Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States government. In 1898 Washington rose to become an imperialist power with the bloody seizure of Puerto Rico along with Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam. At home the U.S. government was carrying out a brutal campaign against freed men and women who were Black, imposing Jim Crow segregation, first by the whip and the noose of government-backed white supremacist groups and then codified through racist legislation.
Today, the same capitalists who are draining the natural resources and wealth out of Puerto Rico are also deepening their attacks on the wages, working conditions, and social gains of workers in the United States. Every Puerto Rican independence fighter released is another gravedigger freed to bury the brutal profit-driven system of capitalism, and every victory won by workers and farmers in the United States weakens the empire's hold on Puerto Rico.
Washington has jailed and harassed many Puerto Rican independentistas with frame-up cases concocted by police spying, lies, and FBI harassment of unionists and others. Most of the 17 Puerto Rican political prisoners in U.S. jails today received prison terms 19 times longer than the average sentence given out the same year. Only 13 percent of all federal prisoners are serving sentences of more than 20 years. Yet 10 of the 14 Puerto Rican fighters arrested between 1980 and 1983 got sentences of between 50 and 90 years.
These same methods of intimidation and prevarication are used against others who stand up to the employers and their government, from Mumia Abu-Jamal, an outspoken opponent of the death penalty on death row in Pennsylvania, to Steve Smyers, a locked-out Kaiser Aluminum worker who was beaten by cops on the picket line June 5.
This is why trade unionists and working farmers should make the July 24 action theirs, and why fighters for independence should join the picket lines of Newport News strikers, visit Century Aluminum workers preparing for a fight, and reach out to farmers who are battling the worst economic crisis in decades to win support.
Washington has wreaked massive destruction on the working people of Yugoslavia, and is now preparing to occupy Kosova to deal a further blow to the Yugoslav federation and to the right to self-determination of the Kosovar Albanians. U.S. imperialist forces have bombed Iraq incessantly for nearly six months. And Puerto Rico is used as their training ground to prepare these assaults. Residents of Vieques are the victims of their target practice.
A deep hatred for U.S. imperialism is growing in Puerto Rico. Last July half a million workers and youth poured into the streets of that Caribbean island to protest the sell-off of their national telephone company and declared, "Puerto Rico is not for sale." This mood is also reflected in the bubbling anger at the continued U.S. Navy occupation of Vieques, especially following the death of a Puerto Rican resident who was bombed by the Navy, and high rate of cancer deaths due in part to carcinogenic uranium bullets supposedly shot off mistakenly. Some of these protesters have come to oppose Washington's war in Yugoslavia by seeing imperialism's utter disregard for Puerto Rican lives.
Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans are an integral component of the working class in the United States. As a nationally oppressed group, they feel the brunt of the capitalist crisis more acutely and, like workers who are Black, will make up a large part of the vanguard in workers' battles against the bosses. Puerto Ricans are also of the greatest allies to the working class because, through their fight to shove off imperialist domination, they bring the politics of that social struggle to their co-workers, to the unions, forcing our class to think and act on broader social issues - one of the initial steps to building a class- struggle nucleus of workers and farmers crucial in leading toilers to power.
The struggle for Puerto Rico's independence from colonial domination and to free the jailed patriots is a blow to the U.S. capitalist class. This struggle directly strengthens those fighting the same bosses, that same government, that same enemy - capitalism - within the United States.
That's why workers, farmers, and youth of all nationalities should turn out in big numbers in Washington July 24 with union signs, banners, and buttons representing many battles against exploitation and oppression to demand: Independence for Puerto Rico! Free all Puerto Rican political prisoners!