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As so many Americans gear up for Fourth of July
fireworks this weekend, the U.S. Territory of
Puerto Rico roils from a brutal civil rights
showdown unleashed by a far-right wing government,
now seemingly hell bent on destroying the recent
unprecedented victory of a two-month long student
strike against privatization of higher education
at the University of Puerto Rico.
The broader implications are crucial on
numerous fronts, including the struggle to
maintain broad access to public higher education
and efforts to rein in runaway neo-liberal
policies that have wreaked havoc on the global
economy, resulting in draconian austerity measures
worldwide. For the violence and repression seen in
Greece and at the G20 in Toronto appears to now be
visiting this Caribbean island nation of about
four million U.S. citizens, the homeland of more
than an additional four million Puerto Ricans in
the United States, the second largest U.S. Latino
group.
While the economic crisis in Puerto Rico--the
worst since the 1940s, if not the 1930s-has been
deepening for years, and the current right wing
government has aggressively implemented a
hard-line, unpopular neo-liberal agenda since its
broad electoral victory last November, it appears
as if the recent UPR student strike victory has
touched off a firestorm, with a police attack on
peaceful demonstrators at Puerto Rico's Capitol
building on Wednesday injuring dozens, some
seriously.
The UPR strike concluded June 21 after a tense,
two-month shut down of 10 campuses in a system
serving nearly 65,000 students at the end of the
academic year, with an accord that by all accounts
was an unprecedented strike victory, in historic,
hemispheric terms. A widely-supported student
movement remarkable for its coalition building
across traditionally distinct and even contentious
social and political sectors coalesced against
threatened erosion of broad public access to the
widely-regarded state university, as well as its
increasing privatization.
With tensions high after police and riot squads
had attacked and injured students, their parents
and journalists on at least three occasions, an
agreement finally reached through judicial
mediation met with the students' basic demands,
reinstating cancelled tuition waivers, temporarily
forestalling a tuition hike or imposition of
student fees, and protecting strike leaders from
summary suspension reprisals. The accord, signed
by a majority of the Board of Trustees, though
those refusing included the university and board
presidents, was hailed as an achievement in civil
conflict resolution, especially in light of the
history of previous UPR strikes that had ended in
deadly violent repressions.
Immediately after however, the Puerto Rico
state legislature, dominated by the extreme right
of the local Pro-Statehood party, rapidly expanded
the university Board of Trustees, with the
governor approving four new appointees, and a new
but divided board quickly imposed a $800 student
fee starting in January, and made it permanent,
reminiscent of the imposition of fees at
University of California by then Gov. Ronald
Reagan. The legislature also quickly dismantled a
long-standing UPR tradition of student assemblies,
replacing them with private electronic computer
voting devoid of open debate. Other cuts were also
implemented affecting professors and adjunct
instructors, who now make up about 40 percent of
the UPR faculty, following trends in the United
States, where 60 percent of all professors occupy
such increasingly precarious positions.
In a far worse economic straits than the states
of California or Michigan, Puerto Rico is
confronting its worst fiscal crisis in decades,
and UPR the biggest fiscal crisis of its 100-year
existence. As throughout much of the world facing
related circumstances, virulent and organized
opposition to drastic cuts principally directed at
the working and deteriorating middle classes has
mushroomed, especially since the current global
crisis, in Alan Greenspan's own befuddled words,
was caused by greed-induced corruption among the
highest echelons of the world economy.
While the neoliberal agenda of Puerto Rico's
current political leaders look back to the very
doctrines now being challenged in the United
States and throughout Latin America, the UPR
student movement embodies the vanguard of the
contemporary 21st Century, as reflected by their
symbols and tactics, including the democratizing
internet, egalitarian rainbow flags, sustainable
organic farming, an effervescence of alternative
arts, and new coalition building among center,
right and left, in tandem with occupation
practices inspired by international student
movements as far as California, Spain, France and
Greece.
Though a shocking collective trauma, the
violent crackdown at the Capitol Wednesday was not
entirely surprising given the current
administration's assault on all fronts since
coming into power, targeting progressive, cultural
and social welfare institutions and agencies with
crippling budget cuts, attempting to dissolve
Puerto Rico's bar association, lifting
environmental protections to whole swaths of
protected lands, and passing a now notorious law,
called Ley 7, that not only dismisses 20,000
public employees, but declares null and void all
public sector union contracts for three years,
with the only recourse to challenging the law
being to petition the local Supreme Court, now
stacked with new appointments in the
administration's favor. The governor has also
activated the National Guard, amidst criticism
from groups such the Puerto Rico chapters of the
ACLU and Amnesty International.
Common in Puerto Rico, however, though unusual
at most U.S. state universities, is the way
political parties assume control of UPR leadership
by appointing a new president, also recently
achieved. This is in part because the UPR is
widely regarded as national patrimony, and is one
of the few places left in the country where
dissent may be cultivated.
As opposition to these policies expands, as
seen in a massive national strike in October which
drew a quarter of a million workers into the
streets, so has the government's seeming
intolerance to any opposition, as Gov. Luis Fortuño,
Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz and UPR
president José Ramón de la Torre commonly resort
to Cold War era red-baiting with media campaigns
labeling protestors as Socialists, Communists, and
professional rabble rousers out to destabilize the
country. The clamp down has so far gone as far as
banning journalists from Senate chambers for four
days last week during the country's budget
sessions, prompting media organizations to
petition in court to regain access.
"I don't think there is any doubt that the
intention of this government is to set back civil
rights," said Judith Berkan, a long-time
civil rights attorney and a law professor at
University of Puerto Rico and InterAmerican
University in San Juan, adding that the
administration has enacted a staggering number of
measures to neutralize and debilitate all those
perceived as a threat to a local oligarchy acting
in concert with U.S. interests.
Attempts were made to reach Resident
Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico's
non-voting representative in the U.S. Congress,
and UPR President José Ramón de la Torre for
comment, but they were not available at press
time.
The irony that the Pro-U.S. Statehood party of
Gov. Fortuño is now curtailing the most basic
press and civil liberties is not lost on UPR
student strike leaders who witnessed and were
injured at Wednesday's melee, including those who
belong to the pro-Statehood party themselves, and
voted for the sitting governor.
"It pains me as a statehooder that this
government has not learned the lessons of U.S.
civil rights struggles of decades ago," said
Aníbal Núñez, a student at the UPR law school
and a member of the student negotiating committee.
Núñez acknowledged the participation of
students affiliated with Socialist groups among
strike leaders and the student negotiating
committee, and said they overcame their
differences via universal concerns for education
as a social necessity, as they gained each others'
respect while coalition building together, adding
that if he could not overcome ideological
differences enough to collaborate, he would still
believe in their right to pluralistically exist.
The notion that accessible, quality higher
education contributes to economic recovery runs
counter to the widening U.S. trend of students
graduating with crippling debt, as public
education has for years now faced diminishing
state support. A common argument used by the
administration during the UPR strike was its
affordable tuition, at less than $2,000 per year
for undergraduates before the recently imposed
fees. But while tuition is cheaper than probably
any other state university in the United States,
average income in Puerto Rico is also far lower
than any other U.S. state, with about 48 percent
of the population living in poverty as defined by
U.S. federal standards, and the cost of living in
San Juan at least, far higher than at oft compared
institutions in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, or Oxford,
Mississippi. This tradition of maintaining broad
public access to a quality state institution of
higher learning is a hard earned point of pride at
UPR, compared to institutions that have recently
reneged their public mission with sudden and steep
fee/tuition increases, such as at University of
California, where students also opposed, occupied
and met with police repression, but could not
stave off a 32% fee hike imposed in November.
As UPR administrators continue to grapple with
what was a nearly $200 million budget shortfall
for next year going into the strike, in search of
additional or alternative money saving and raising
sources, an emboldened student movement will also
regroup and weigh all its options. Future
conflicts may be averted by altering the very
style of governance at UPR, a top-down and
paternalistic holdover from the past, as this
could go a long way toward making students, as
well as professors and staff who also have large
stakes at play, part of a give-and-take process.
For come what may in the global fiscal crisis
in the coming decade, these students are the
future of new Americas of increasingly porous
borders and dramatic, rapid demographic,
political, cultural, informational and economic
shifts, as the old order, the vestiges of the Cold
War in Puerto Rico and in South Florida for
example, fade into the proverbial sunset.
"We may not hold the power but we have the
will power," stated law student Núñez,
"and given the choice, I prefer the
latter."
UPR administrators and Statehood party leaders
would do well to recognize and reach out to the
productive potential of this new power, shift
gears and learn to act on the principles they
purportedly hold dear.
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