GFR Media runs three local daily newspapers, including El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico’s most widely read daily, and 10 business web sites. Credit: public domain

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
SAN JUAN, Nov 5 2014 (IPS)

A multi-million-dollar grant from a major media conglomerate to a communications school here has been hailed by some as a shining example of corporate philanthropy working to improve the quality of journalism.

But others view it as a worrisome case of undue influence of media corporations on the formation of journalists.“Gallardo represented the worst of corporate strategies, that is, those measures that compromise journalism with greed and market routines in detriment of the interests of the people and their most noble hopes." -- Luis Fernando Coss

Last June GFR Media, Puerto Rico’s largest media company, gave a five-million-dollar grant to the Communications School of Universidad del Sagrado Corazón (USC), one of the country’s leading private universities. Upon receiving the grant, the university changed the school’s name to Ferré Rangel School of Communication, after the Ferré-Rangel family, which owns GFR Media.

GFR Media runs three local daily newspapers, including El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico’s most widely read daily, and 10 business web sites. It is part of Grupo Ferré Rangel, a family-owned portfolio of companies and investments which includes real estate, printing, marketing and health services.

GFR Media and USC already have a history of collaboration. Together they run Agenda Ciudadana, a roundtable of business and civil society leaders that aims to enhance citizen participation in public affairs, and the PR Center for Press Freedom (CLP), founded and funded by El Nuevo Día, which is housed in the USC Campus.

“This centre was founded to educate the citizenry about freedom of expression, which is our dearest human right,” said CLP director Helga Serrano.

The centre works with high school students, holding journalism summits, forming journalism clubs and giving youths hands-on for print media and digital radio workshops.

“We encourage people to read the media with a critical eye,” said Serrano. “The Ferrés have been totally supportive of us on that. An alert and questioning public pushes the media out of their comfort zone.”

Serrano does not believe that accepting five million dollars from GFR Media and having the school renamed after the Ferré-Rangel family compromises the institution in any undue way.

“In the United States this is a very common practice. You see plenty of buildings and institutions named after philanthropists over there,”Serrano told IPS. “Columbia School of Journalism in New York, for example, was founded by Mr. Pulitzer, a newspaper publisher and creator of the journalism prize named after himself.

“The [USC] trustees approved the name change, because the grant is a major contribution to the school’s development.”

But others believe the donation will undermine the Communication School’s independence and intellectual integrity.

“This grant [from GFR Media] means that the poorly formed communicators graduated from the school will have to carry the message and editorial line of the Ferré-Rangels and their publications,” said a source in the USC faculty that refused to be identified. This grant “contradicts the institution’s mission, which is to form persons with intellectual liberty, with critical thinking.”

According to “Un Diario Amable”, a critical 2009 documentary about El Nuevo Día, between 2001 and 2005 the Ferré-Rangel group of companies had profits of over 100 million dollars. And yet, in February 2007 El Nuevo Día laid off some 40 employees.

According to the PR Journalists Association (ASPPRO), after the layoffs the remaining staff writers have lived in a state of fear and uncertainty, and are afraid to publicly denounce their working conditions.

GFR Media is now one of ASPPRO’s top donors.

El Nuevo Día is a member of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA), an organisation that has frequently been accused of right-wing bias and political activism. Chilean entrepreneur Agustín Edwards, owner of the El Mercurio newspaper and IAPA president from 1968 to 1969, met with U.S. Central Intelligence Agency director Richard Helms to discuss ways to undermine the government of Chilean president Salvador Allende, who was overthrown by a right-wing military coup in 1973.

El Mercurio, which strongly opposed Allende, became a strong supporter of the military regime.

Mauricio Gallardo, a close associate of Edwards, was executive director of El Nuevo Día from 2007 to 2009. He had previously worked for El Mercurio as editor of its Sunday magazine. Gallardo is currently back in Chile directing La Segunda, another newspaper owned by the Edwards family.

Gallardo was allegedly fired from El Nuevo Día shortly after he was featured in “Un Diario Amable”.

Good riddance, according to the documentary’s executive producer, Luis Fernando Coss: “Gallardo represented the worst of corporate strategies, that is, those measures that compromise journalism with greed and market routines in detriment of the interests of the people and their most noble hopes. Corporate colonialism suffered a hard setback.”

From 1986 to 1998, Coss directed Diálogo, the University of Puerto Rico’s monthly newspaper. He now directs 80 Grados, an online magazine.

IPS repeatedly tried to contact Héctor Peña, director of El Nuevo Día’s opinion columns section and IAPA board member, for comment but he did not respond by deadline.

“Criticisms of IAPA come from all sectors,” said Ricardo Trotti of IAPA.

Trotti, who is IAPA’s press freedom coordinator, told IPS that the followers of Peru’s Fujimori, Paraguay’s Stroessner, Chile’s Pinochet, and Argentina’s Menem, and the Nicaraguan contras have all considered the organisation to be “unbearably to the left”; and the leftist followers of Ecuador’s Correa, Venezuela’s Chavez and Cuba’s Castro accuse IAPA of undermining democracy while serving imperialism and colonialism.

He also pointed out that in the U.S., both Democrats and Republicans have made similar accusations of bias against the organisation.

“IAPA has always criticised and denounced press freedom violations from all kinds of governments,” said Trotti. He added that the organisation cannot be held responsible for the behaviour of each and every member.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

President Ronald Reagan with top aides Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz, Ed Meese, and Don Regan discussing the president's remarks on the Iran-Contra affair, Oval Office. Nov. 25, 1986. Credit: Courtesy Ronald Reagan Library, official government record

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
SAN JUAN, Oct 26 2014 (IPS)

In late 1986, Washington was rocked by revelations that the Ronald Reagan administration had illegally aided a stateless army known as the contras in Central America.

Thus began the Iran Contra scandal. The contras were an irregular military formation put together by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1981 to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The war they provoked caused tens of thousands of deaths and devastating damage to Nicaragua’s economy.What’s truly tragic and ironic in this whole affair is that the main allegations in Webb’s contra reporting had been confirmed in 1998 by a CIA report authored by the agency’s inspector general, Frederick Hitz.

Reagan’s aid was illegal since Congress had banned it. The Reagan administration responded to the congressional ban by setting up secret and illegal channels to keep the contras supplied and armed. The operation was directly supervised by the office of Vice President George H. W. Bush, who himself had headed the CIA in the 1970s.

The contras also benefited from collaboration with South American cocaine cartels. This explosive information was uncovered at least as early as 1985 when Associated Press reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger co-wrote an article that cited documentation and witness testimony from inside both the contra movement and the U.S. government implicating nearly all contra groups in drug trafficking.

John Kerry, then a U.S. senator, carried out an investigation into illegal contra activities, including drugs, as head of a Senate subcommittee. His investigation was all but ignored by the mainstream media, which was busy covering the congressional Iran Contra hearings, the ones that made a celebrity of National Security Council staffer Oliver North.

The media also ignored the final report of Kerry’s investigation, “Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy”, released in 1989.

In 1996, the subject of contra drug dealing reappeared in a series of investigative articles by reporter Gary Webb published by the San Jose Mercury News in California.

For these articles, Webb was savaged by fellow reporters and editors, particularly from the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. The Mercury News buckled under the pressure and got rid of Webb.

Unemployed, shunned by his own colleagues and practically abandoned by progressive sectors that had lost interest in the contra story, Webb took his own life in 2004. His journalistic saga and tragic end are the subject of a new Hollywood movie called “Kill The Messenger.”

Some insist that Webb was assassinated by the CIA. Regarding this, Robert Parry, who was friends with Webb, wrote:

“Some people want to believe that he was really assassinated by the CIA or some other government agency. But the evidence of his carefully planned suicide – as he suffered deep pain as a pariah in his profession who could no longer earn a living – actually points to something possibly even more tragic: Webb ended his life because people who should have supported his work simply couldn’t be bothered.”

What’s truly tragic and ironic in this whole affair is that the main allegations in Webb’s contra reporting had been confirmed in 1998 by a CIA report authored by the agency’s inspector general, Frederick Hitz.

But the mainstream media alleged that the report cleared the CIA and the contras of drug trafficking. The report indeed concluded that the CIA had not conspired to fund the contras with the help of drug cartels.

But Hitz, now a scholar at the University of Virginia’s Center for National Security Law, said in the report that the war against the Sandinistas had taken precedence over law enforcement, and that the CIA had evidence of contra involvement in cocaine trafficking and hid it from the Justice Department, Congress, and even from the agency’s own analytics division.

Hitz interviewed CIA officers who confessed to him that they knew of contra drug trafficking but kept quiet about it because they thought that such disclosures would undermine the fight against the Nicaraguan regime.

He also received complaints from agency analysts to the effect that field officers who worked directly with the contras hid evidence of drug trafficking, and that then, working with partial and incomplete information, they concluded that only a few contras were involved with drugs.

On Oct. 10, 1998, the New York Times ran a piece attacking Webb’s credibility while acknowledging, as if it were a minor detail, that contra drug dealing was worse than the newspaper had originally estimated.

In September the CIA declassified a number of articles from its in-house journal Studies in Intelligence. One of these showed that the agency was genuinely distressed by Webb’s contra articles, and that it took active steps against him, relying on “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists”.

The article even brags that the CIA discouraged “one major news affiliate” from covering the story.

The article’s author tries to fathom the hostility of broad sectors of the U.S. population toward the CIA: “We live in somewhat coarse and emotional times—when large numbers of Americans do not adhere to the same standards of logic, evidence, or even civil discourse as those practiced by members of the CIA community.”

That’s an actual quote.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Editing by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Casa Pueblo. Credit: Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
SAN JUAN, Oct 1 2014 (IPS)

The heart of Puerto Rico’s central mountain range is the site of an extraordinary story of struggle and triumph.

Since the 1960s, the government of this commonwealth of the United States had intended to authorise strip mining for copper in the mountain municipalities of Lares, Adjuntas and Utuado. But a decades-long grassroots environmental campaign forced the government to desist.“We are economically self-sufficient, and because of that our talk of freedom is not mere discourse.” -- Casa Pueblo director Alexis Massol

In 1996, then-governor Pedro Rosselló forbade strip mining in the island and signed into law the designation of the parcel of land where the digging would start as “The People’s Forest” (El Bosque del Pueblo).

The successful opposition to mining was led by Casa Pueblo, a non-governmental organisation based in Adjuntas. The group was founded in 1980 by artists, intellectuals and environmentalists associated with Juan Antonio Corretjer, internationally renowned poet and one of the independence movement’s top figures until his death in 1985.

From 1937 to 1942, Corretjer was imprisoned in the United States for his association with the Nationalist Party, which engaged in armed struggle for independence.

In 1982, a secret source inside La Fortaleza (the governor’s mansion, which houses the executive branch) leaked to Corretjer’s group a mysterious map of Puerto Rico, which showed the island crisscrossed with what seemed like infrastructure projects, highways, petrochemical factories, open pit mines and military bases.

Corretjer tasked Casa Pueblo, back then called the Arts and Culture Workshop, with researching what the map meant. After consulting several sources, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the group uncovered Plan 2020, a secretive resource extraction and militarised economic development scheme which had strip mining at its heart.

Over 30 years after the exposure of Plan 2020, strip mining was stopped before it began, but other elements of the plan, like the construction of superhighways, continue apace in spite of environmentalist protests.

Casa Pueblo has remained vigilant in its protection of Puerto Rico’s environment and active in promoting sustainable development. From 1999 to 2003, the organisation aided protesters who engaged in civil disobedience to shut down a U.S. Navy firing range in the island-municipality of Vieques. Casa Pueblo’s volunteers carried out peer reviewed in situ scientific studies of military pollution in the firing range.

For its work for peace and development, Casa Pueblo won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2002.

“This is a project of evolution and re-evolution,” said the organisation’s founder and director, Alexis Massol. “It is a response to the capitalist colonial project that the U.S. empire seeks to impose on us. Our project is dynamic; it is not afraid to face errors or contradictions. And it combines education and action.”

Casa Pueblo is named after its physical home, an old house that was taken and restored by the organisation in the mid-1980s. The house has a community library and a large hall often used for meetings and cultural and artistic activities.

Its second floor is used by an artist in residence programme. In the back there is a butterfly sanctuary and another structure which houses Radio Casa Pueblo. Founded in 2007, it is Puerto Rico’s first ever community radio station.

Independence is very important for Casa Pueblo. Since 1989, it has been funded by sales of its own artisanal brand of coffee, Madre Isla. Much of it is grown in Casa Pueblo’s own Madre Isla farm, which also has an eco-tourism project.

In 1999, the Casa Pueblo building went off the electricity grid and switched to a solar energy system.

“We are economically self-sufficient, and because of that our talk of freedom is not mere discourse,” Massol told IPS. “We speak with our own independent voice and we do not make alliances with political parties.”

The organisation’s most ambitious project is the Model Forest. This proposed forest, which has been signed into law by governor Alejandro Garcia-Padilla and is currently being amended and negotiated by the Puerto Rico House and Senate, will cover some 379,000 acres and link 20 existing natural protected areas through ecological corridors.

“The Model Forest is a project of sustainable economic development, ecological preservation and citizen participation,” according to economist Mike Soto-Class, president of the Center for a New Economy, a business think tank based in the capital city of San Juan.

“It promotes conservation while it generates business and jobs, and it contributes to the country’s food security. It is a project that exemplifies a paradigm shift in the use of resources, and in the way development and governance models are conceived.”

“A Model Forest is a territory in which people organise and participate to manage their forests and other natural resources together in search of sustainable development,” according to the Iberoamerican Network of Model Forests (RIABM). “Model Forests contribute to reaching global objectives of poverty reduction, climate change, the struggle against desertification and the Millenium goals.”

There are currently 28 model forests in Latin America.

“In this forest there will be popular participation and shared governance,” explains Massol. “It will be an ecological project but will also include economic development, especially agriculture.”

Casa Pueblo has proposed that the Model Forest be a zone of sustainable agriculture free of genetically modified crops.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the U.S. Its relationship with the United States has been denounced as colonial by both the independence and pro-statehood movements. Credit: Arturo de la Barrera/cc by 2.0

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
SAN JUAN, Aug 27 2014 (IPS)

A feeling of insecurity has overtaken broad sectors of Puerto Rican society as the economy worsens, public sector debt spirals out of control, and the island’s creditworthiness is put in doubt.

To tackle this economic crisis, the administration of governor Alejandro Garcia-Padilla has adopted a number of measures that have been extremely unpopular with civil society and labour unions."Capital is on the offensive all over the world. But in Puerto Rico it's worse because it is a colony of the United States." -- Retired telephone company worker Guillermo De La Paz

Retirees have been particularly affected. In 2013, the government passed Law 160, which drastically changed the retirement system of public employees. It puts an end to the previous retirement system, established by Law 447 of 1951, under which every public sector worker was entitled to a full pension after 30 years of service, regardless of age.

But Law 160 changes that. The size of monthly pension payments is no longer guaranteed, and employees must work more years in order to get full benefits.

“The retirement system has been compromised,” said labour attorney Cesar Rosado-Ramos in a position paper for the Working People’s Party (PPT).

“It is unheard of, abusive and unjust that people with 30 years of service now have to keep working for four, five, 10 or even 15 additional years in order to receive a full pension. This means the working class will have to spend a lifetime working and if you survive you get a miserable retirement plan.”

The PPT was formed in 2009 by current and former members of the Movement Toward Socialism and the Socialist Front. Its first electoral participation was in the 2012 general elections but it did not get enough votes to elect any candidate.

Public school teachers were spared from Law 160. They sued and last April the PR Supreme Court ruled key parts of the law unconstitutional because they violated teachers’ contracts. Thus the teachers’ retirement was saved, but the court ruling upheld other parts of the law that reduce their Christmas bonuses, summer pay and medical benefits.

“The retirement age of public employees has been raised and their [retirement] benefits have been reduced to poverty level,” economist Martha Quiñones told IPS.

Ramón Marrero, an emergency doctor who works in the city of Cayey, was forced to continue working just when he was due for retirement. He was going to retire after 18 years of work, but with the new law he has to stay on for three more years to get a full pension.

“One has life projects for when retirement comes. When all of a sudden the date for retirement is postponed, all of these projects and plans are turned upside down,” said Marrero, who commutes to work from the nearby town of Cidra.

Quiñones, who teaches at the University of Puerto Rico, pointed out that private sector workers and pensioners are also in for a raw deal. “Many of those private pensions are tied to Puerto Rico government bonds, which have recently been downgraded by Moody’s and Standard and Poor. When the value of these bonds is affected, pensions are reduced.”

Many public sector retirees are politically active, not only defending their benefits and pension plans from the ever present threat of privatisation, but also protesting the government’s neoliberal austerity policies, which affect all of society.

“The local ruling class seeks to reverse the gains and livelihoods of workers to what they used to be in a bygone era,” said labour activist Jose Rivera-Rivera, president of the retirees chapter of the UTIER labour union.

“In order for the neoliberal system to establish its superiority it must erase the last two centuries of labor struggle and solidarity. It’s the new stage of capitalism, they want us to start from zero.”

“Capital is on the offensive all over the world. But in Puerto Rico it’s worse because it is a colony of the United States,” retired telephone company worker Guillermo De La Paz told IPS. “Here the exploiters can experiment in ways they cannot do in a sovereign country.”

Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the U.S. Its relationship with the United States has been denounced as colonial by both the independence and pro-statehood movements.

The Puerto Rico Telephone Company was public until it was privatised by then governor Pedro Rosselló in 1998. Privatisation opponents paralysed the island in a two-day general strike in July of that year, but to no avail.

“For the rich there is no crisis,” said De La Paz. “I mean, we’ve got [billionaire] Henry Paulson urging rich people to come here to avoid taxes.”

Rivera-Rivera believes that in order to get Puerto Rico out of its economic crisis and protect retirement benefits, the government could start by taxing the rich.

“Our government is supposedly in crisis because it cannot pay its debt, but the previous administration [Governor Luis Fortuño, 2009-2012] practically eliminated the fiscal responsibility of major corporations and rich people in its 2009 tax reform. It wasn’t justified, they were already enjoying major tax breaks.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Vendors at the organic farmers' market in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Courtesy: Tillie Castellano.

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, May 21 2014 (IPS)

Agriculture in this Caribbean island is going through its worst moment. Whereas this sector accounted for 71 percent of its gross domestic product in 1914, now it amounts to no more than one percent. 

A century ago, local agriculture employed over 260,000 workers, nowadays it employs 19,000. Over three billion dollars leaves the island through food imports, according to data published in the local press.

Puerto Rican Agriculture Secretary Myrna Comas, who has been in office since last year, is widely regarded as the island’s top food security scholar. Prior to directing the agriculture department, she conducted extensive research into local food security issues as professor at the University of Puerto Rico.“We want to double the farmers that we buy from on a weekly basis, from 10 to 20. And we also aim at setting up drop off points for our produce all over Puerto Rico.” -- Departamento owner Tara Rodriguez

According to her research, Puerto Rico imports over half of its dairy products, around 70 percent of its coffee, over 80 percent of its meat, over 90 percent of its fruit, and all of its sugar and cereal grains. The island’s food insecurity is further compounded by the fact that 76 percent of these food imports come from one single country: the United States. Almost all of this food comes from the ports of New Jersey and Florida, with 75 percent of all the food coming from the latter. Food imported from the U.S. travels an average of 1,310 miles.

But Comas found that Puerto Rico imports food from 57 other countries. Imports also come from China (four percent of total food imports), Canada (three percent) and the Dominican Republic (two percent). Food is also imported from other distant countries like Kenya, Tanzania, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Poland. Food from Asia to Puerto Rico has traveled over 16,000 kms, and can take up to 47 days to arrive as it is unloaded on the U.S. west coast, trucked across to the east coast, sent through distribution centres, and finally loaded into ships headed to Puerto Rico.

The agriculture secretary has made it her business to increase agricultural production in order to reduce reliance on imports and thus assure Puerto Rico’s food security. But the island’s budding organic farming movement faults Comas for not questioning the prevailing industrial agriculture model, which critics claim poisons the environment with toxic agrochemicals, contributes to climate change, is harmful to the health of both agricultural workers and consumers, and cannot insure food security.

The United Nations International Assessment of Agriculture, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) found that the dominant model of modern agriculture is undermining the planet’s ecological and social systems and endangering the future of humanity. The report was written by over 400 scientists and went through two peer reviews.

“Modern agriculture, as currently practised, is devouring our capital. It is mining the soil, our natural resource base, and it is unsustainable, because it is both fossil energy- and capital-intensive and because it is not based on a full accounting of the externalities,” said IAASTD co-chairman Hans Herren. “Continuing with current trends would exhaust our resources and put our children’s future in jeopardy.”

The report endorses small-scale sustainable agriculture as an alternative. The U.N. Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, and a recent report by the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, both reached similar conclusions.

Ian C. Pagán, a young agronomist, farmer, writer, activist and educator, runs the El Josco Bravo Agroecology Project in the municipality of Toa Alta. Pagán, who has a Master’s Degree in soil restoration and sustainable agricultural practices, is a passionate advocate of agroecology and is not afraid to debate advocates of industrial agriculture.

“There are many myths about alternative agricultural production systems,” Pagán told IPS. “These myths are propagated precisely by multinational agribusinesses that profit from farming systems that are highly dependent on external inputs.”

“Science itself has demonstrated the productive potential of agroecology versus conventional agriculture. For starters, over half of world food production is in the hands of small campesino farmers, most of whom are practicing agroecologically based farming.”

Pagan’s farm produces tomatoes, green beans, lettuce, yautia, fruits and cabbage, among many other crops.

“Furthermore, agroecological production has greater resilience to climate change and is more energy efficient. These two aspects are ever more important in a world that is now facing environmental and energy crises.”

Local organic farmers get their produce to consumers through various innovative ventures, such as El Departamento de la Comida (The Food Department), an alternative retailer located in the working class urban neighborhood of Tras Talleres in San Juan.

The Departamento is switching to non-profit status. To fund this transition, it is raising money through Antrocket, a Puerto Rican online crowdfunding platform.

“We aim at creating Puerto Rico’s first ecological food hub,” said Departamento owner Tara Rodriguez in an interview. “We will work with the entire food production cycle, and that includes consumer education, services for farmers, and various aspects of sustainability.”

“The money we are raising will go into improvements in our equipment that will make it possible to scale up our operations and become an NGO [non-governmental organisation] with a business model, a community non-profit corporation,” said Rodríguez, whose mother, Silka Besosa, quit her lucrative job managing a shopping mall to become an organic farmer. Besosa died of cancer in 2011.

“We want to double the farmers that we buy from on a weekly basis, from 10 to 20. And we also aim at setting up drop off points for our produce all over Puerto Rico.”

The Departamento’s offerings include kale, squash, avocados, eggplant, arugula, bananas, tomatoes, sprouts, cucumbers and tangerine oranges, as well as seeds, seedlings and artisanal locally made marmalade, bread and soap. It also delivers weekly boxes of produce to restaurants and residential customers.

Rodriguez emphasises that education is very important. “We educate consumers as to why everything we sell is organic and local, and and explain to them the importance of paying our farmers a fair price for their product.”

The University of Puerto Rico showcases a solar-powered home at the 2009 Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C. Five years later, renewable energy sources have yet to be used widely on the island. Credit: Stefano Paltera/US Dept. of Energy Solar Decathlon

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
SAN JUAN, Apr 28 2014 (IPS)

Everyone in Puerto Rico agrees that the island’s ailing Electric Power Authority (PREPA) is badly in need of an overhaul, both in engineering and economic terms.

Its inefficient, largely obsolete, and highly polluting generating facilities, most of which use petroleum as fuel, require expensive repairs or must be replaced altogether.“There is no free lunch. Technological fixes are traps." -- Juan E. Rosario

Its finances are in a shambles. The utility’s debt stood at just over 8.95 billion dollars as of 2013, and its rates are rising ever faster, with commercial and residential ratepayers crying for relief.

However, there is sharp disagreement among stakeholders as to what is to be done. PR Senate president Eduardo Bhatia presented an energy reform bill, approved by the Senate and currently being considered by the House, that he claims will bring efficiency, transparency and clean and cheap energy.

Its proposals include net metering and a new regulating entity that would oversee rates and assure transparency.

“In order for energy costs to go down, we need to demand clean and cheap energy. We need efficient generating plants. Through this bill, PREPA is given a timetable to generate 60 percent highly efficient energy as required by industry and by U.S. regulations,” the Senate president told the local press earlier this month.

Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the United States. It is subject to U.S. laws and regulations.

Senator Bhatia denies that his bill leads to privatisation of the Authority. “The most important thing is to end the inefficient monopoly that PREPA has been over the years. What I propose is not privatisation.”

But organised labour views the Bhatia proposal as a trojan horse.

The Alliance of Active and Retired PREPA Employees and UTIER, the employees’ union, point out that there is no electricity monopoly in Puerto Rico, given that over a third of the country’s electricity is supplied by private corporations. PREPA purchases electricity from two facilities owned by the Ecoelectrica and AES energy corporations, which burn natural gas and coal respectively.

The Alliance claims that for all their talk about environment and renewable energy, privatisation advocates fail to mention that the private AES facility, which provides the island with 15 percent of its electricity, burns “precisely the most polluting fuel, which is coal, which not only contaminates the air we breathe, but also its ashes are being buried in our coastal plains and it’s contaminating our aquifers.”

In a Mar. 31 communique, the Alliance adds that Bhatia’s proposal for deregulation and free competition actually impedes PREPA from competing in conditions of equality with the private sector.

PREPA’s current rate is 28 cents per kilowatt hour, which is decried by pro-privatisation sectors as one of the world’s highest. Although relatively expensive, it is lower than in Germany (29.2 cents kwh), Denmark (30 cents), Hawaii (34.08 cents), the Philippines (36.13 cents), and the nearby Virgin Islands (52.5 cents), according to data presented by the Alliance.

The utility is economically tied down by 392 million dollars in annual subsidies it is forced to give by virtue of legislation. These include subsidies for churches and other non-profit institutions (three million dollars), the tourism industry (nine million), agriculture (oine million), rural electrification and irrigation (six million), and small businesses (less than one million).

But these pale in comparison to the 261 million dollars given to municipalities, known as the CELI subsidy, 17 million for the 2008 Industrial Incentives Act, and 35 million to subsidise the AAA water utility. These last three comprise 80 percent of all subsidies given out by PREPA.

Privatisation opponents question what will happen to all these subsidies if the Authority is put under the control of private business.

The Alliance and UTIER insist that deregulation and private sector involvement will not lower rates. The Alliance cites U.S. Department of Energy data that show that between 1997 and 2012, electricity rate hikes were higher in deregulated states than in regulated states.

Towering over PREPA’s debacle are the utility’s bondholders, or ‘bonistas’ as they are called in Puerto Rico.

“The utility’s bondholders have been setting the country’s energy policy… they determine where the Authority will invest its money, and what payroll expenses should be,” said UTIER President Angel Figueroa-Jaramillo.

According to the 1974 Trust Agreement that governs the Authority’s relationship with bondholders, if PREPA’s income goes down, rate hikes are automatic.

“The bondholders are people and institutions that have lent money to PREPA,” explains economist Sergio Marxuach of the Centre for the New Economy. “Money is lent through bond issues. In exchange for that money, PREPA makes some promises to those who buy those bonds.”

In its fiscal year 2010 report to bondholders, PREPA boasts that its cost reduction programme includes reducing personnel through “attrition”, that is by voluntary retirements and by eliminating temporary jobs. Between January 2009 and the end of June 2010 the Authority eliminated 739 jobs.

“In the last 15 years, the number of employees has been reduced,” the UTIER president told IPS. “Especially in areas of conservation and maintenance, even though the infrastructure is growing – less people to maintain more infrastructure.”

Marxuach differs in his perspective regarding bondholders. “We could transition to renewable energy and change the energy model without necessarily affecting the bondholders,” the economist told IPS.

“They are only interested in getting paid. They are not in the business of operating power utilities. [For some people] it is convenient to use this group of investors as the boogeyman. We need to be sceptical towards these allegations that the bondholders do not let us do anything, because it is not true.”

What to do about PREPA’s environmental liabilities? How can the utility’s air pollution and carbon emissions be lowered?

“There is no free lunch. Technological fixes are traps,” says environmental activist and organiser Juan E. Rosario, community representative in the PREPA board of directors.

Rosario agrees that Puerto Rico must move to renewable energy but is concerned that the citizenry does not understand the costs involved or the amount of time such a transition will take.

“Wind and solar power are intermittent sources, their availability changes constantly,” Rosario told IPS. “This makes them less reliable than fossil fuels. And this, therefore, presents some serious technical problems. It’s a whole different game with a different set of rules.”

Rosario suggests natural gas as a transition bridge from the current coal and petroleum burning system of today to a future based on renewable energy sources.

“Natural gas is much cleaner, especially with respect to solid particles. This is no small matter. Seventy-five percent of all particulate air pollutants in Puerto Rico that come from stationary sources are produced by PREPA’s facilities,” he said.

But Rosario advises that people must brace for the costs. “The Palo Seco thermoelectric power plant [in the town of Toa Baja] cannot possibly be retrofitted for natural gas. It has to be decommissioned and scrapped, and that can cost 600 million dollars.”

“PREPA can cut emissions by 30 percent just by adopting conservation and efficiency measures. And most importantly, its income must be decoupled from the sale of electricity. If it isn’t decoupled, its management will never have any incentive to be efficient.”

Electric utility workers of the UTIER labour union protest for safer workplace conditions. UTIER spearheads the fight against privatisation and against the Puerto Rico government's unpopular emergency economic measures. Courtesy of Photo Jam

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
SAN JUAN, Apr 15 2014 (IPS)

Puerto Rican society has been shaken to its foundations by the announcement in February by Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s credit rating agencies that they had downgraded the island’s creditworthiness to junk status.

“The problems that confront the commonwealth are many years in the making, and include years of deficit financing, pension underfunding, and budgetary imbalance, along with seven years of economic recession,” said Moody’s."Working people are faced with three choices: they can migrate, resign themselves to poverty, or go out to the street to organise and struggle for justice." -- Luis Pedraza-Leduc

Located in the Caribbean Sea, Puerto Rico has been a Commonwealth of the United States since 1952.

Moody’s added that the island’s worsening economic situation has “now put the commonwealth in a position where its debt load and fixed costs are high, its liquidity is narrow, and its market access has become constrained.”

In order to meet its debt obligations, the PR legislature has considered enacting fiscal measures that are strongly opposed by labour unions, including dipping into the public school teachers’ retirement fund. Law 160, the retirement “reform”, was approved by both House and Senate earlier this year.

Unions have headed to court to challenge the law. On Apr. 11, the Puerto Rico Supreme Court ruled some key provisions were unconstitutional because they breached teachers’ contracts.

Schoolteachers’ unions declared the ruling a triumph, although the court upheld other parts of the law that adversely affect Christmas bonuses, summer pay and medical benefits.

The current fiscal crisis is the result of the commonwealth economic model’s failure, according to union official Luis Pedraza-Leduc.

“Our economic model, based on providing cheap labour to the pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries and light manufacturing, has exhausted itself,” said Pedraza-Leduc, who runs the UTIER utility workers union’s Solidarity Programme (PROSOL) and is spokesperson of the Coordinadora Sindical, a coalition of over a dozen unions.

“In recent decades there has been a worldwide trend towards reducing state involvement in the economy to a minimum,” he told IPS.

“Things that were considered basic services provided by the state are now turned into commodities as private enterprise moves in to fill those spaces. Rather than reducing these essential services, the government went into debt.”

According to a chart provided by the office of PR Governor Alejandro Garcia-Padilla, the commonwealth’s public debt reached 10 billion dollars in 1987, when the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) ruled, and passed the 20-billion-dollar mark in 1998 under governor Pedro Rossello, of the New Progressive Party.

Under PDP governor Sila M. Calderon (2001-2004) the debt went over 30 billion dollars. And at the end of his 2009-2012 mandate, NPP governor Luis Fortuño left the country with more than 60 billion in debt. Garcia-Padilla belongs to the PDP.

Pedraza-Leduc recalls that successive governors undertook neoliberal measures that made matters even worse.

“Governor Rossello privatised the health sector, the phone company and the water utility. Governor Acevedo-Vila [of the PDP, 2004-2007] imposed a sales tax on retail sales [known as IVU],” he said.

Governor Fortuño laid off over 30,000 public sector workers, and introduced “public-private partnerships”, which were decried by labour unions as thinly disguised privatisation schemes. Upon beginning his mandate in early 2013, Garcia-Padilla privatised the San Juan international airport and is considering new taxes.

The Puerto Rico Constitution obligates the government to honour its debts.

“In order to pay bondholders, the government could close down schools, reduce the number of Urban Train daily trips, scale down 911 emergency phone services, and freeze the hiring of employees”, warned Pedraza-Leduc. “They are considering reducing Christmas bonuses and sick leave days.”

According to University Puerto Rico economist Martha Quiñones, “We are having here the same crisis as Greece and Detroit, but here it is broader because of our colonial situation.

“We had an economic model based on bringing foreign corporations and enticing them with cheap labour and tax incentives,” she told IPS, calling this the “exogenous” model, which is based on bringing investment from outside.

“It did not work. Not enough jobs were created, and the unemployed do not pay taxes. Locally owned businesses ended up picking up the tax burden that foreign investors were exempted from, which caused many of them to close. Local and foreign businesses were not competing in conditions of equality.”

Quiñones said that the model’s death knell was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other similar trade deals that the U.S. has struck, which made even cheaper labour available in other parts of the world.

Successive Puerto Rico governments made up for these failures by requesting help from the U.S. government in the form of food stamps and unemployment benefits, and other forms of social assistance. Another way was by issuing bonds, which led to long-term debt and the current debacle.

As an alternative, Quiñones advocates an “endogenous” economic model, which strengthens local capabilities rather than looking abroad for deliverance. “The government must support locally owned businesses,” she said. “Those are the businesses that create jobs at home and pay taxes.

“The government must also collect the IVU sales tax, which most retailers simply pocketed. A progressive tax reform is needed, plus rich tax evaders must be brought to justice. Start by investigating businesses that take only cash, and individuals who are taking second mortgages. Those are pretty obvious red flags.”

She also advocates that the health system be changed to single payer, “which would be more efficient than the current inefficient and unsustainable health system we have now.

“Working people are faced with three choices: they can migrate, resign themselves to poverty, or go out to the street to organise and struggle for justice,” said Pedraza-Leduc.

But he admits that the prospects for all-out popular struggle are uncertain at best. “The lack of class consciousness complicates the outlook. Maybe we are not prepared for a confrontation,” he said.

To him, the way out of the impasse lies in education. “I propose an educational project, a Union School [Escuela Sindical] that can transcend the unions and branch out into broader issues and thus further the political struggle.

“And we need a new model for our country, we need to speak concretely about justice and a fair distribution of wealth.”

He also called for a reexamination of Puerto Rico’s relationship with the U.S. “Under our current status we are not allowed to sign trade agreements with other countries. We could be associating ourselves with other countries, and also get cheaper oil from Venezuela. But under our current status we cannot.”

A group of visitors tours Jorge Cora's farm on Jan. 25, 2014. Credit: Elisa Sanchez

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
VIEQUES, Puerto Rico, Feb 10 2014 (IPS)

A decade after the United States Navy’s departure, the Puerto Rican island town of Vieques faces new challenges, and the rebirth of its agriculture sector is hampered by a legacy of toxic military trash that has uncertain consequences.

From 1999 to 2003, Vieques, which is just over twice the size of New York City’s Manhattan Island, was the site of a massive civil disobedience campaign to put an end to the presence of the Navy, which had used the island for bombing practice since World War Two. Puerto Rico is officially a commonwealth and territory of the United States.“The soils in Vieques could be safe for farming, or maybe not. There is uncertainty." -- Biologist Arturo Massol

In 2003, the bombing range was closed. But Vieques faces other challenges, like unemployment, crime, and basic infrastructure issues like health and transportation.

The principal means of transportation between Vieques and the main island of Puerto Rico is the ferry that travels the 30 kms between the town of Fajardo and the pier at Vieques’ Isabel Segunda village. The service is plagued by frequent breakdowns and delays, a situation which discourages tourism and makes life difficult for Vieques residents that need to travel to the main island.

“Transportation here is a disaster,” said Robert Rabin, a U.S. expatriate who moved to Vieques in 1980 and was a major figure in the anti-Navy movement. “This situation is an attempt against the island’s economic development and the health of its residents. When the elderly and sick have to go to the main island for medical appointments, they cannot arrive on time because of the poor ferry service.”

Rabin works at the Conde de Mirasol historic museum in Isabel Segunda and at the newly founded Radio Vieques community radio station. He pointed out that the island town of Culebra, some 15 kms to the north of Vieques, faces a similar transportation plight. “This shows the Puerto Rico government’s lack of commitment to the economic development of both Vieques and Culebra,” he said.

Local residents of both islands feel squeezed out by a large influx of wealthy new residents – mostly U.S. citizens – which is allegedly causing “gentrification”. Rabin says that this type of population displacement is also happening in the main island and in the nearby Virgin Islands.

“I see an increase in the control of foreigners, especially American, over local tourism. The government has not responded to this problem. And the local community has not been able to respond in a coherent way due to lack of organisation,” he said.

“There are some foreigners who set up businesses here and provide good jobs for local people, but they are the exception. Most of them employ friends they bring in from the U.S., and offer Vieques residents only the lowest paying jobs, like maintenance.”

Many of these migrants are “snowbirds”, the term used by local residents to describe people who come only for the winter, staying in Vieques no longer than six months a year. According to Rabin, “When they are away they rent their properties for as much as a thousands dollars a week, or even a thousand a night. Some of those houses are real palaces.”

Not all “snowbirds” are rich property owners. Some come for high-paying jobs in the tourism and construction sectors, others work as carpenters or electricians. The poorer ones live in camping tents in Sun Bay beach, in the island’s south coast.

Vieques has been experiencing a renaissance of sorts in its farming sector. New farm operations, both conventional and organic, have been sprouting up in recent years. One of these nouveau agricultural operations is the small company Hydro Organics, which is working a 30-acre farm called La Siembra de Vieques, located between the Lujan and Esperanza sectors.

La Siembra grows squash, green beans, papaya, moringa, avocado, coconut, eggplant, pineapple, guava and salad greens, among many other crops. Part of the labour is provided by woofers, international backpackers that travel from one farm to another, working in exchange for lodging and food. The farm is run according to the principles of permaculture, a discipline that combines ecological design and sustainable agriculture.

“We are getting started with community-supported agriculture,” said Hydro Organics farmer Vanessa Valedon. “We have consumer-investors who pay in advance for six months of our harvest.”

In Monte Carmelo, a hillside sector next to the old Navy firing range, is the farm of Jorge Cora. He has no running water or electricity and there is no paved road leading to his farm. He plants salad greens, okra, peppers, tomato, basil, neem, tobacco and beets, all without the use of agrochemicals.

“I get no government aid, not even food stamps,” said Cora, who prides himself on his independence. “If I can do all this with no chemicals or government help, I challenge conventional industrial farmers to do the same.”

But there is debate as to whether Vieques farm produce is safe to consume. Some point out that all of the island’s settlements are downwind from the old firing range, where shells of different calibres were exploded over 60 years, blowing up dust and debris contaminated with munitions toxic chemicals, which were carried by the winds and settled in the civilian area.

In the 1990s, the Puerto Rico Health Department determined that the cancer rate among Vieques residents was 26.9 percent above the national average. The anti-Navy movement attributed this anomaly to toxic pollution caused by military activities.

Biologist Arturo Massol, professor at the University of Puerto Rico and volunteer staffer at the non-governmental organisation Casa Pueblo, carried out peer-reviewed studies of military pollution in Vieques and how these toxins travel the marine and land food chains. He believes there is reason for concern, but advises that more studies need to be done.

“The soils in Vieques could be safe for farming, or maybe not. There is uncertainty,” he told IPS.

Massol declared that the Puerto Rican government has a duty to carry out soil tests to ascertain any toxic hazard. For its work with the people of Vieques and the anti-Navy protest movement, Casa Pueblo won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2002.

The gas pipeline would cross the central mountain range and the ecologically delicate karstic zone. Credit: d3b/CC BY 2.0

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
SAN JUAN, Jan 24 2012 (IPS)

As Puerto Rico seeks to lower soaring utility rates while simultaneously shifting toward cleaner energy sources, it faces grassroots opposition to two major projects even though at least one is 100-percent renewable.

Objections to the projects – a natural gas pipeline and wind installation – revolve mostly around their locations, underlining the complex interests involved in actually implementing changes to the island’s power grid.

The pipeline would start on the island’s south coast, head northwards through the central mountain range and the ecologically delicate karstic zone, and then eastwards into the densely populated San Juan metropolitan area.

Dubbed “Vía Verde” (Green Way) by the government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) and “el tubo de la muerte” (the tube of death) by its opponents, the project is more generally known as “el gasoducto” (the gas duct or pipeline).

PREPA holds a monopoly on electricity generation in the island, but since the 1990s it has purchased power from private facilities.

The government claims the gas pipeline will lower utility rates, which have skyrocketed in recent years, and reduce dependence on dirtier fossil fuels.

Most of the utility’s power is currently produced by thermoelectric facilities which use highly polluting petroleum-based fuels, like Bunker C and “destilado #2”.

“Natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel there is,” PREPA says, adding that it generates 64 percent less atmospheric pollutants than oil and is more economical.

Citing data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the utility says that natural gas will remain cheaper than oil and that world supplies will be sufficient for decades to come.

But Puerto Rico will be doing no more than trading one dangerous, non-renewable fossil fuel for another, says University of Puerto Rico professor Arturo Massol-Deya, one of the gas project’s most outspoken opponents.

“As an island we are in the dead end of oil dependence, and the government is trading that for the dead end of natural gas, when we have abundant sun, wind and water resources with which to generate the energy we need,” Massol-Deya told IPS.

Massol-Deya is spokesperson of Casa Pueblo, a grassroots community organisation in the mountain town of Adjuntas, which the proposed pipeline would bisect from south to north.

“We have strong, well-founded objections with regards to environmental impact, as well as safety in the face of inevitable natural challenges like steep slopes, flood-prone areas, high rainfall, geological faults and many more,” said Massol-Deya. “And besides, the savings of switching from one fuel to another will barely amount to one cent per kilowatt hour.”

Casa Pueblo and other groups opposed to the gas line are at pains to make clear that they do not necessarily oppose natural gas. They believe a transition can be made from thermoelectric power to natural gas without building a tube across the island.

The proposed “gasoducto” will begin in Ecoelectrica, a natural gas generator in Puerto Rico’s south coast that provides the island with about 13 percent of its electricity. Ecoelectrica, which commenced operations in 2000, is barely two kilometers away from Costa Sur, a PREPA thermoelectric complex that generates 30 percent of Puerto Rico’s electricity.

“Switching Costa Sur to natural gas would require no major modifications,” geographer Alexis Dragoni told IPS. “It would only require that the facility’s burners be replaced.”

Dragoni is a member of Casa Pueblo’s technical team.

Retrofitting Costa Sur to run on natural gas would have PREPA use gas for no less than 43 percent of its electricity, with no need for a “gasoducto” cutting across Puerto Rico. A pipeline has indeed been built from Ecoelectrica to supply gas to Costa Sur but its final segment, of about 50 metres, has yet to be built, said Dragoni.

The “Via Verde” pipeline is to be built by the Spain-based Fenosa Corporation, which bought Ecoelectrica from the controversial U.S.- based Enron in 2003.

The Casa Pueblo leaders are strong advocates of solar energy. All the organisation’s facilities in the town of Adjuntas have been powered by photovoltaic panels since 1999.

Renewables currently comprise a tiny fraction of Puerto’s Rico’s energy, with hydroelectricity the main source. Twenty-one hydro dams produce 1.8 percent of the island’s electricity.

However, the Santa Isabel wind power project is under fire from farmers, local communities and environmental groups, who have created an Agriculture Resistance Front (FRA).

The civil society coalition advocates for the protection of Puerto Rican farmland from threats like urban sprawl and the windmill project, which entails 44 to 65 windmills being built by the U.S.- based Pattern Energy Corporation in the heart of Puerto Rico’s fertile southern plains.

The windmills are expected to generate 75 megawatts, which Pattern claims can power 25,000 homes.

Construction of the wind project began in November. “They have already compacted the soil with their heavy machinery, they have destroyed the drip irrigation system and damaged the topsoil, which takes centuries to form. The best agricultural lands are slipping from our hands,” said FRA member Karla Acosta.

According to FRA spokesman and UPR student Warys Zayas, “The project will impact between 3,500 and 3,700 cuerdas.” (3,700 cuerdas equals 3,594 acres) “The area affected will include not only the windmills’ bases, which together would occupy 21 cuerdas, but also the area within a radius of 1.6 kilometers of each windmill base.”

FRA cites U.S. Agricultural Census data that indicate that Puerto Rico has already lost 19 percent of its farmland between 2002 and 2007, as well as studies by University of Puerto Rico professor Myrna Covas on food security, which estimate that local agriculture produces no more than 15 percent of the food Puerto Rico residents consume – the rest is imported.

Food security advocates are alarmed by these figures, given that with approximately 350 inhabitants per square kilometre, Puerto Rico is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Population has more or less doubled in the last 40 years, environmentalist Juan Rosario of Mision Industrial told IPS.

Santa Isabel has some of Puerto Rico’s top farmland, generating some 30 million dollars in crops per year including tomatoes, peppers, melons, mangoes and onions. Farms provide about 3,000 jobs in the region, according to farmer Ramón González, president of the PR Farm Bureau (Asociación de Agricultores).

“We must not destroy the few lands that feed us,” added FRA spokesperson María Viggiano. “We suggest that the windmills be placed on lands that have already been industrialised and have no agricultural value.”

With regards to energy alternatives, there is no consensus among local experts and activists as to what would work. FRA does not oppose wind energy, just as long as such projects are not placed on farm land.

However, other groups do not favour wind power and see better alternatives elsewhere.

“We oppose wind energy projects. Wind is an intermittent, unpredictable energy source,” activist José Francisco Sáez-Cintrón told IPS. “We support other options like solar, hydroelectric, tidal power and ocean thermal energy.”

Sáez-Cintrón is spokesperson for the Coalición Pro Bosque Seco, a group that seeks the protection of the Guánica Dry Forest, in the island’s southwest. The organisation opposes a wind energy project proposed for the forest’s immediate vicinity.

“But what is even more important is to educate about energy consumption,” he added. “Renewable energies can be no more than a complement to fossil fuel sources.”

“By implementing policies to save energy we can get six to 10 times the cost savings of renewable energy,” said Luis Silvestre of the Puerto Rico Ornithological Society. “They require a much smaller investment and do not lead to debt.”

“Renewable energies cannot possibly lower utility rates. That can be achieved with operational improvements in the utility, as well as modifications of the currently existing grid.”

*This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

The political ground is shifting under the campaign to end the U.S. Navy’s use of the inhabited island of Vieques as a bombing range.

The Sep. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the wave of public sympathy and international coalition building that have ensued, have left civil society organisations here wondering how to rally Puerto Rican and U.S. public opinion to their cause.

The local health, environmental, social and political consequences of U.S. forces use of Vieques to practice bombing from sea, air, and land has drawn widespread concern and condemnation from international peace and environmental groups.

The majority of voters here also have called for the Navy’s withdrawal, prompting President George W. Bush to announce earlier this year that the U.S. would do so by May 2003.

Activists now fear, however, that the U.S. defence department will use Washington’s “war” on international terrorism to remain on Vieques indefinitely, even as local right-wing groups use the attacks to argue for keeping the Navy here.

“We condemn the opportunism of local politicians who are already trying to use the tragedy to push their small-minded agendas, like their defense of the U.S. Navy’s presence in Vieques”, said Jorge Farinacci, a former political prisoner and spokesperson for the Puerto Rico Socialist Front.

Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States. Its residents have U.S. citizenship and can join the U.S. military but can’t vote in presidential elections, and have no vote in the U.S. Congress, where their delegate has only observer status.

On the day after the terrorist attacks, local anti-Navy organizations met in assembly and decided to declare a moratorium on civil disobedience, at least until they agree on a new course of action appropriate to the new circumstances.

“This is for our security”, said Vieques community leader Ismael Guadalupe. “They’ll shoot first and ask questions later. We don’t want them to shoot a protester and then claim they believed it was a terrorist.”

“We Puerto Ricans are not enemies of the American people”, added Doris Pizarro, spokesperson of the Nuevo Movimiento Independentista, a group seeking independence from the United States. “In Vieques, terror has also been sown among the children and among a whole innocent people.”

“The commitment to peace, exemplified through civil disobedience, international cooperation and the quest for fair political solutions, is the best alternative to face the terrorist threats of the twenty-first century,” she added.

The Socialist Front’s Farinacci assailed Governor Sila Calderón’s public statements to the effect that violence is not the answer while at the same time fully supporting Bush’s stated intention to launch a “war” of retaliation.

“The Puerto Rican people want peace, but they know that it won’t come with military agression and bombings”, Farinacci said. “Peace will only come from a radical change in U.S. foreign policy.”

Ricardo Olivero, a University of Puerto Rico student leader who has organised marches against the U.S. military’s recruitment of students, said he fears the Sep. 11 attacks will lead to more domestic surveillance and repression by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

“They’ll reinforce the policies of constant surveillance against any group that doesn’t agree with the policies of the U.S.”, said Olivero. “Groups the seek peace for Vieques will be particularly affected.”

“We must redouble our anti-military activism and at the same time must be cautious,” he added. “The repressive wave coming our way will touch everyone in the left, or who just appears to be in the left.”