Week 50: My Summer Vacation 2, Violence

Right before we arrived in Puerto Rico for our vacation, a cop had shot and killed an unarmed man who was lying defenseless on the ground. He did it in plain daylight while surrounded by a number of people. One person there had a camera phone and videotaped the event. This person then posted the video on the internet, instead of selling exclusive rights to one of the various TV stations that made him offers. I’ve got some reservations about the idea of showing stuff like this, but ultimately I think it’s good to watch it. I may be wrong, but I’m going to take the chance. So here’s the video.


It’s fucked up.

Part of me is saying, yet another cop, letting his anger and fear get the best of him and abusing the power given to him when he got the right to bear a gun.

Part of me feels heartbroken for the three children of the guy who was shot. As a new father, my sensitivity towards the suffering of children has multiplied exponentially.

Part of me is reviewing all the encounters I’ve had with cops while breaking any number of laws, and how lucky I’ve been to have never had a cop break my head open. Even the one time I’ve been taken to jail, the cops that arrested me seemed to be basically nice guys.

Then I think about all the times the news have been filled with reports of cops acting in ridiculously violent ways towards mostly harmless civilians.

And this always leads me to think about Cerro Maravilla. When you see violence unfold at lightning speed, as in the above youtube video, it feels like an isolated incident, trapped in some weird far away land of cops and robbers, it feels like something that started and ended, and now it’s done. It is a very different experience when a violent act unfolds very slowly over many years, as in the slowest of slow motion cameras. So that each bullet is seen traveling its course for months before you see that its target is on his knees and begging for mercy. That's what the Cerro Maravilla executions were like.

I started to write about Cerro Maravilla and pretty soon I realized that I was going to have to write a complete history of violence in Puerto Rico, starting with the arrival of Columbus in 1493 and ending with the guy in the video above getting shot by a cop. Trying to describe the events at Cerro Maravilla to a non-Puerto Rican audience would take that long. Many Puerto Ricans are still trying to explain it to themselves after three different grand jury investigations over the course of twenty years. But don’t worry I’m not going to write a complete history of violence, as appealing as that sounds, not yet.

For now this is all I will do. A mentally unstable undercover agent infiltrated a group of three college-aged friends who wanted to fight the power that the US holds over the island. The agent convinced them to blow up a communications tower as a symbolic gesture. The agent then got them the explosives, and on July 25, 1978, went with two of them (the third one ended up not wanting to go) to blow up the tower at Cerro Maravilla, a tower that unbeknownst to them wasn't even functioning.

When they got to the tower, they were ambushed by a large group of policemen. The kids surrendered, were handcuffed, made to kneel on the ground and then executed. The governor of the island at the time had told the cops to “teach the independentistas a lesson they would never forget.” And this is what the cops thought he meant.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry for the incident if you want to read a more detailed account.

I was twelve when the events at Cerro Maravilla took place, and all through high school I watched the first of three grand jury investigations that slowly began to reveal what happened. By the time I had finished college the opposition party had initiated a second grand jury investigation that seemingly contradicted the findings of the first investigation. And by the time I had moved to New York in 1997, there had been a third grand jury investigation, and the truth had become clear, even if maybe not to those involved in the grand jury investigations.

When one looks at something this closely, and for that long, the smallest aspect of the event explodes with significance and one starts to see the connection between all things.

On November 25, 1897, after more than 400 years of oppressive and violent colonial rule, the Spanish Government approved the Autonomic Charter, which gave Puerto Rico political and administrative independence from Spain, and jurisdiction over its own territory. On February 8, 1898, the new independent government officially began.

But independence was short lived. In April of that year the Spanish American War broke out. A few months later the Spanish had surrendered, and on December 10, 1898 had signed the Treaty of Paris which gave possession to the United States of the islands of Puerto Rico, Cuba, The Philippines and Guam. Of course, nobody in Paris cared to mention that Spain no longer had the right to offer Puerto Rico up as spoils of war since the island had been given independence a few months earlier. I think maybe they were thinking that something like the 5 second (or 5 month rule) applied in this case. During the war the Americans had landed in Puerto Rico where Spain still hadn't retired all it's military personnel, and once there, I don’t think they really cared whether they were rescuing the island from the Spanish colonial monsters or just invading a free country that was too young to know better.

Spain had left Puerto Rico in a sad state in every sense of the word, and the Americans arrived ready to help the poor Puerto Ricans better themselves. They would clean up the water, improve education and eradicate various diseases. But to do this they also apparently had to dissolve any kind of local government and impose an American military government.

By 1917, the US government granted Puerto Ricans U.S. Citizenship, which was enough to be able to draft them into World War I, but not enough to allow them to vote in US elections or have any representation in congress. And as if that wasn’t enough Congress also voted to affirm that Puerto Rico was not an incorporated territory and would therefore never become a state. Just in case any Puerto Rican mother whose son would die fighting the Germans might get the idea that she was making some sort of sacrifice towards getting some kind of representation in government.

By then some Puerto Ricans were beginning to get a good sense that the intentions of the US Government were not as altruistic as some might have thought. Cuba had been given independence but not without having a clause in its constitution that allowed for the US to intervene at any time they felt the Cubans were “straying” from the path. The Philippines, like Puerto Rico, were also handed over by Spain and accepted by the US, even though they had already won their independence, and therefore had to fight a war against the US to regain what they already had.

In Puerto Rico what followed were a series of violent confrontations between the local law enforcement officers and various more or less nationalist groups.

Among the most violent were the Ponce Massacre on July 25, 1936. And the Jayuya Uprising on October 30, 1950.

Then on July 25, 1952, the US government granted Puerto Ricans self-government. What this meant was that we could elect our own government officials and write our own constitution as long as it was approved by congress. As it turned out the constitution was sent back and forth so many times to congress (Puerto Ricans wanted to add health care and housing as a right), that eventually the US Government just settled for adding some small print at the end that gives congress the right to invalidate the constitution any time they feel Puerto Ricans are not going about democracy the right way.

This constitution along with the distraction of having elections every four years and acting like the US Government might listen to something we say, when in fact we don’t have any voting representation in Washington, has not kept the peace. During most of the 1960s and up through most of the 1980s Puerto Rican nationalists took most of the spots on the FBI’s top ten most wanted lists, and were a major focus of the FBI’s Cointelpro program.

Of course, there are many reasons for violence, not all of it is political, but it all has the same source. But even as much as I sometimes feel like cutting the balls off some cop, maybe the one in the above video, in the end Gandhi was right, and its best to just stick to making music.

The Calle 13 kids did just that, and as with the death of Filiberto Ojeda Rios have recorded a song, a Tribute to the Police, and released it free on the internet. You can download it here.