was reversible, or told that they would not be employed unless they
had been sterilized. When healthy pregnant women arrived at hospitals
ready to deliver their babies, many were turned away unless they
agreed to be sterilized after giving birth. It became common practice
for women to have “la operación” following delivery, even after
the repeal of Law 116. The 1982 Fertility and Family Planning
Assessment, published in the journal _Population Today_, found
that 41 percent of married women in Puerto Rico had been sterilized
[[link removed]]. Puerto Rican women of
childbearing age had the world’s highest sterilization rate. Decades
later, the sterilization rate in Puerto Rico is still among the
highest. “They wanted to exterminate us,” López Rivera
maintained.

I was born in one of Puerto Rico’s government housing projects, El
Caserío Padre Rivera, in Humacao. El Caserío was a small community,
most of us Black and brown, all of us born into poverty. Police raids
were frequent, harassment routine. Most of the women were sterilized.
My mother held a job at a factory in Las Piedras, working long shifts
making electronic parts. She’d had three children by the time she
was 22. I recall a conversation we had a few months into the pandemic,
about her life as a young mother—and how she, like so many other
women in Puerto Rico’s public-housing projects, had been sterilized.

“I loved being a mother,” she told me. “I would’ve filled the
house with babies.”

“Then why did you get la operación?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Everybody told me to get it. All the women
were getting it. Your father said I should. The nurses.” She paused,
took a deep breath. “And I wanted to go back to work.” Her
supervisors had never explicitly said she needed to get la operación,
she told me, but she remembered that it was just understood.

My mother was sterilized after giving birth to her third child. Back
then, la operación was a part of life. You went into the hospital to
give birth, and you came home with your baby and with your tubes tied.
There were never any conversations about informed consent or about
potential risks. Sterilization was just what you did.

Puerto Rico became a proving ground for medical experiments. In the
early 1950s, as the in­famous Tuskegee syphilis study
[[link removed]] was
being conducted on Black men in Alabama, experimental pharmaceutical
contraceptives were tested on unknowing Puerto Rican women. The
project was funded and guided by Clarence Gamble, the heir to Procter
& Gamble and a prominent eugenicist. Gamble established birth-control
clinics across Puerto Rico and sent nurses and social workers to
recruit women from the predominantly Black and brown housing projects
for “perhaps one of the most notorious abuses of medical power in
birth control technology’s history,” as the scholar Nancy Ordover
writes in her book, _American Eugenics_
[[link removed]]. Without informed
consent, doctors gave progesterone injections and dispensed the
world’s first birth-control pills to poor women from rural and
poverty-stricken communities. What would become known as “the
pill” was, at the time, “a highly experimental drug administered
without controlled dosage,” Ordover writes. The women suffered
serious side effects, such as nausea, headaches, and bleeding, but
were disregarded when they reported feeling ill. During the clinical
trials, three women died.

_The Gag Law_

from the start, the fight for Puerto Rican independence was
in­extricable from the movements in the archipelago to abolish
slavery and demand racial equality. In 1856, the Afro Puerto Rican
diplomat and doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances helped found a secret
abolitionist society to liberate enslaved people by securing their
passage to other countries or paying for their freedom. At the same
time, the society promised freedom to enslaved people who joined the
independence movement, and the struggle against Spanish colonial rule
was embraced early by many Black Puerto Ricans. For their efforts,
Betances and others were exiled to the Dominican Republic by the
Spanish crown. Working abroad, Betances and his partner, Segundo Ruiz
Belvís, founded the Revolutionary Committee of Puerto Rico, which
demanded both abolition and independence—­together. From the
Dominican Republic, the group plotted an uprising. In September 1868,
pro-­independence rebels carried out their plans, but the revolt was
quickly quelled by the Spanish. Betances fled to New York. The
uprising, still commemorated, is known as El Grito de Lares
[[link removed]].
Slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873.

["Man Redeemed" monument (El Hombre Redimido)]

_El Hombre Redimido_ (“Man Redeemed”), a monument in the city of
Ponce commemorating the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873
(Christopher Gregory-Rivera for _The Atlantic_)

In 1897, Spain granted Puerto Rico a form of sovereignty under a
statute called the Carta Autonómica, but when the United States
seized the archipelago the following year, it dissolved the new
Parliament and brushed aside the new charter, establishing its own
colonial government. Under military occupation, Puerto Ricans saw
their land taken, their industries destroyed, their currency devalued.
They were forced to live as subjects of a nation whose Supreme Court
had just promulgated the racist doctrine of “separate but equal.”
Six months into the occupation, the same troops that had been called
to fight in Puerto Rico were mobilized in Wilmington, North Carolina,
where they helped massacre Black citizens and elected officials amid
the violent overthrow of the city’s multiracial government
[[link removed]] by
white supremacists.

In 1917, the U.S. Congress passed the Jones Act, which granted a form
of second-class citizenship to most people born in Puerto Rico. Within
weeks, it passed a second law making Puerto Ricans eligible for the
military draft. In the months that followed, some 20,000 Puerto Rican
men were conscripted for service
[[link removed]] during
World War I. The Jones Act did not grant Puerto Ricans the same rights
as most other U.S. citizens. Then as now, they did not have any voting
representatives in Congress, and could not vote in presidential
elections.

[archival photos from the 1937 Ponce Massacre and an uprising in 1950]

_Left_: One of 19 Puerto Ricans killed in the 1937 Ponce Massacre; the
facts were initially covered up by
U.S. authorities. _Right_: Suspected nationalists and sympathizers
are rounded up after an uprising in 1950. (Archive PL / Alamy;
Bettmann / Getty)

This injustice—as well as his own experience in the U.S.
military—­inspired the work of Pedro Albizu Campos. After serving
as an officer in the Army during the war, he graduated from Harvard
Law School
[[link removed]] and
returned to Puerto Rico to practice law. He took up activism against
the U.S.-owned sugar industry, leading union strikes on plantations
and representing workers in lawsuits. He joined the new,
pro-independence Nationalist Party and was elected its vice president
in 1924 and its president in 1930.

The United States saw the independence movement as a threat and used a
range of suppressive tactics against it, including FBI surveillance,
long-term imprisonment, and the torture of pro-­independence
political leaders. In 1935, on the campus of the University of Puerto
Rico in Río Piedras, the police shot and killed four members of the
Nationalist Party and a young bystander in what is now known as the
Río Piedras Massacre. A year later, two Puerto Ricans were accused of
murdering the American chief of police in Puerto Rico as retaliation.
The suspects were arrested and executed without trial at the police
headquarters in San Juan. Shortly afterward, Albizu Campos and several
other Nationalist leaders were convicted of conspiring to overthrow
the United States government and sent to federal prison, where Albizu
Campos would remain for a decade.

When the U.S. seized Puerto Rico, its people saw their land taken,
their industries destroyed, their currency devalued.

In March 1937, the same year Governor Winship introduced the
sterilization law, hundreds of Puerto Ricans in the city of Ponce
gathered for a march organized by the Nationalist Party to commemorate
emancipation in Puerto Rico and to protest the incarceration of Albizu
Campos. Under Winship’s orders, police opened fire on the peaceful
protesters: families with children; students; parishioners who had
been celebrating Palm Sunday, marching with music and palm fronds. The
police shot into the crowd and kept shooting for almost 15 minutes. As
they walked by the dead or dying, they beat them with clubs. The
police killed 19 people and wounded more than 200. Most of those who
died were shot in the back while running away. An extensive cover-up
followed, with Winship claiming that the protesters had shot first and
the police had only returned fire. An investigation by the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights determined that the governor was lying
[[link removed]] and that evidence
had been fabricated. Winship was removed from office but never
prosecuted.

Albizu Campos returned to Puerto Rico in 1947. A year later, the
U.S.-appointed governor signed Law 53, La Ley de la Mordaza. It is
widely referred to as the Gag Law, and it made flying Puerto Rican
flags, even privately, illegal. The Gag Law also made it a crime to
sing the Puerto Rican national anthem; to speak out against the United
States; and to speak, organize, or assemble in favor of independence.
Law 53, which violated the First Amendment, was in effect for nearly a
decade, until it was repealed in 1957. It essentially empowered
authorities to penalize Puerto Ricans just for being Puerto Rican.

[Aftermath of the FALN bombing at Fraunces Tavern in 1975]

In 1975, the Puerto Rican nationalist group known as the FALN carried
out a lethal bombing at a New York restaurant, Fraunces Tavern—one
of many attacks. (_New York Daily News_ / Getty)

In response to the Gag Law and the attempted suppression of
pro-independence sentiment, the Nationalists planned a series of
revolts. In October 1950, after a firefight that killed three
Nationalists in the town of Peñuelas, Albizu Campos called for an
insurrection. Nationalists rose up in several towns over the following
days. On November 1, after particularly serious revolts in Jayuya and
Utuado, the governor called in the Puerto Rican National Guard and the
U.S. Air Force. American military aircraft flew over the two
municipalities, dropping bombs over the pueblos, flattening homes.
According to police estimates, 28 people were killed and 50 were
wounded.

After Jayuya and Utuado had been retaken by the government, National
Guardsmen patrolled the streets with pistols, rifles, and bayonets
[[link removed]].
In Utuado, after a group of Nationalists surrendered, the prisoners
were walked to the local police station and ordered to remove their
shoes and belts. Behind the station, the police lined them up, their
backs to the wall—the youngest only 17, pleading for water—and
shot them, killing five.

That same day, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola boarded a train
from New York to Washington, D.C. Torresola’s family lived in
Jayuya; his sister had been wounded in the uprising and his brother
had been arrested. Twenty-four hours later, in an effort to gain
international attention for the cause of Puerto Rican independence,
Collazo and Torresola attempted to assassinate President Truman
[[link removed]] inside
Blair House, across from the White House, where he was living at the
time. Following the Nationalist uprisings, thousands of people
supporting independence were jailed. Albizu Campos was arrested again,
and this time sentenced to 80 years in federal prison.

_Underground_

this is the world that Oscar López Rivera grew up in. Born in San
Sebastián, in 1943, just a few years after Albizu Campos’s first
arrest, López Rivera moved to Chicago with his sister at the age of
14. His father followed with the rest of the family a few years later.
López Rivera was drafted into the Army and in 1965 was sent to
Vietnam. He earned a Bronze Star, but came to see the war as an
extension of the same colonial logic that had governed life in Puerto
Rico—the powerful doing whatever they wanted, because they thought
they could. “I kept on making myself promises about coming home and
doing everything that I could do to transform Puerto Rico into an
independent nation,” he told me. Back in Chicago, he began a career
as an activist for tenants’ and workers’ rights and as an advocate
for Puerto Rican communities. He co-founded a high school and a
cultural center. In 1972, the United Nations’ Special Committee on
Decolonization urged the U.S. to recognize the “inalienable right of
the people of Puerto Rico to self‐­determination and
independence.” Around this time, López Rivera first met the
activists who would become members of the militant and clandestine
pro-independence organization known as the FALN.

The FALN first emerged publicly in October 1974, when it set off
bombs in New York City
[[link removed]]:
two in Rockefeller Center and two on Park Avenue, as well as a car
bomb in the Financial District that covered nearly two blocks in
debris. No one was hurt—the bombings took place around 3 a.m., when
the streets were empty. But then, later in the year, a bomb left in an
abandoned building injured a New York City police officer. A month
later, in January 1975, the FALN claimed responsibility for a
lunchtime explosion at Fraunces Tavern, a restaurant and historic
landmark in the Financial District. Four men were killed and at least
44 people were injured. One of the dead was the father of young
children; the wife of another victim was pregnant. The attack,
according to the FALN’s written statement
[[link removed]], was in
retaliation for a bombing in Puerto Rico in which two independence
activists had been killed and 11 people injured. Over the next decade,
the FALN orchestrated more than 100 bombings or incendiary attacks in
New York; Washington; Newark, New Jersey; San Juan; and Chicago.

In 1980, the FBI identified and arrested 11 members of the group. They
were charged with seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S.
government as well as with a number of related crimes, including
weapons possession. All of the men and women were convicted. They were
sentenced to prison terms ranging from 55 to 99 years. López Rivera
was not arrested with the original group, and no evidence was found
directly tying him to any of the bombings—­­to this day, he denies
involvement in actions that killed or injured anyone. But the FBI said
that, a few years earlier, it had found bomb-making equipment in an
apartment López Rivera frequented, and he was named a co-defendant
with the 11 others. López Rivera was already on the run, hiding in
safe houses in Chicago. He was finally arrested during a traffic stop
in May 1981. At his trial, Alfredo Méndez, a member of the FALN who
had become an FBI informant, testified that López Rivera had been his
trainer, teaching him how to make gun silencers and bomb-detonation
devices. López Rivera was convicted and sentenced to 55 years in
prison. After he served six years, an additional 15 years were added
to his sentence for his alleged role in planning an escape. He spent
12 years in solitary confinement.

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In time, supporters around the world began campaigning for his
release. In 1999, President Bill Clinton extended an offer of
clemency and conditional release
[[link removed]] to
16 FALN members, including López Rivera. The offer required that
López Rivera “refrain from the use or advocacy” of violence,
which he was prepared to do, but also that he leave behind his
co-defendant Carlos Alberto Torres. Torres, a FALN leader, had been
unapologetic about pursuing revolution by any means, and had not been
included in Clinton’s offer. López Rivera refused the deal. “I
was well aware that I could end my life in prison,” he explained.
“But I was not prepared to leave anyone behind.”

Clinton’s offer stirred controversy; the son of one of the men
killed in the Fraunces Tavern bombing called it “an affront” that
“endangered America.” But efforts on López Rivera’s behalf
continued. In 2016, the playwright and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda, a
Puerto Rican American, reportedly raised the matter with President
Obama.

Read: The mixed reception of the _Hamilton_ premiere in Puerto Rico
[[link removed]]

I spoke with López Rivera at length about his past. He defended
attacks against property back then as a last resort, “but not with
the goal of killing people. Not with the goal of taking human life.”
He denied once again that he had played a role in acts that had hurt
people. Of course, this sits uneasily alongside the fact that he
remained a member of a group that did hurt innocent people, and killed
five of them. During our conversations, López Rivera spoke about some
of the events of those years—“What happens at times is that
we’re thinking of doing something, and then it turns into something
else”—with vagueness and remoteness rather than moral clarity.

But as we talked, it became apparent to me that López Rivera thinks
differently now. There is no role for violence in the independence
movement, he said. He believes, as I do, that the only path to
independence is one that draws people into peaceful action. Is he a
pacifist? I don’t know. What I do know is that, at almost 80, he
appears to be a man trying to reckon with the past.

The Dream

Since 1952, Puerto Rico has had six nonbinding referendums on its
political status. In the most recent referendum
[[link removed]],
held during the 2020 general election, only a little more than half of
registered voters turned out; of those, some 52 percent voted for
statehood, while 47 percent voted against it. Independence was not
listed as a choice.

Despite all of the ways that America has failed Puerto Rico, joining
the union more formally as a state is seen by some as the best way
forward. Proponents of statehood argue that making Puerto Rico the
51st state would give it the tools and authority to sort out its own
financial issues, and bring an increase in disability benefits, Social
Security benefits, and Medicaid funding. As a state, Puerto Rico would
finally have voting representation in Congress, and its citizens would
gain the right to vote in presidential elections.

 

Children at play in the western municipality of Maricao, which has the
highest child-poverty rate in Puerto Rico (Christopher Gregory-Rivera
 //  The Atlantic)
But if the case of Hawaii is at all predictive, statehood would also
ensure that even more Americans would move to Puerto Rico, displacing
even more Puerto Ricans and putting even more non–Puerto Ricans into
positions of power. Writing about citizenship, the Afro Caribbean
geographer Ileana I. Diaz has argued that “the extension of American
citizenship to Puerto Ricans works not so much to include Puerto
Ricans into the nation, but rather to extend the borders of the United
States.” The extension of statehood would have the same effect.

The future of a free Puerto Rico doesn’t need to be utopian, or
easy, to be just.

sue

EXPLORE

IDEAS [[link removed]]

LET PUERTO RICO BE FREE

The only just future for my home is not statehood, but full
independence from the United States.

By Jaquira Díaz [[link removed]]

Photographs by Christopher Gregory-Rivera

[Boy with Puerto Rican flag as cape]

Christopher Gregory-Rivera

SEPTEMBER 20, 2022

SHARE

In 2017, as summer ends, when news anchors first mention the oncoming
Hurricane Irma, the people go to the big-box store or the Econo
supermarket just a few minutes from home. They try to stock up, but by
the time they arrive, the lines are long and most of the shops are
running low. They get what they can: some food, a few gallons of
water, a portable gas-powered hot plate in case they lose power. They
refill their prescriptions and then fill the gas tank after waiting in
an hours-long line at the Puma station.

When Irma moves north of Puerto Rico and across the Caribbean, it
brings heavy rains, flooding, power outages. And then, two weeks
later, Hurricane María approaches the archipelago. On September 20,
the storm makes landfall, knocking out the electrical grid and leaving
the entire population in the dark. It passes through Yabucoa and
Humacao and Comerío, and the water levels in Río de la Plata begin
to rise. Flash floods destroy many of the houses. Roads and bridges
collapse.

[[link removed]]

American Eugenics - Race, Queer Anatomy, And The Science Of
Nationalism [[link removed]]NANCY
ORDOVER,U OF MINNESOTA PRESS

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When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a
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Read: Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands brace for Hurricane Irma
[[link removed]]

The days following María bring only more misery, and there is a
general understanding that everyone is up against something bigger
than a storm. People lose family members. They desperately hunt for
drinking water, collecting it from wells and natural springs and any
other source they can find. They endure President Donald Trump, who
spends the weekend after the storm at a golf tournament
[[link removed]],
tweeting that his critics in Puerto Rico are “politically motivated
ingrates.” They watch him toss paper towels
[[link removed]] at
hurricane survivors when he finally does visit, in early October—a
performance before the world, meant as a humiliation. Eventually he
will propose trading Puerto Rico for Greenland
[[link removed]].

As the days become weeks, there is more rain; there are more floods.
People live without power for months. They watch that same president
deny that many people have died, even as thousands never come home.
The people work with their neighbors to secure blue tarps onto roofs.
Every day, more tarps go up, house after house. When people stand on a
terrace watching the town below, they see an ocean of blue-covered
houses. They clear debris from the road. They shovel mud out of their
living rooms, their kitchens, their bedrooms, their bathrooms. They
try to salvage family pictures, wedding albums, birth certificates.
The storm carried so much away, dropped other people’s things inside
their homes. In a bedroom is someone else’s desk lamp, a
neighbor’s charcoal grill. All over the sloped back garden:
children’s clothing, toys, shingles from a nearby roof. People clear
fallen trees, bamboo, garbage. They clean and clean, but the job never
stops. They wait for FEMA. They wait for FEMA.

For months, they live in survival mode, dealing with an
archipelago-­wide mental-health crisis, a shortage of drinking water,
delayed or unavailable medical services. They endure obstacles created
by the U.S. government. The military arrives, the National Guard
mobilizes, but the Trump administration blocks access
[[link removed]] to
more than $20 billion in hurricane-relief aid and recovery funding.
María, the people learn, is the deadliest hurricane to hit Puerto
Rico since 1899, but nobody can agree on the true death toll
[[link removed]].
The official count, announced in December, is 64, but a study the
following year by _The_ _New England Journal of Medicine_ finds a
fair estimate to be more than 5,000
[[link removed]].

RECOMMENDED READING

* [[link removed]]
A Baffling Murder Case. An Unimaginable Tragedy.
[[link removed]]

EMILY BUDER [[link removed]]

* [An illustration of a woman in high heels and a colorful suit; her
head is overlaid with a giant gear with a frowny face on it, and the
gear is meshed with a large system of other gears]
[[link removed]]
A Profession Is Not a Personality
[[link removed]]
ARTHUR C. BROOKS [[link removed]]

* [Mirrored illustration of a face with the word "NO" spelled out,
using the mouth as the "O."]
[[link removed]]
How About Never?
[[link removed]]
ANNA HOLMES [[link removed]]

Photos of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Mar
[[link removed]]ia
[[link removed]]

Nine months after María, people still have no electricity. They stop
waiting for FEMA. Instead, they look to their neighbors. They take
care of one another. This is how it has always been. Every day, it
becomes more and more obvious that the current government
structure—Puerto Rico as a de facto colony of the United States,
despite the official language referring to it as a
“commonwealth”—is a failure. There is no benevolent American
savior coming to help Puerto Rico. Every day, people see that there is
only _them_, doing everything for themselves. Every day, more of them
come to understand that Puerto Rico has always stood on its own. This
is why I believe that independence, not statehood, is the path we must
pursue.

_Oscar_

every year, no matter where I’m living, I visit family in Puerto
Rico. Sometimes I spend whole summers there, sweating my ass off,
driving up and down narrow mountain roads, splitting my time among San
Lorenzo and San Juan and Humacao and Comerío. After a couple of weeks
in the mountains, of days walking the cobblestone streets, feeding
flea-bitten satos with wagging tails, mosquitoes leaving galaxies of
red down my arms and legs, the coquis singing me to sleep at night, I
start to feel more like myself, like the woman I’m supposed to be.
Soon, I can’t remember what life is like without roosters screaming
in the early morning, the neighbor’s donkey braying, wild parrots
flying overhead, the peacocks train-rattling down the hill.

Last year, on my first trip back since the corona­virus pandemic
began, I visited my Tío David, a Catholic priest. When Hurricane
María hit, my uncle lived in Comerío, a mountain town about an hour
south of San Juan, near the center of the main island. He was based in
the church there. Our family lost contact with him when the power and
cellphone service went down. I spent six weeks listening for his name
on walkie-talkie apps, reading lists of survivors, texting and
emailing and calling, until finally one day I found him and heard his
voice again. He didn’t leave Comerío, even as I sent supplies and
begged him to fly to Ohio, where I lived at the time. “There’s too
much work to do here,” he told me. “People need help.”

Explore the Special Preview: November 2022 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

View More [[link removed]]

In time, he transferred to a Catholic church in Yabucoa, on the
southeastern coast, one of the towns hardest hit by the storm. When
Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico, it entered through
Yabucoa, with winds of up to 155 miles an hour. Tornadoes tore through
as well, and the rains led to landslides. More than 1,500 houses were
damaged. So were most of the local businesses in el pueblo, as well as
major structures like Yabucoa’s baseball stadium and city hall. The
recovery has been slow.

It was late morning when I pulled up to the church. The sun was
shining, the city center bustling with pedestrian traffic, the narrow
streets busy with cars and bikes and scooters. Tío David and I drove
around, taking it easy on the hills and turns, keeping an eye out for
pedestrians. A pack of satos walked right in front of my Kia, bolting
when I slammed on the brakes.

The city center is small, but Yabucoa is spread out over 10 barrios.
Hills, then the valley, then cliffs overlooking the ocean. This is
where he plans to retire, Tío David told me: close to the sea, close
to family and friends and his church. The people take care of one
another in Yabucoa, he said, as they did in Comerío; the people, not
the government, will ensure Puerto Rico’s recovery.

[Oscar Lopez Rivera in his office]

_Left_: Oscar López Rivera at his office in Río Piedras. _Right_:
His painting of the independence activists Filiberto Ojeda Ríos,
Pedro Albizu Campos, and Juan Antonio Corretjer. (Christopher
Gregory-Rivera for _The Atlantic_)

I told him that I would soon be meeting with Oscar López Rivera to
talk about the prospect of Puerto Rico’s independence. He knew
Oscar, he said. Everybody knew Oscar. In May 2017, a few months before
the hurricanes, López Rivera had been released from prison in the
U.S., where he had been confined since 1981 after his conviction on
charges of seditious conspiracy. The sentence was commuted by
President Barack Obama in one of his last acts before leaving office.
For decades, particularly in the United States, López Rivera was seen
as a terrorist because of his involvement with the Fuerzas Armadas de
Liberación Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation), or FALN, a
militant organization whose campaign for Puerto Rican independence in
the 1970s killed five Americans and wounded dozens of others. But to
many people in Puerto Rico and among the diaspora, he was regarded as
a political prisoner, the embodiment of resistance. After his release,
he was greeted by crowds from all over Puerto Rico—cheering,
singing, carrying flowers and Puerto Rican flags. The University of
Puerto Rico’s student choir serenaded him outside his daughter’s
apartment building. Tío David was among those who celebrated his
return, in part because he believed it was a sign that change was
coming.

María was not just a natural disaster; it was a political event that,
I believe, is provoking a historic shift.

The United States seized Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898, during the
Spanish-American War. Today, although Puerto Rico has its own national
identity, its official political status is neither as a U.S. state nor
as a sovereign nation but rather as, technically, an “unincorporated
territory.” That status was supposedly determined with the input of
Puerto Ricans. But the deck has always been stacked. In 1952, two
years after Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to assassinate Harry
Truman, the U.S. endorsed a plebiscite to settle the question of the
archipelago’s status. However, only two options were available to
voters: the establishment of limited self-­governance under American
colonial authority—the “common­wealth” option—or continued
direct administration as an actual colony. Back then, Puerto Ricans
chose the commonwealth option. Most politicians in Puerto Rico—and
those people wired into the American social and economic system—now
favor statehood. The political consensus in Washington is that, as a
practical matter, the most likely future for Puerto Rico is an
indefinite continuation of the status quo. Independence is not an
official choice.

[The author's uncle saying Mass]

The author’s uncle, Padre David Díaz Matos, says Mass at Capilla
Nuestra Señora del Carmen,
a church in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico. (Christopher Gregory-Rivera
for _The Atlantic_)

A few days after my visit with Tío David, I met López Rivera in the
city of Río Piedras. Around the corner from López Rivera’s office,
I walked past a mural depicting the 19th-century Flag of
Lares—created to be the flag of a free Puerto Rico once it gained
independence from Spain—along with López Rivera’s face and the
words ¡liberación ya! The same flag hangs inside López Rivera’s
small office, surrounded by portraits of the Afro Puerto Rican
independence activist Pedro Albizu Campos; the Cuban revolutionary Che
Guevara (the FALN was supported by Cuba’s Communist government); and
the Puerto Rican writer and activist Consuelo Lee Tapia, together with
her husband, Puerto Rico’s national poet, Juan Antonio
Corretjer—all painted by López Rivera himself. In a studio behind
the office, López Rivera showed me more of his work: Frida Kahlo in
tones of black and muted red. Another portrait of Corretjer. Back in
the office, he offered me a seat and made coffee.

Read: Puerto Rico’s power struggle
[[link removed]]

Since his return to Puerto Rico, López Rivera has again assumed the
role of activist, protesting the private takeover of the publicly
owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority by a new Canadian American
company, Luma, known for its unreliable service and repeated rate
hikes. The takeover has brought Puerto Ricans into the streets. López
Rivera has also spoken out against PROMESA, the Puerto Rico Oversight,
Management, and Economic Stability Act, signed by Obama in 2016.
Puerto Rico had been plagued by a debt crisis that would soon be
worsened by ballooning pension-fund liabilities, losses from the
state-owned power company, and a mass migration of taxpayers and
workers to the United States after Hurricane María. Because of its
political status, Puerto Rico is denied many of the legal and fiscal
tools granted to states and other sovereign entities to restructure
debts or seek relief. PROMESA created a financial-oversight board made
up of unelected officials who have the authority to overrule Puerto
Rican lawmakers—which they did when they forced Puerto Rico to
accept the new power company. The oversight board is known by everyone
simply as “la junta.” It has slashed pension funds, closed
hundreds of schools, cut funding to the University of Puerto Rico, and
created a work requirement that people have to satisfy before they can
qualify for food assistance.

[The damaged baseball stadium in Yabucoa]

The baseball stadium in Yabucoa was severely damaged in 2017 by
Hurricane María, and ultimately had to be razed. (Christopher
Gregory-Rivera)

We spoke about the protests during the past few years, when Puerto
Ricans came out against la junta’s austerity measures and then
forced Governor Ricardo Rosselló to resign after hundreds of leaked
messages on the Telegram app showed him and his associates engaging in
sexism and homophobia—and perhaps political graft and corruption.
Many of the protesters on these occasions have loudly and publicly
demanded independence.

The quest for independence has a long history in Puerto Rico, going
back to Spanish colonial times. The U.S. has spent more than a century
discrediting independence movements on the archipelago and at times
criminalizing them. Pro-independence sentiment has not always been
openly expressed. In a _Washington Post_ /Kaiser Family Foundation
survey conducted in Puerto Rico in 2018, only about 10 percent of
respondents said they favored independence. But I am not alone in
believing that support for independence is growing. In the 2020
gubernatorial election, two parties advocating for self-determination
and decolonization—one of them calling for full
independence—­collectively garnered more than a quarter of the
vote. Hurricane María was not just a natural disaster; it was a
political event that, I believe, is provoking a historic shift.
Americans do not appreciate the sheer scale of the trauma. To give one
example: In the three months after María, a Puerto Rico Department of
Health hotline received approximately 10,000 calls from people
considering suicide
[[link removed]]—­a
huge increase over the previous year. Of those, almost a third said
they had already tried—­an even greater increase. María also made
it clear to ordinary people, during the worst disaster in the
archipelago’s modern history, that self-sufficiency and,
essentially, self-governance were the only things Puerto Ricans could
truly rely on.

[man rebuilding his home in San Isidro]

Recovery from Hurricane María continues, slowly. Two years after the
storm, in San Isidro,
a homeowner began the task of rebuilding. (Christopher Gregory-Rivera)

In search of jobs, many were forced by María to leave. Puerto
Rico lost 135,000 people
[[link removed]] in
the six months after the hurricane—this out of a population of a
little more than 3 million. For those still living on the archipelago,
the challenges continue to mount. Changes to Puerto Rico’s tax code
since 2012 have reduced corporate tax rates to just 4 percent, and
have exempted all interest and dividend income, encouraging rich
non–Puerto Ricans to take up residence. In recent years, Puerto Rico
has become a destination for disaster capitalists—real-estate
developers and cryptocurrency investors looking for a tax haven.
“There are foreign­ers buying up all the property,” López Rivera
told me. “Puerto Ricans are being pushed out, displaced.”
Approximately 43 percent of all Puerto Ricans live below the poverty
line and struggle to find work. The median household income is
$21,058, less than half the median income in Mississippi, the poorest
American state.

Read: The situation in Puerto Rico is untenable
[[link removed]]

_“La Operación”_

there are constant reminders in Puerto Rico of its powerlessness. On
April 21, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law
[[link removed]] that
denies Supplemental Security Income benefits to Puerto Ricans who are
blind or disabled, even though Puerto Ricans are ostensibly U.S.
citizens. Vieques and Culebra—two small islands that are part of the
archipelago—were long used by the U.S. Navy for bombing practice and
munitions dumping, and the Navy left behind thousands of bombs,
grenades, and other live ordnance. The devastation on Vieques and
Culebra—including contamination of the groundwater by hazardous
substances, such as perchlorate—is so significant that the U.S.
Government Accountability Office estimates the cleanup will continue
through 2032.

Even Americans familiar with some of Puerto Rico’s history may be
unaware of major episodes—for instance, the U.S.-imposed
population-control policies, starting in the 1930s, that promoted the
mass sterilization of Puerto Rican women and used Puerto Ricans for
medical experiments.

In 1937, under Blanton Winship, the U.S.-appointed governor, Law 116
came into force, creating the Puerto Rican Eugenics Board and
subsidizing the sterilization of Puerto Ricans. Sterilization,
particularly of poor women, had been proposed by the U.S. government
as a solution for the archipelago’s rising unemployment rate, which,
according to the colonial government, was caused by overpopulation. In
the 1920s and ’30s, according to the historian Laura Briggs, “the
term _overpopulation_ had acquired another meaning, one that blamed
excessive sexuality and fertility for the poverty of [Puerto Rico] as
a whole.”

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In truth, blame for the archipelago’s unemployment and poverty lies
with the United States. After taking control of Puerto Rico, the U.S.
disrupted the coffee industry, which employed much of the working
class, devaluing the currency and inflating the cost of coffee
production. American sugar companies supplanted Puerto Rican coffee
growers, converting about half of all arable land into sugar
plantations and displacing small landholders. In a variety of ways,
the economy was upended. By the 1930s, more than a third of Puerto
Ricans found themselves out of a job and without an income. Panic
about “overpopulation” was used to indict Puerto Ricans for their
own dispossession.

The idea of overpopulation drove the eugenics regime. From 1937 to
1960, when Law 116 was repealed, the Puerto Rican Eugenics Board
directly forced 97 sterilizations by means of tubal ligation or
hysterectomy, but many thousands of other women were effectively
coerced into the same procedures—led to believe that sterilization
was reversible, or told that they would not be employed unless they
had been sterilized. When healthy pregnant women arrived at hospitals
ready to deliver their babies, many were turned away unless they
agreed to be sterilized after giving birth. It became common practice
for women to have “la operación” following delivery, even after
the repeal of Law 116. The 1982 Fertility and Family Planning
Assessment, published in the journal _Population Today_, found
that 41 percent of married women in Puerto Rico had been sterilized
[[link removed]]. Puerto Rican women of
childbearing age had the world’s highest sterilization rate. Decades
later, the sterilization rate in Puerto Rico is still among the
highest. “They wanted to exterminate us,” López Rivera
maintained.

I was born in one of Puerto Rico’s government housing projects, El
Caserío Padre Rivera, in Humacao. El Caserío was a small community,
most of us Black and brown, all of us born into poverty. Police raids
were frequent, harassment routine. Most of the women were sterilized.
My mother held a job at a factory in Las Piedras, working long shifts
making electronic parts. She’d had three children by the time she
was 22. I recall a conversation we had a few months into the pandemic,
about her life as a young mother—and how she, like so many other
women in Puerto Rico’s public-housing projects, had been sterilized.

“I loved being a mother,” she told me. “I would’ve filled the
house with babies.”

“Then why did you get la operación?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Everybody told me to get it. All the women
were getting it. Your father said I should. The nurses.” She paused,
took a deep breath. “And I wanted to go back to work.” Her
supervisors had never explicitly said she needed to get la operación,
she told me, but she remembered that it was just understood.

My mother was sterilized after giving birth to her third child. Back
then, la operación was a part of life. You went into the hospital to
give birth, and you came home with your baby and with your tubes tied.
There were never any conversations about informed consent or about
potential risks. Sterilization was just what you did.

Puerto Rico became a proving ground for medical experiments. In the
early 1950s, as the in­famous Tuskegee syphilis study
[[link removed]] was
being conducted on Black men in Alabama, experimental pharmaceutical
contraceptives were tested on unknowing Puerto Rican women. The
project was funded and guided by Clarence Gamble, the heir to Procter
& Gamble and a prominent eugenicist. Gamble established birth-control
clinics across Puerto Rico and sent nurses and social workers to
recruit women from the predominantly Black and brown housing projects
for “perhaps one of the most notorious abuses of medical power in
birth control technology’s history,” as the scholar Nancy Ordover
writes in her book, _American Eugenics_
[[link removed]]. Without informed
consent, doctors gave progesterone injections and dispensed the
world’s first birth-control pills to poor women from rural and
poverty-stricken communities. What would become known as “the
pill” was, at the time, “a highly experimental drug administered
without controlled dosage,” Ordover writes. The women suffered
serious side effects, such as nausea, headaches, and bleeding, but
were disregarded when they reported feeling ill. During the clinical
trials, three women died.

_The Gag Law_

from the start, the fight for Puerto Rican independence was
in­extricable from the movements in the archipelago to abolish
slavery and demand racial equality. In 1856, the Afro Puerto Rican
diplomat and doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances helped found a secret
abolitionist society to liberate enslaved people by securing their
passage to other countries or paying for their freedom. At the same
time, the society promised freedom to enslaved people who joined the
independence movement, and the struggle against Spanish colonial rule
was embraced early by many Black Puerto Ricans. For their efforts,
Betances and others were exiled to the Dominican Republic by the
Spanish crown. Working abroad, Betances and his partner, Segundo Ruiz
Belvís, founded the Revolutionary Committee of Puerto Rico, which
demanded both abolition and independence—­together. From the
Dominican Republic, the group plotted an uprising. In September 1868,
pro-­independence rebels carried out their plans, but the revolt was
quickly quelled by the Spanish. Betances fled to New York. The
uprising, still commemorated, is known as El Grito de Lares
[[link removed]].
Slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873.

["Man Redeemed" monument (El Hombre Redimido)]

_El Hombre Redimido_ (“Man Redeemed”), a monument in the city of
Ponce commemorating the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873
(Christopher Gregory-Rivera for _The Atlantic_)

In 1897, Spain granted Puerto Rico a form of sovereignty under a
statute called the Carta Autonómica, but when the United States
seized the archipelago the following year, it dissolved the new
Parliament and brushed aside the new charter, establishing its own
colonial government. Under military occupation, Puerto Ricans saw
their land taken, their industries destroyed, their currency devalued.
They were forced to live as subjects of a nation whose Supreme Court
had just promulgated the racist doctrine of “separate but equal.”
Six months into the occupation, the same troops that had been called
to fight in Puerto Rico were mobilized in Wilmington, North Carolina,
where they helped massacre Black citizens and elected officials amid
the violent overthrow of the city’s multiracial government
[[link removed]] by
white supremacists.

In 1917, the U.S. Congress passed the Jones Act, which granted a form
of second-class citizenship to most people born in Puerto Rico. Within
weeks, it passed a second law making Puerto Ricans eligible for the
military draft. In the months that followed, some 20,000 Puerto Rican
men were conscripted for service
[[link removed]] during
World War I. The Jones Act did not grant Puerto Ricans the same rights
as most other U.S. citizens. Then as now, they did not have any voting
representatives in Congress, and could not vote in presidential
elections.

[archival photos from the 1937 Ponce Massacre and an uprising in 1950]

_Left_: One of 19 Puerto Ricans killed in the 1937 Ponce Massacre; the
facts were initially covered up by
U.S. authorities. _Right_: Suspected nationalists and sympathizers
are rounded up after an uprising in 1950. (Archive PL / Alamy;
Bettmann / Getty)

This injustice—as well as his own experience in the U.S.
military—­inspired the work of Pedro Albizu Campos. After serving
as an officer in the Army during the war, he graduated from Harvard
Law School
[[link removed]] and
returned to Puerto Rico to practice law. He took up activism against
the U.S.-owned sugar industry, leading union strikes on plantations
and representing workers in lawsuits. He joined the new,
pro-independence Nationalist Party and was elected its vice president
in 1924 and its president in 1930.

The United States saw the independence movement as a threat and used a
range of suppressive tactics against it, including FBI surveillance,
long-term imprisonment, and the torture of pro-­independence
political leaders. In 1935, on the campus of the University of Puerto
Rico in Río Piedras, the police shot and killed four members of the
Nationalist Party and a young bystander in what is now known as the
Río Piedras Massacre. A year later, two Puerto Ricans were accused of
murdering the American chief of police in Puerto Rico as retaliation.
The suspects were arrested and executed without trial at the police
headquarters in San Juan. Shortly afterward, Albizu Campos and several
other Nationalist leaders were convicted of conspiring to overthrow
the United States government and sent to federal prison, where Albizu
Campos would remain for a decade.

When the U.S. seized Puerto Rico, its people saw their land taken,
their industries destroyed, their currency devalued.

In March 1937, the same year Governor Winship introduced the
sterilization law, hundreds of Puerto Ricans in the city of Ponce
gathered for a march organized by the Nationalist Party to commemorate
emancipation in Puerto Rico and to protest the incarceration of Albizu
Campos. Under Winship’s orders, police opened fire on the peaceful
protesters: families with children; students; parishioners who had
been celebrating Palm Sunday, marching with music and palm fronds. The
police shot into the crowd and kept shooting for almost 15 minutes. As
they walked by the dead or dying, they beat them with clubs. The
police killed 19 people and wounded more than 200. Most of those who
died were shot in the back while running away. An extensive cover-up
followed, with Winship claiming that the protesters had shot first and
the police had only returned fire. An investigation by the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights determined that the governor was lying
[[link removed]] and that evidence
had been fabricated. Winship was removed from office but never
prosecuted.

Albizu Campos returned to Puerto Rico in 1947. A year later, the
U.S.-appointed governor signed Law 53, La Ley de la Mordaza. It is
widely referred to as the Gag Law, and it made flying Puerto Rican
flags, even privately, illegal. The Gag Law also made it a crime to
sing the Puerto Rican national anthem; to speak out against the United
States; and to speak, organize, or assemble in favor of independence.
Law 53, which violated the First Amendment, was in effect for nearly a
decade, until it was repealed in 1957. It essentially empowered
authorities to penalize Puerto Ricans just for being Puerto Rican.

[Aftermath of the FALN bombing at Fraunces Tavern in 1975]

In 1975, the Puerto Rican nationalist group known as the FALN carried
out a lethal bombing at a New York restaurant, Fraunces Tavern—one
of many attacks. (_New York Daily News_ / Getty)

In response to the Gag Law and the attempted suppression of
pro-independence sentiment, the Nationalists planned a series of
revolts. In October 1950, after a firefight that killed three
Nationalists in the town of Peñuelas, Albizu Campos called for an
insurrection. Nationalists rose up in several towns over the following
days. On November 1, after particularly serious revolts in Jayuya and
Utuado, the governor called in the Puerto Rican National Guard and the
U.S. Air Force. American military aircraft flew over the two
municipalities, dropping bombs over the pueblos, flattening homes.
According to police estimates, 28 people were killed and 50 were
wounded.

After Jayuya and Utuado had been retaken by the government, National
Guardsmen patrolled the streets with pistols, rifles, and bayonets
[[link removed]].
In Utuado, after a group of Nationalists surrendered, the prisoners
were walked to the local police station and ordered to remove their
shoes and belts. Behind the station, the police lined them up, their
backs to the wall—the youngest only 17, pleading for water—and
shot them, killing five.

That same day, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola boarded a train
from New York to Washington, D.C. Torresola’s family lived in
Jayuya; his sister had been wounded in the uprising and his brother
had been arrested. Twenty-four hours later, in an effort to gain
international attention for the cause of Puerto Rican independence,
Collazo and Torresola attempted to assassinate President Truman
[[link removed]] inside
Blair House, across from the White House, where he was living at the
time. Following the Nationalist uprisings, thousands of people
supporting independence were jailed. Albizu Campos was arrested again,
and this time sentenced to 80 years in federal prison.

_Underground_

this is the world that Oscar López Rivera grew up in. Born in San
Sebastián, in 1943, just a few years after Albizu Campos’s first
arrest, López Rivera moved to Chicago with his sister at the age of
14. His father followed with the rest of the family a few years later.
López Rivera was drafted into the Army and in 1965 was sent to
Vietnam. He earned a Bronze Star, but came to see the war as an
extension of the same colonial logic that had governed life in Puerto
Rico—the powerful doing whatever they wanted, because they thought
they could. “I kept on making myself promises about coming home and
doing everything that I could do to transform Puerto Rico into an
independent nation,” he told me. Back in Chicago, he began a career
as an activist for tenants’ and workers’ rights and as an advocate
for Puerto Rican communities. He co-founded a high school and a
cultural center. In 1972, the United Nations’ Special Committee on
Decolonization urged the U.S. to recognize the “inalienable right of
the people of Puerto Rico to self‐­determination and
independence.” Around this time, López Rivera first met the
activists who would become members of the militant and clandestine
pro-independence organization known as the FALN.

The FALN first emerged publicly in October 1974, when it set off
bombs in New York City
[[link removed]]:
two in Rockefeller Center and two on Park Avenue, as well as a car
bomb in the Financial District that covered nearly two blocks in
debris. No one was hurt—the bombings took place around 3 a.m., when
the streets were empty. But then, later in the year, a bomb left in an
abandoned building injured a New York City police officer. A month
later, in January 1975, the FALN claimed responsibility for a
lunchtime explosion at Fraunces Tavern, a restaurant and historic
landmark in the Financial District. Four men were killed and at least
44 people were injured. One of the dead was the father of young
children; the wife of another victim was pregnant. The attack,
according to the FALN’s written statement
[[link removed]], was in
retaliation for a bombing in Puerto Rico in which two independence
activists had been killed and 11 people injured. Over the next decade,
the FALN orchestrated more than 100 bombings or incendiary attacks in
New York; Washington; Newark, New Jersey; San Juan; and Chicago.

In 1980, the FBI identified and arrested 11 members of the group. They
were charged with seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S.
government as well as with a number of related crimes, including
weapons possession. All of the men and women were convicted. They were
sentenced to prison terms ranging from 55 to 99 years. López Rivera
was not arrested with the original group, and no evidence was found
directly tying him to any of the bombings—­­to this day, he denies
involvement in actions that killed or injured anyone. But the FBI said
that, a few years earlier, it had found bomb-making equipment in an
apartment López Rivera frequented, and he was named a co-defendant
with the 11 others. López Rivera was already on the run, hiding in
safe houses in Chicago. He was finally arrested during a traffic stop
in May 1981. At his trial, Alfredo Méndez, a member of the FALN who
had become an FBI informant, testified that López Rivera had been his
trainer, teaching him how to make gun silencers and bomb-detonation
devices. López Rivera was convicted and sentenced to 55 years in
prison. After he served six years, an additional 15 years were added
to his sentence for his alleged role in planning an escape. He spent
12 years in solitary confinement.

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In time, supporters around the world began campaigning for his
release. In 1999, President Bill Clinton extended an offer of
clemency and conditional release
[[link removed]] to
16 FALN members, including López Rivera. The offer required that
López Rivera “refrain from the use or advocacy” of violence,
which he was prepared to do, but also that he leave behind his
co-defendant Carlos Alberto Torres. Torres, a FALN leader, had been
unapologetic about pursuing revolution by any means, and had not been
included in Clinton’s offer. López Rivera refused the deal. “I
was well aware that I could end my life in prison,” he explained.
“But I was not prepared to leave anyone behind.”

Clinton’s offer stirred controversy; the son of one of the men
killed in the Fraunces Tavern bombing called it “an affront” that
“endangered America.” But efforts on López Rivera’s behalf
continued. In 2016, the playwright and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda, a
Puerto Rican American, reportedly raised the matter with President
Obama.

Read: The mixed reception of the _Hamilton_ premiere in Puerto Rico
[[link removed]]

I spoke with López Rivera at length about his past. He defended
attacks against property back then as a last resort, “but not with
the goal of killing people. Not with the goal of taking human life.”
He denied once again that he had played a role in acts that had hurt
people. Of course, this sits uneasily alongside the fact that he
remained a member of a group that did hurt innocent people, and killed
five of them. During our conversations, López Rivera spoke about some
of the events of those years—“What happens at times is that
we’re thinking of doing something, and then it turns into something
else”—with vagueness and remoteness rather than moral clarity.

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But as we talked, it became apparent to me that López Rivera thinks
differently now. There is no role for violence in the independence
movement, he said. He believes, as I do, that the only path to
independence is one that draws people into peaceful action. Is he a
pacifist? I don’t know. What I do know is that, at almost 80, he
appears to be a man trying to reckon with the past.

_The Dream_

since 1952, Puerto Rico has had six nonbinding referendums on its
political status. In the most recent referendum
[[link removed]],
held during the 2020 general election, only a little more than half of
registered voters turned out; of those, some 52 percent voted for
statehood, while 47 percent voted against it. Independence was not
listed as a choice.

Despite all of the ways that America has failed Puerto Rico, joining
the union more formally as a state is seen by some as the best way
forward. Proponents of statehood argue that making Puerto Rico the
51st state would give it the tools and authority to sort out its own
financial issues, and bring an increase in disability benefits, Social
Security benefits, and Medicaid funding. As a state, Puerto Rico would
finally have voting representation in Congress, and its citizens would
gain the right to vote in presidential elections.

[Kids playing in Maricao]

Children at play in the western municipality of Maricao, which has the
highest child-poverty rate in Puerto Rico (Christopher Gregory-Rivera)

But if the case of Hawaii is at all predictive, statehood would also
ensure that even more Americans would move to Puerto Rico, displacing
even more Puerto Ricans and putting even more non–Puerto Ricans into
positions of power. Writing about citizenship, the Afro Caribbean
geographer Ileana I. Diaz has argued that “the extension of American
citizenship to Puerto Ricans works not so much to include Puerto
Ricans into the nation, but rather to extend the borders of the United
States.” The extension of statehood would have the same effect.

The future of a free Puerto Rico doesn’t need to be utopian, or
easy, to be just.

Is an independent Puerto Rico possible—and would it be viable? A
bill for independence has little chance of moving through Congress. Of
course, Washington is not eagerly opening the door to statehood,
either. Puerto Rico’s present and future are also complicated by
climate change: As a small archipelago in the Caribbean, it is facing
rising sea levels and ever more violent storms. It is heavily
dependent on imported oil. In mid-September, almost five years to the
day after Hurricane María made landfall, Puerto Rico once again lost
power and endured catastrophic flooding, this time because of
Hurricane Fiona. Puerto Rico continues to experience grave financial
difficulties, many of them with roots in its colonial history. Its
path forward will be challenging, no matter what its political status.

But the future of a free Puerto Rico doesn’t need to be utopian, or
easy, to be just. With independence, the citizens of Puerto Rico would
have a government created by and for the benefit of the Puerto Rican
people rather than for the benefit of outside interests. The newly
recognized nation would be able to align itself and its political and
diplomatic systems as it wishes—perhaps joining the growing number
of Caribbean nations (most notably Barbados) that have fully rejected
their colonial ties
[[link removed]].
Although the United States still exerts enormous influence even on
Caribbean countries it does not occupy, independence might allow
Puerto Rico to reassess and adjust economic agreements to better suit
its people—rejecting the dominance of corporations and crypto bros
in favor of co-ops and green reforms.

Those, like me, who argue for sovereignty are not simply asking the
United States to “free Puerto Rico”—freedom is not
Washington’s to give. A return of sovereignty to the Puerto Rican
people would require a U.S. commitment to a policy of reparations
designed to provide independence and security—a policy that
acknowledges and begins to address generations of environmental
destruction, economic dislocation, and human-rights violations.
Reparations would have to cover many areas, large and small: paying
for the repair of the power grid; liquidating $70 billion in debt;
undergirding Puerto Rico’s pension funds; and expanding the
health-care system. It wouldn’t end there, and many arrangements
would have to be worked out, encompassing knotty issues involving
citizenship and trade relations. The process would be complex,
imperfect, messy. The point is that self-determination for Puerto
Ricans necessitates not just cutting them loose, but also restoring
what has been taken and otherwise making amends.

This is the future I dream about: Puerto Rico libre, all of us coming
home. We arrive at night, carrying duffel bags filled with our
clothing, our children’s clothing. We come with our families,
hauling suitcases through the airport, boxes sealed with packing tape,
whatever we can carry from Orlando, from Philadelphia, from Hartford.
At the airport in San Juan, a crowd is waiting outside baggage claim,
hands raised over heads, makeshift signs reading welcome
home and viva puerto rico libre. We wrap our arms around family,
friends, and strangers. Somebody’s grandfather plays a guiro. Women
dance. Children sing. The people return to Lares, Ponce, Culebra,
Isabela. We are here again after 10 years, after 20 years. We are here
for the very first time.

The journey home is different from what we imagined—the road into el
pueblo is narrow and potholed, and everything seems smaller than we
remember. But people are out walking, riding bikes, gathering at the
plaza. The schools, the airport, the power grid, the parks, the
beaches—all of this, all of the land and natural resources, belongs
to the people. The rebuilding is under way.
 

Earthquake survivors in Guánica in 2019. The earthquakes struck a
still-devastated Puerto Rico two years after Hurricane María.
(Christopher Gregory-Rivera  //  The Atlantic)
These are the days of reckoning, when the reparations paid to the
people help fund hospitals in Vieques and Culebra, help establish
universal medical care, help create a reproductive-and-maternal-health
program. These are the days of land being returned, of the coffee
industry thriving. The days of renewable energy, of solar and wind and
hydroelectric power; the days of coastline protection, of El Yunque
rain forest and coral reefs and wetlands and bioluminescent bays
preserved. The days of hope, as people cry in the streets after our
first free elections, the first time we’ve ever chosen a president.

I like to imagine myself there, among that crowd of family and friends
and strangers. Returning. When I arrive, I carry one suitcase full of
clothes and books, my laptop in my backpack. I carry my family’s
working-class Puerto Rican Spanish, the way we drag our _R_ ’s,
the way Tío’s voice is like a song, the way my father tells a
story, our language and its music and its Black history, our people
taken from Africa to Haiti to Puerto Rico. I carry the decades I spent
living in a country that never felt like home. I like to imagine an
independent Puerto Rico, where more and more babies are born each
year, where all the schools remain open, where winding mountain roads
take us home. Where we are all a little closer to freedom.

_[JAQUIRA DÍAZ [[link removed]] is
the author of Ordinary Girls
[[link removed]],
which won a Whiting Award and a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal. It was
also a Lambda Literary Awards finalist. Díaz was born in Humacao,
Puerto Rico.]_

_This article appears in the November 2022 print edition with the
headline “Let Puerto Rico Be Free.”_

* Puerto Rico
[[link removed]]
* Puerto Ricans
[[link removed]]
* Puerto Rico's Debt crisis
[[link removed]]
* colonialism
[[link removed]]
* neocolonialism
[[link removed]]
* imperialism
[[link removed]]
* independence
[[link removed]]
* statehood
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* reparations
[[link removed]]
* environmental disaster
[[link removed]]
* economic dislocation
[[link removed]]
* hurricane Maria
[[link removed]]
* Hurricane Fiona
[[link removed]]
* Caribbean
[[link removed]]
* Human Rights
[[link removed]]
* human rights violations
[[link removed]]
* United Nations
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

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