UNITED NATIONS — The ongoing roundups of Dominican-born and other workers in Puerto Rico by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement police are an example of “the direct intervention by the U.S. government in the daily lives of our society,” a brutal consequence of the fact that Puerto Rico is a U.S. colony, said Kevin Rivera-Medina of the Human Rights Committee in Puerto Rico.
Rivera-Medina was one of several speakers at this year’s United Nations decolonization hearing on Puerto Rico who condemned the stepped-up raids by U.S. federal cops and expressed solidarity with Dominican-born immigrants, workers “from a neighboring and sister nation.”
Sixty speakers addressed the June 16 hearing, a majority of whom were advocates of independence from U.S. rule. The U.N. committee adopted a resolution, as it has every year since 1972, affirming the right of the Puerto Rican people to “self-determination and independence.”
“Next month will mark 127 years of colonial rule over Puerto Rico by the United States,” said Calvin Yohannan from Boricuas Unidos en la Diáspora, a group of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. That is “more than twice as long as Belgian rule over the Congo.”
Puerto Rico’s current “commonwealth” status, as well as proposals for statehood, represent “nothing but disguised forms of colonial rule,” said Cyn Rodríguez from the group Se Acabaron las Promesas (No More Promises).
The island’s pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP) brought 20 speakers to the hearing who, while recognizing Puerto Rico’s colonial status, argued in favor of it becoming the 51st U.S. state.
Davina Resto from Adolfina, an organization of young Puerto Rican women in New York, described conditions under U.S. colonial domination. “Close to half of Puerto Ricans live in poverty, schools are being closed, hospitals are being underfunded, and public utilities are sold off,” she said.
U.S. ‘junta’ imposes cutbacks
Christina Mojica of the group Plan B Independence explained that since 2016 a “Financial Oversight and Management Board” imposed by President Barack Obama has enforced payments on the island’s multibillion-dollar debt to wealthy U.S. bondholders. The hated junta, as it’s popularly known, “answers not to us but to the U.S. Treasury,” she said, yet “it controls our budget and slashes essential services.”
Speakers described the devastation of Puerto Rico’s public health care system as a result of the capitalist economic and social catastrophe. This includes lower federal Medicaid funding and higher rates of diabetes and other diseases than in U.S. states, as well as shortages of doctors and nurses and a rise in maternal mortality.
The health crisis is especially acute on the island of Vieques. “Since 2015, the delivery room at the only ‘hospital’ there has remained closed,” Vieques resident Alexandra Connelly Reyes told the hearing. “Just this past Thursday, a young woman in labor, while being transferred to the main island, gave birth as she boarded the plane!”
The colonial government privatized the state-owned electric company and in 2021 turned over its management to the U.S.-Canadian company LUMA Energy. Since then, as several speakers noted, most Puerto Ricans face unending blackouts as well as utility rate hikes, which has led to repeated protests demanding “LUMA out!”
Mádelin Colón Pérez, of the Puerto Rican Coalition Against the Death Penalty, said another example of U.S. colonial oppression is the federal imposition of the death penalty in Puerto Rico, even though the island’s Commonwealth constitution bars it. To add insult to injury, federal trials in the Spanish-speaking nation are conducted in English, excluding most working-class residents from juries.
Nonetheless, Colón Pérez said, while federal prosecutors on the island have pressed many death penalty cases, they have failed to get a single Puerto Rican jury to impose a death sentence.
May Day march by unionists
Speaking for the Socialist Workers Party, Joanne Kuniansky, the party’s candidate for New Jersey governor, pointed to the May Day march by thousands of unionists in San Juan who protested the U.S. “junta,” and stated, “We join our brothers and sisters to demand Washington cancel Puerto Rico’s debt now!”
“Workers in the U.S. and Puerto Rico face the same enemy — the capitalist ruling families and their governments,” Kuniansky said. “A successful struggle to free Puerto Rico from U.S. colonial rule will also strengthen the hand of our class” in the U.S. Kuniansky took part in several other pro-independence events over the following days.
Speakers expressed a variety of views on how to press the fight against colonial rule. Some called for pressuring the U.S. Congress to negotiate an agreement leading to independence. Others hailed the 2024 elections, where Puerto Rican Independence Party leader Juan Dalmau, heading an electoral coalition with the liberal Citizens’ Victory Movement, won 32% of the vote, behind pro-statehood candidate Jenniffer González Colón, who won with 39%.
Ben Ramos of Pro-Libertad insisted that independence will not be won through “any U.S. bills or executive orders that give the U.S. government control or approval over our decolonization.” Jerry Lugo Segarra of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party said, “The colony cannot be reformed,” quoting 20th century Puerto Rican revolutionary Pedro Albizu Campos. “There can never be negotiation between the slave and the master.” Freedom, they argued, can only be won in struggle.
The resolution adopted by the U.N. committee was co-sponsored by Cuba and several other governments. Ambassador Ernesto Soberón reaffirmed Cuba’s “unwavering solidarity with the fight for independence by the Puerto Rican people, with whom we share a history of struggle.”
Puerto Rican independence fighters in New York organized several events around the hearing. Dozens marched in a lively contingent in the June 8 Puerto Rican Day Parade. Right after the hearing, the Frente Boricua Independentista organized a rally of more than 100 people.
A major pro-independence rally has been called in San Juan for Aug. 31. A rally will be held in New York the same day.