There Is No Peace: 60 Years Since End of World War II

Rejecting calls to subordinate their national liberation struggle to “unity” with “democratic” Washington and its allies against a rival group of imperialist predators, the independentistas stood up to frame-ups and persecution by the U.S. government. The Nationalist Party, led by Pedro Albizu Campos, spearheaded a campaign to defy the U.S.-imposed wartime draft. Scores of Puerto Ricans were jailed for refusing to be cannon fodder in the army of their colonial oppressors.

In the mid-1930s, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration launched a wave of repression against the independence movement in Puerto Rico. Coinciding with the rise of labor battles in the United States, radical and pro-independence moods were spreading among the Puerto Rican people in response to Depression-era conditions magnified by colonial superexploitation. A high point was the 1934 sugarcane strike. Betrayed by the collaborationist union officialdom led by the pro-imperialist Socialist Party, the workers turned for leadership to Albizu Campos, who addressed rallies of thousands of sugar workers.

In 1936, Albizu Campos and other top Nationalist Party leaders were arrested and convicted on trumped-up charges of “conspiracy to overthrow the United States government,” “conspiracy to incite rebellion against the United States,” and “conspiracy to recruit soldiers to fight against the United States.” They were locked up in the Atlanta federal prison.

The following year, police fired on a Nationalist Party rally in the city of Ponce on orders from Gen. Blanton Winship, the colonial governor appointed by Roosevelt. At least 20 people were killed and 200 wounded in what became known as the Ponce Massacre.

As Washington prepared to enter World War II, claiming to defend “democracy” against fascism, the FBI stepped up its spying and harassment against Puerto Rican independence fighters, both on the island and in New York.  
 
‘What democracy?’
Even as its central leaders were in jail, the Nationalists launched a vigorous campaign against the war and for “disobedience against the imperialist draft law.” After that bill came into effect in 1940, the party issued a statement declaring, “We are ardent defenders of democracy and are willing to give our lives for it at any time that it may be necessary. But one must ask: What democracy are we going to defend in Puerto Rico? Is it the democracy that keeps dozens of our most noble men in jail, including Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos?… Is it the democracy that, without due process, murders citizens in the police stations? Or is it the democracy that swept the streets of Ponce with its machine guns, wounding more than 200 people and murdering 20 men, women, and children?”

If Puerto Rico is not granted independence, the statement continued, “we are not willing to serve in any way to defend something that is nonexistent in our country…. Hence, Puerto Ricans must ignore any imperialist requirement of the draft imposed in our country.”

Ramón Medina, one of the interim presidents of the Nationalist Party while Albizu was in prison, gave a speech on March 2, 1941, stating that the war “is based simply on an imperialist conflict over the domination of the world.” According to historian Ché Paralitici in his book No quiero mi cuerpo pa’ tambor: El servicio militar obligatorio en Puerto Rico (‘I don’t want my body as a drum’: the draft in Puerto Rico), Medina called it “a world war among thieves” and said that “it was not a matter of allying with one imperialist power to fight another one…but of fighting against all the imperialists.”

In their intransigent opposition to the imperialist war, the Nationalists spoke for a vocal minority of Puerto Ricans. The Popular Democratic Party (PPD), led by Luis Muñoz Marín, which had moved away from its official pro-independence stance toward accommodation with imperialism, backed Washington’s war effort. It absorbed many reformist elements in the independence movement.  
 
Resistance to draft
During the war, 65,000 on the island were drafted into the U.S. armed forces. Many protested the Jim Crow segregation they encountered in the U.S. army, which classified Puerto Ricans as either “Negro” or “nonwhite.”

Puerto Rican residents of the island of Vieques got a taste of the “war for democracy” when they were evicted from their land by the U.S. Navy beginning in 1941. It would take six decades of struggle to finally remove the U.S. military from that island, which was used for target practice and war maneuvers.

Over the course of World War II, scores of Nationalist Party youth resisted the draft and were prosecuted and sentenced to jail, including the party’s top leaders. As a new Nationalist leadership took their place, they too were arrested for leading resistance to the imperialist war—three successive leaderships.

During the war, Albizu Campos was visited by U.S. State Department officials who promised to release him and other Nationalists from prison on condition that they suspend all pro-independence activity during the war. The Puerto Rican patriots unanimously refused the degrading “offer.”

Albizu served out his sentence. In June 1943 he was paroled from the Atlanta prison and moved to New York, but he refused to accept the terms of parole, saying the U.S. government was not his. He was not permitted to return home until 1947.

The Nationalists were not the only ones jailed for opposing the imperialist war. In 1941 the Roosevelt administration framed up and convicted 18 leaders of the Minneapolis Teamsters and the Socialist Workers Party on charges of conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government “by force and violence”—the first use of the Smith “Gag” Act.

The Militant, championing the fight for Puerto Rico’s independence, backed the campaign to free the jailed Nationalists. In its June 16, 1945, issue the socialist paper interviewed one of those facing prosecution, Julio Pinto Gandía, former secretary general of the Nationalist Party.

“I do not evade anything,” Pinto Gandía told the Militant. “I simply refuse to fight as a slave of an imperialist power. I will fight as much as is needed, but only for the freedom and independence of my people. I know there are many young men from Puerto Rico in the U.S. army…. They think they are fighting for freedom and democracy. But they will learn…that kind of fight begins at home.”

An article in next week’s issue will report on how the Communist Party both in the United States and Puerto Rico followed Moscow’s “Popular Front” line of supporting Washington in the war and called on Puerto Ricans to subordinate the anticolonial struggle to the war effort.
 
 
Previous article in the series:
Imperialist lies and the atom bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki  
 
 
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