martes, septiembre 30, 2014

The CIA was very concerned about contra-drug investigation in the 1990's

http://ww4report.com/node/13581

Nicaragua: contra-drug series was CIA 'nightmare'

The CIA journal article, by Directorate of Intelligence staffer Nicholas Dujmovic, described the initial public reaction to the series as a "nightmare" and "a genuine public relations crisis." Although the contras' links to cocaine trafficking had been reported previously, Webb's series had more effect, in part because it connected the contras to the explosion of crack use in African-American communities. It was also one of the first major stories to gain traction through circulation over the internet. Dujmovic attributed the popularity of "Dark Alliance" to "societal shortcomings." "We live in somewhat coarse and emotional times—when large numbers of Americans do not adhere to the same standards of logic, evidence, or even civil discourse as those practiced by members of the CIA community," he complained.
The CIA's response largely relied on "a ground base of already productive relations with journalists," Dujmovic wrote. The agency managed to discourage "one major news affiliate" from covering the story, and in another case it helped out a reporter by making "a rare exception to the general policy that CIA does not comment on any individual's alleged CIA ties." But to a large extent the mainstream media did the job on Webb without prompting from the CIA. The Los Angeles Times, for example, assembled a group of 17 reporters in what one member called the "get Gary Webb team." The group "put [Webb's series] under a microscope," another of the reporters, Jesse Katz, said in a 2013 radio interview. "And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California." The result of the media attack was a "success," according to Dujmovic, although only "in relative terms." (The Intercept, Sept. 25)
The story has never completely disappeared from public consciousness, however. A 1997 report by the CIA's then-inspector general, Frederick Hitz, confirmed the contras' link to drug trafficking, and a new story about contra drug dealing appeared in October 2013 in both the righ-twing US-based Fox television network and the left-leaning Mexican weekly Proceso. A feature film about Gary Webb, Kill the Messengeris scheduled for release on Oct. 10.

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Toward the agro-police state, by Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero

http://foodfirst.org/toward-the-agro-police-state/

monsanto_by_jackcomstock

Toward the Agro-Police State

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero | 09.20.2014
Welcome to the brave new world of precision farming, in which every farmer will need a wifi connection and an iPad. 

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lunes, septiembre 29, 2014

Columna publicada en Claridad sobre postura de Gallisá ante "novedosas" propuestas de Aníbal Acevedo Vilá

Por José Escoda


Ningún sistema de dominio puede funcionar con opresión directa nada más, necesita endulzadores, ideologías, imaginarios, etc. Y lo que el imperio yanqui ha logrado aquí en ese aspecto es asqueroso por su eficiencia. Por esa eficacia vemos cómo una de las características del debate político boricua es el modo en que se ha creado una adecuación de significados entre lo que es Puerto Rico y lo que es el ELA, de modo tal que la mayor parte de la discusión política, incluyendo a muchos(as) independentistas, se hace desde y dentro de las coordenadas de la colonia, identificando ELA como el País; y algunos(as) entonces marcan al independentismo, como lo no real y hasta lo sectario. Así, terminan manifestándose desde una perspectiva que privilegia denunciar solamente los exabruptos de ciertas figuras y de ciertas medidas desde y dentro del ELA, impulsando un tipo de acuerdo tácito de que Puerto Rico sería feliz si no existiesen los abusadores y las arpías; que si Populares benignos sin Penepés gobernasen no habría crisis; que la solución pal País está en apretar esta tuerca aquí, aquel tornillo allá; que aquí las cosas andarían bien si este gobernador X tuviese babilla, si aquel senador Q no fuese guaynabito, etc.
Recientemente, incluso el compañero Carlos Gallisá nos dice que es “injusto” analizar a Aníbal Acevedo Vilá desde una óptica independentista… (“Ya veremos”, Claridad del 28 de agosto al 3 de septiembre, 2014), luego procede a señalar 8 puntos del libro de Aníbal que a su juicio son nuevos e importantes… mientras califica de “ceguera política” no estar de acuerdo con su conclusión. ¿Aguanta el análisis del texto de AAV esta contención? Veamos.

Para leer el resto:
http://frentesocialistapr.blogspot.com/2014/09/columna-publicada-en-claridad.html

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domingo, septiembre 28, 2014

Hacia el estado agropolicial - ahora vas a necesitar un iPad para ser agricultor

Carmelo Ruiz Marrero
Publicado en el periódico Compartir es Vivir. Puerto Rico, septiembre 2014.



El año pasado el gigante de biotecnología Monsanto compró la empresa Climate Corporation por $930 millones. Esta compañía, fundada en 2006 por ingenieros y científicos de Google y otras empresas de alta tecnología, posee una plataforma tecnológica que combina un minucioso monitoreo de condiciones meteorológicas locales, modelaje de datos agronómicos y simulaciones del tiempo en alta resolución. Maneja 50 terabytes de datos en cualquier momento dado para poder procesar datos meteorológicos de 2.5 millones de localidades y 150 mil millones de análisis de suelos, los cuales generan 10 trillones (10 a la 13 potencia) de puntos de datos para simular el tiempo. Con esta vasta información, Climate le vende a agricultores lo que llama Total Weather Insurance, un paquete analítico, de monitoreo y manejo de riesgo para asegurar cosechas.

******

Bienvenidos al mundo de la agricultura de precisión, donde el agricultor necesita internet inalámbrico wifi y un iPad para sembrar. La agricultura de precisión es el nombre colectivo de una gama de tecnologías de informática y monitoreo de siembras. Los alegados beneficios de este nuevo paquete tecnológico incluyen mayores rendimientos de las cosechas, mejor información para tomar decisiones en el manejo de la finca, reducción del uso de agroquímicos y fertilizantes, y aumento en los márgenes de ganancia.  Esta nueva modalidad de agricultura se sirve de varias tecnologías de punta, como sistemas de información geográfica, percepción remota, telecomunicaciones, computadoras portátiles, procesamiento de información, y sistema de posicionamiento global (GPS, por sus siglas en inglés).


Hay críticos, sin embargo, que temen que estas nuevas tecnologías serán un riesgo para la sustentabilidad agrícola y las comunidades rurales, ya que podrían someter a los agricultores a nuevas formas de dependencia y establecer de facto un estado agropolicial, gobernado por corporaciones trasnacionales.

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La “Sorpresa de Octubre” fue real

http://frentesocialistapr.blogspot.com/2014/09/la-sorpresa-de-octubre-fue-real_27.html




La “Sorpresa de Octubre” fue real


Carmelo Ruiz Marrero
Haciendo Punto en Otro Blog, 10 de julio 2014


El primer artículo escrito por este servidor que salió en la prensa de Puerto Rico fue publicado en enero de 1992 en el semanario Claridad. En el escrito afirmé que en 1980 la campaña electoral republicana estadounidense, la campaña Reagan-Bush, pactó secretamente con radicales iraníes para que pospusieran la liberación de 52 estadounidenses que ellos mantenían como rehenes. Estos rehenes eran empleados de la embajada de Estados Unidos, la cual elementos leales al Ayatollah Khomeini habían tomado por asalto en noviembre de 1979. Este acuerdo secreto, conocido como la “Sorpresa de Octubre”, frustró los intentos del entonces presidente de Estados Unidos, Jimmy Carter, de lograr la liberación de los rehenes a tiempo para las elecciones en noviembre. Esto le costó a Carter su reelección, y el republicano Ronald Reagan ganó la presidencia. Las encuestas realizadas antes de las elecciones demostraban que el tema de los rehenes en Irán fue determinante para el electorado.

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sábado, septiembre 27, 2014

Rush hour

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Contenido nuevo en el blog de Ionosfera, 28 sept 2014




http://ionosferamusic.blogspot.com/

Un blog bilingüe de Carmelo Ruiz Marrero dedicado a todo lo que sea divertido, como música, cine, comedia y ciencia ficción - A bilingual blog by Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero dedicated to all things fun, like music, film, comedy and science fiction.




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viernes, septiembre 26, 2014

Recent additions in Biosafety Blog / Contenido reciente en Blog de Bioseguridad

jueves, septiembre 25, 2014

Scientists praise and challenge FAO on agroecology

Title : TWN Agriculture Info: Scientists Praise and Challenge FAO on Agroecology
Date : 22 September 2014

Contents: 

Scientists praise and challenge FAO on agroecology
Nearly 70 scientists and scholars of sustainable agriculture and food systems sent an open letter to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) today, praising the organization for convening an International Symposium on Agroecology for Food and Nutrition Security [18-19 September 2014]. Given the multiple, overlapping challenges posed by continued food insecurity, rural poverty, climate change, drought and water scarcity, the letter calls for a solid commitment to agroecology from the international community.
This symposium comes at an opportune time as climate change, continued food insecurity and rural poverty present myriad challenges to sustainability. Agroecology, especially when paired with the developing principles of food sovereignty and food justice, offers opportunities to address all of these problems to an extent not matched by other approaches or proposals. This is why agroecology has been endorsed by the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier De Schutter; the 10,000-member Ecological Society of America; through the formation and statements of the Latin American Society for Agroecology;in the scientific report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD); by La Vía Campesina, the world’s largest organization of peasant farmers; by a growing number of research institutions around the world and most recently, further endorsed by over 250 scientists and experts.
As the organizers and attendees of the symposium likely already know, these groups view agroecology as a well-grounded science, a set of time-tested agronomic practices and, when embedded in sound socio-political institutions, the most promising pathway for achieving sustainable food production. Agroecology integrates multiple fields into a unique “trans-discipline,” drawing on ecology, agronomy, political economy and sociology, among other fields. It can be considered a science, a set of practices, and a social movement for distributive and procedural justice. In fact, without these elements of justice - which are often lacking in other approaches (for example, “climate-smart agriculture” or “sustainable intensification”) - no approach can be scientifically assessed as "sustainable" according to most established definitions of sustainability. The procedural justice element has been associated with the growing conceptualization of and movement for “food sovereignty” - the right for people to design and decide on the shape of their own food system within their own localities, to the maximum extent practicable, with the maximum possible participation.
According to the letter, agroecology’s broad base in science and society means it is uniquely suited to address today’s challenges in food and agricultural systems. It can be considered a science, a set of practices, and a social movement for food sovereignty and justice. As a science, agroecology integrates multiple disciplines into a "trans-discipline," drawing on fields such as ecology, agronomy, political economy and sociology. As a set of practices, it can provide multiple benefits to society and the environment, from reducing pollution from agriculture and supporting the conservation of the environment to boosting nutrition security and improving resilience in a changing climate. As a movement, it can address the vitally important issues of distributive andprocedural justice in food and agriculture—that is, who gets access to what resources and how to decide. The letter points out that, according to well-established science, social movements and addressing distributive and procedural justice are just as crucial as scientific and technical innovation in sustainably implementing the right to food.
International institutions are currently using a variety of different terms, with different meanings, to identify a way forward for agriculture and food systems to address critical crises including climate change and food security. The FAO and other international institutions like the World Bank have supported other approaches which they call “climate-smart” agriculture and “sustainable” intensification. The letter criticizes these as vague terms that are subject to abuse through misleading or incomplete definitions. In contrast, agroecology is a holistic approach with a long history and an extensive body of knowledge grounded in science and in the experiences and leadership of farmers themselves.
The scholars call on FAO member states and the international community to build upon the proceedings of this symposium in order to launch a U.N. system-wide initiative on agroecology as the central strategy for addressing climate change and building resilience in the face of water crises. Such an initiative could form one of the pillars the future work of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) and make an invaluable contribution to negotiations about agriculture within the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change process and the post-2015 Sustainable Development agenda. The letter closes with a hope that the FAO will consider this proposal at the forthcoming Committee on World Food Security meeting on October 13–18, 2014.

Read the full letter for more.

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miércoles, septiembre 24, 2014

Martínez Alier reseña el nuevo libro de Naomi Klein

Corporate-Smart Greenwash

Title : TWN Agriculture Info: Corporate-Smart Greenwash: Why We Reject the Global Alliance on Climate-Smart Agriculture
Date : 23 September 2014

Contents: 
Corporate-Smart Greenwash:
why we reject the Global Alliance on Climate-Smart Agriculture
We, the undersigned civil society organisations, hereby manifest our rejection of the proposed Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture to be launched at the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Change Leaders' Summit. This proposed alliance is a deceptive and deeply contradictory initiative.
Food producers and providers – farmers, fisherfolk, and pastoralists – together with our food systems are on the front lines of climate change. We know that urgent action must be taken to cool the planet, to help farming systems – and particularly small-scale farmers – adapt to a changing climate, and to revive and reclaim the agroecological systems on which future sustainable food production depends.
The Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture, however, will not deliver the solutions that we so urgently need. Instead, “climate-smart” agriculture provides a dangerous platform for corporations to implement the very activities we oppose. By endorsing the activities of the planet’s worst climate offenders in agribusiness and industrial agriculture, the Alliance will undermine the very objectives that it claims to aim for.
Although some organizations have constructively engaged in good faith for several months with the Alliance to express serious concerns,[1] the concerns have been ignored. Instead, the Alliance is clearly being structured to serve big business interests, not to address the climate crisis.
We reject “climate-smart” agriculture and the Global Alliance for a number of reasons already articulated in previous efforts to interface with the promoters,[2] including:
1. No environmental or social criteria
The final framework of the Alliance does not contain any criteria or definitions for what can – or cannot – be considered  “climate-smart agriculture.” Industrial approaches that increase greenhouse gas emissions and farmers’ vulnerability by driving deforestation, using genetically modified (GM) seeds, increasing synthetic fertiliser use or intensifying industrial livestock production, are all apparently welcome to use the “climate-smart” label to promote their practices as solutions to climate change.
2. Carbon trading
The originators of “climate-smart” agriculture – the FAO and the World Bank – have a vision that “climate-smart” projects will be funded in part by carbon offset schemes. Many of our groups question the environmental and social integrity of carbon offsetting. Carbon sequestration in soils is not permanent and is easily reversible, and should be especially excluded from schemes to offset emissions. Carbon offset schemes in agriculture will create one more driver of land dispossession of smallholder farmers, particularly in the Global South, and unfairly place the burden of mitigation on those who are most vulnerable to, but have least contributed to, the climate crisis.
3. A new space for promoting agribusiness and industrial agriculture
Companies with activities resulting in dire social impacts on farmers and communities, such as those driving land grabbing or promoting GM seeds, already claim that they are “climate-smart.”  Yara (the world’s largest fertilizer manufacturer), Syngenta (GM seeds), McDonald’s, and Walmart are all at the “climate-smart” table. Climate-smart agriculture will serve as a new promotional space for the planet’s worst social and environmental offenders in agriculture. The proposed Global Alliance on Climate-Smart Agriculture seems to be yet another strategy by powerful players to prop up industrial agriculture, which undermines the basic human right to food. It is nothing new, nothing innovative, and not what we need.
We do urgently need climate action! Unfortunately, the Alliance seriously misses the mark. Real climate solutions are already out there in farmers’ fields – based on agroecological practices and the relocalisation of food systems to effectively fight hunger. Instead of creating one more body for business-as-usual, governments, funding agencies, and international organizations should be taking bold action: committing to shift resources away from climate-damaging practices of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture and meat production and towards investment in and commitment to agroecology, food sovereignty, and support to small-scale food producers.
The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development concluded in 2008 that business-as-usual in agriculture is not an option; instead, a thorough and radical overhaul of present international and agricultural policies is essential to meet the challenges of the future.
We reject the Global Alliance as one more step by a small percentage of the UN's total membership to promote industrial agriculture against all the evidence of its destructive impacts on people, biodiversity, seed, water, soils, and climate. It is merely one more attempt to block the real change needed to fix our broken food systems and our broken climate, change which instead must be based on food sovereignty and agroecological approaches for agriculture and food production andthe effective reduction of greenhouse gases.

International Organisations & Farmers’ Movements
ActionAid International
Centro de Estudios Internacionales y de Agricultura Internacional (CERAI)
CIDSE
Coalition pour la Protection du Patrimoine Genetique African (COPAGEN)
Corporate Europe Observatory
Earth in Brackets
Foro Rural Mundial (FRM)
Friends of the Earth International
IBON International
Inades-Formation
International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM)
International-Lawyers.Org (INTLawyers)
GRET
LDC Watch
Mesa de Coordinación Latinoamericana de Comercio Justo
Send a Cow
South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE)
South Asia Peasants Coalition
Third World Network

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Cultura Común

http://www.culturacomun.com/













Cultura Común es una publicación para dar a conocer información que no es privativamente de nadie. Es un proyecto que se construirá en comunidad, abierto a todos los que deseen participar enviando su colaboración en temas que estarán identificados como: Comunidad, Centros Urbanos (Ciudad), Creencias (Filosofía, Espiritualidad, Religión), Convocatorias (Congresos, Premios, Certámenes), Carnet (Biografías), Comentarios (Ensayos, Críticas, Reseñas), Comida (Nutrición, Agricultura, Restaurantes), Cartelera Cultural (Eventos), Citas (Frases y pensamientos).


Cultura Común es un centro de difusión, divulgación y debate sobre los asuntos que son comunes. Porque la diferencia, la diversidad, la divergencia y la disidencia nos es común. Desde este espacio se ofrecerá una nueva perspectiva sobre la manifestación cultural puertorriqueña, sus actores, sus protagonistas, y su público.


Seremos el punto de referencia del tema cultural en Puerto Rico y de nuestra relación con el mundo.

Cultura Común parece un lugar común que pretende unir una voz común para evitar una fosa común: que es la incomunicación y la desinformación.

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martes, septiembre 23, 2014

Clouds on the organic horizon

In light of the recent uproar over General Mills buying out Annie's Organic, I think it's a good moment to redistribute this article I wrote on the corporate takeover of organic back in 2004. Michael Pollan and I were talking about this trend ten years ago.




Is organic farming becoming the victim of its own success?
by Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero, Special to CorpWatch
November 25th, 2004



Until a decade ago, organic foods were available only through tiny farmers markets, health and natural food stores, but today their growing popularity means that more organic food is now sold by chain stores like Whole Foods. Often, the food itself is produced by companies ranging from General Mills to Nestle to Coca Cola , and grown on corporate-owned farms no longer synonymous with small farms, rural communities, social justice and humane treatment of animals.

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Carmelo explains Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico explained, briefly


Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
August 23 2014


American progressives and friends from many countries have often asked me about my country, Puerto Rico, and what is going on here. I ask myself, how do I even start? So here is a brief and partial explanation of Puerto Rico, past and present:


Puerto Rican politics can be viewed as the unfinished business of the 1898 Spanish American War. That year, four centuries of Spanish colonialism came to an end in Cuba and Puerto Rico as military forces sent by US president William McKinley routed Spain’s troops in both islands in a rather easy victory, or as a US diplomat called it, “a splendid little war”. Cuba went on to become an independent country a few years later, but US troops remained in Puerto Rico, and over one century later the island nation still remains under US rule. Although subject to US laws, Puerto Rico has no representation in the US Congress and no presidential vote.


Since World War Two, the island has been used as a military bastion to project US power all over the Caribbean. According to journalist and historian Jesús Dávila:


“Starting in the 1940’s, Puerto Rico became a hive of military bases- which came to include Ramey Field air base, with atomic bombers of the Strategic Air Command, and the Roosevelt Roads naval base- as well as facilities for espionage and regional surveillance of radio and telephone communications. In 1954 the Puerto Rico Air National Guard provided the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with P-47 fighter planes to bombard Guatemala… In 1961 it served as escape route for the CIA agents that fled the Dominican Republic after the execution of dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo and, also for the CIA, as practice center for the amphibian landing at Bay of Pigs, Cuba.


In the 1960’s, Ramey would be a base for U-2 spy planes, as well as for the transport of thousands of soldiers for the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic. In that war, from Roosevelt Roads, a Blue Eagle 1 was used for the first time for the radio transmission of propaganda- the Jenny program- which would be heavily used in Vietnam.”


During the cold war Puerto Rico was also used as a showcase of democracy and prosperity, paraded around to the rest of Latin America as proof of the benefits of US tutelage. The country’s apparent economic miracle was based on corporate tax breaks for foreign investors and social subsidies for the poor, and was presented as “the best of both worlds” as it allegedly combined local autonomy with the full benefits of US citizenship. This colonial model of dependent capitalism, dubbed “Operation Bootstrap”, was largely the brainchild of technocrat Teodoro Moscoso, a man who would later make his mark advising the US government on Latin America policy.


These twin military and economic roles became much more important with the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959. Cuba is a permanent trauma for US policymakers. It is fair to say that for the last 50+ years all of US policy towards Latin America has centered around isolating Cuba and preventing another Cuba from happening in the hemisphere. To this end, US president John F. Kennedy founded in 1961 the Alliance for Progress, an initiative to enhance US prestige in Latin America and to counter the appeal of the Cuban revolution. To highlight Puerto Rico’s importance in this grand design, Kennedy appointed Teodoro Moscoso to head the Alliance.


Operation Bootstrap eventually started to fall apart at the seams and sinking under the weight of its contradictions. Agriculture had been abandoned in favor of manufacturing, a sector that was never able to make up for the lost jobs in the farming sector. Whereas for some Puerto Ricans the “economic miracle” meant the realization of the suburban dream (a house in the suburbs, a car and upward mobility), for others it meant complete destitution. Enormous shantytowns populated by former campesinos began to appear in the capital city of San Juan’s metro area, overwhelming the welfare state’s ability to keep up. The government explicitly encouraged poor Puerto Ricans to leave for the United States, and they started to fly out by the hundreds of thousands once the Isla Verde international airport was built in the 1950’s. It was the first airborne mass migration in history. Cities like New York, Hartford and Chicago received a massive and sudden influx of poor Puerto Rican migrants, causing considerable social tension in already racially polarized urban communities. Today there are as many Puerto Ricans living in exile as in the island.


Massive food imports from the US flooded the island, driving many local agricultural producers to bankruptcy. Small locally owned grocery stores were almost entirely replaced by giant US retail chains, trains and streetcars were torn up to make way for cars, the countryside was blanketed with sprawling suburbia and shopping malls. Nowadays 85% of all food consumed in Puerto Rico is imported. The remaining farmers struggle to survive in the face of cutthroat competition from US agribusiness and a disloyal and neglectful local government that seems to be obeying an unwritten mandate to destroy Puerto Rican agriculture.


But there always was resistance. In the first half of the 20th century, the Puerto Rico Nationalist Party led the opposition to the US occupation and the call for independence. The government, then headed by American governors appointed by the president of the United States, responded with repression, culminating in the Rio Piedras and Ponce massacres, in 1935 and 1937 respectively. In the latter incident, described by the American Civil Liberties Union as “cold-blooded murder”, a peaceful Nationalist march was fired upon by the police, resulting in 19 deaths and some 100 injuries. The Nationalists upped the ante and turned to armed struggle, assassinating US counterinsurgency specialist Francis Riggs, and attempting to shoot governor Blanton Winship, who had ordered the Ponce massacre.


Attempts to exterminate the independence movement, including the legal and electoral Independence Party (PIP), continued even as Puerto Rico moved towards formal constitutional democracy in the 1940’s and 50’s. The new democracy and constitutionally protected citizen rights were barely more than a formality, since repressive legislation, modeled on the anti-Communist Smith Act of the United States, made it for all practical purposes illegal to engage in any pro-independence advocacy. Even as we Puerto Ricans elected our governor for the first time and voted to approve a constitution, Nationalist leaders were incarcerated merely for their public speaking, as proven by the publicly available transcripts of their court trials.


Cornered, vastly outgunned and confronted with their imminent extermination and erasure from history, the Nationalists preferred to go down in a hail of bullets rather than be collaborators or passive spectators of this democratic farce. In October 1950 there was a nationwide independentista uprising which resulted in gunfights all over the island. The revolt was put down with the help of the Puerto Rico Air National Guard, whose planes bombed and strafed the town of Jayuya, where the Nationalist resistance was particularly strong and a republic had been declared. It was followed by a major crackdown in which hundreds of independentistas were incarcerated, some would remain in prison for two decades. Simultaneously with the uprising, a team of two Nationalists attempted to shoot US president Harry Truman in Washington. After suppressing the uprising, the colonial authorities were pretty confident that they had neutralized the Nationalist threat, but in March 1954 four Nationalists attacked the US Congress, wounding several congressmen. The response from the FBI and local colonial authorities was harsh and vindictive. Even today, the FBI holds a special grudge against independentistas and against Puerto Ricans in general, as evidenced by declassified documents.


And still the resistance continued, even in the middle of Operation Bootstrap’s much celebrated “economic miracle”. In the 1960’s and 70’s, a youthful new independence movement, aligned with the international left and inspired by the Cuban revolution and third world anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movements, made its rowdy appearance in the political scene. The “nueva lucha independentista” explored new and innovative forms of protest- like pickets and sit-ins-, engaged in sporadic armed struggle (by clandestine groups such as MIRA, CAL, FALN and the Macheteros), set a new standard in independent investigative journalism through alternative media- particularly the Claridad weekly newspaper and the Pensamiento Crítico political journal-, joined forces with organized labor and with the fledgling modern environmental movement, which was then engaged in a seemingly hopeless struggle to prevent strip mining in the island’s mountainous interior, and also made common cause with human rights, feminist and peace movements.


And again there was a repressive response from the authorities, a response which included police brutality, mob violence, death squad terror, arson, bombings of homes and businesses of outspoken independentistas, and even assassination. Some political murders from the 1970’s still remain unsolved. FBI documents declassified in that decade showed that the Puerto Rican independentista movement was under massive and thorough government surveillance, mostly through widespread use of paid informers. The documents also evidenced that the US government had spent considerable effort trying to covertly disrupt and divide the movement through the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO program. In 1971 the US Congress ordered COINTELPRO shut down due to its flagrant infringement of First Amendment rights. In 2005 Machetero leader Filiberto Ojeda, who had evaded capture for 15 years, was shot dead by the FBI in his home. The autopsy determined that he had died from lack of medical attention. The image of flak-vested FBI agents gloating over Ojeda as he gasped his last breath burns in the heart and consciousness of every patriotic Puerto Rican.


At least since the second half of the 20th century, Puerto Rico has been used by the US for a variety of shady medical, biological, chemical, atomic and military experiments:
* The earliest trials of contraceptive pills were carried out in the 1950’s on Puerto Rican women without their fully informed consent. (1)
* The US Department of Defense tested toxic defoliants for use in the Vietnam War, including agent orange, on several locations in the island. (2)
* The Atomic Energy Commission tested the effects of gamma radiation in Puerto Rico’s El Yunque tropical rainforest in a series of experiments supervised by famed ecologist Howard T. Odum. (3)
* During World War Two, most of the inhabitants of the island town of Vieques were forcibly evicted from their homes by the US Navy in order to set up a firing range for training maneuvers, which included amphibian landing practice and bombardment from sea and air. These war games went on for some sixty years, though not without protest and resistance (4), as we’ll see.
* In the 1980’s, Puerto Rico’s farmlands hosted some of the earliest field experimentation with genetically modified (GM) crops. Nowadays the island has more GM crop field tests per square mile than any US state, with the possible exception of Hawaii (5). These genetic experiments have included GM cassava developed with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (6)


And still, the resistance continues. In this highly urbanized and densely populated Caribbean nation with practically no food security, where agriculture, environmental protection, peace and demilitarization seem like lost causes, there are social movements for change- and sometimes they even score some victories. In 2003 the Navy ended its target practice in Vieques after a massive and unprecedented four year-long civil disobedience campaign that involved church groups, the independence, environmental and peace movements, and top figures from all political parties.


The government’s drive to commence strip mining in the Central Mountain Range (Cordillera Central) was ultimately stopped dead in its tracks by a decades-long grassroots environmental education campaign in which the independence movement played a decisive role. The leading organization in the campaign, Casa Pueblo, went on to make major contributions to the Vieques anti-Navy campaign, supplying the protesters who were camping inside the firing range with solar panels, and carrying out the first peer reviewed in situ scientific studies of military toxic pollution in the island. For its efforts in promoting peace, sustainable development and participatory scientific research, the organization won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2002.


Another example of stubborn resistance is the Organización Boricuá de Agricultura Eco-Orgánica, a group of organic farmers and concerned citizens that since its founding in 1989 has been promoting food sovereignty and ecological agriculture through alternative marketing channels for locally grown organic produce, educational activities, work brigades, mutual help, international delegations, and seed exchanges. Boricuá belongs to the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo (CLOC), an international coalition that brings together dozens of organizations of peasants, farm workers, and black and indigenous communities of 18 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. And the CLOC is in turn part of La Via Campesina, a global federation of small farmers’ organizations which spearheads the worldwide movement for food sovereignty.


Boricuá is also a key part of the growing national movement against GM crops. The national campaign against GM is led by the Nada Santo Sobre Monsanto coalition, which in 2013 carried out a number of educational activities, gave press interviews, and organized protests, including two major rallies. NSSM, together with Boricuá and other organizations such as the National Environmental Law Association (ANDA), the Agricultural Rescue Front (FRA) and the PIP party, have succeeded in getting the local press and civil society to take a serious critical look at the global biotechnology revolution and Puerto Rico’s place in it.


But let’s not kid ourselves. Nowadays Puerto Rico faces a very uncertain future, as successive governments have been shredding the already badly tattered social safety net of the Operation Bootstrap days, by introducing new taxes, privatizing state functions, laying off tens of thousands of public sector workers and tampering with pension funds (7). Prospects for a general strike or uprising are remote at best, given that much of the labor leadership has responded to the situation by circling the wagons to protect their respective unions’ ever shrinking turf. To make matters worse, the corporate-controlled media have brainwashed much of the citizenry into apathy and hostility toward labor unions, workers, the public sector, social spending, and poor people in general.


I hope this account of Puerto Rico’s last 116 years of history has been helpful. Yes, it is incomplete and partial. It is biased, of course it is. So sue me.

Ruiz-Marrero is a Puerto Rican author, investigative journalist and environmental educator. His Twitter ID is @carmeloruiz. In the interest of full disclosure: he is active in many of the social and environmental movements and struggles that he writes about in this article.

3) Howard T. Odum with Robert F. Pigeon (eds), A Tropical Rain Forest; a Study of Irradiation and Ecology at El Verde. Puerto Rico, United States Atomic Energy Commission, National Technical information service.
4) Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero. “Puerto Ricans Battle US Navy in Vieques” Synthesis/Regeneration, Summer 2001. http://www.greens.org/s-r/25/25-09.html
5) Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero. “More GMO’s in Puerto Rico: Why we should worry” Upside Down World, September 20 2011. http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3226-more-gm-crops-in-puerto-rico-why-we-should-worry
6) Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero “Puerto Rico and Bill Gates’ Yucca” May 14 2010. http://bioseguridad.blogspot.com/2010/05/please-feel-free-to-post-and-distribute_03.html

      7) Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero “Is Puerto Rico Going the Way of Greece and Detroit?” Inter Press Service, April 15 2014. http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/04/puerto-rico-going-way-greece-detroit/

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