The Rio Piedras Massacre 1935

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

On October 24, 1935, University of Puerto Rico students held a meeting to discuss their relationship with Pedro Albizu Campos and the Nationalist Party. To insure a “peaceful” gathering, General Winship’s police surrounded the campus in Rio Piedras and stationed themselves on every street corner with carbines, tear gas, and machine guns.

At 10:30 AM, before the meeting started, several police cars intercepted a sedan with four Nationalists inside. Several more police cars pulled up, a squad of officers surrounded the car, and all of them started shooting.

The entire island was outraged. Speaking to 8,000 mourners, Albizu Campos accused General Winship and his police chief, Colonel Riggs, of deliberate murder.

Governor Winship Strike Breaker - January 1934

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

On January 12, 1934, President Roosevelt appointed General Blanton Winship, a retired army general, as governor of Puerto Rico. General Winship was not sent to Puerto Rico to negotiate. He was sent to crush labor strikes, subdue Nationalists, and kill them if necessary. It didn’t take long before he did just that.

From the moment he arrived, General Winship proceeded to militarize the entire island. He urged the building of a naval air base and created new, vigorous police-training camps. He added hundreds of men to the insular police force, equipping every unit with machine guns, tear gas, and riot gear, and painted their cars a suggestive new color: blood red. The new police uniforms resembled those of WWII military officers. The FBI initiated round-the-clock surveillance of the Nationalist leadership. An additional 115 Insular Police were armed with carbines, submachine guns, and grenades. Nationalists were imprisoned for “incitement to riot” against the United States.

 

Albizu Meets Chief of Police Riggs – January 1934

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

A few days after the speech, Colonel Riggs, the police chief of Puerto Rico, invited Albizu Campos to lunch at the El Escambron Beach Club. Albizu had already heard about Riggs, the heir to the Riggs National Bank fortune, a Yale-educated gentleman. Throughout Central America the Riggs National Bank was suspected of laundering money for right-wing dictators, bribing entire legislatures, destabilizing populist regimes, and financing military coups disguised as “revolutions” on behalf of the United Fruit Company. Riggs had just come from Nicaragua, where he’d been advising a budding dictator named Anastasio Somoza, who, one month later, on February 21, 1934, would assassinate Augusto Sandino.

Riggs tripled the size of the Insular Police force and armed its officers with grenade launchers, machine guns, carbines, and 12-guage shotguns. In addition, he recruited over a hundred FBI agents to follow Albizu all over the island and infiltrate the Nationalist Party.

On January 18, 1934, one week after his speech, Albizu met with Riggs. Riggs offered to donate $150,000 to the Nationalist Party, to ensure that Albizu won the Senate seat that year or in 1936, and to make Albizu governor of Puerto Rico within ten years. In exchange, Albizu would back down and lets Riggs take care of the strike. Albizu told him Puerto Rico was not for sale, at least not by him.

In January 1934, the Nationalist Party led an agricultural strike that paralyzed the island’s sugar economy for a full month. Alarmed US corporations and sugar syndicates cabled President Roosevelt that “a state of actual anarchy exists. Towns in state of siege, police impotent, business paralyzed.”

Note: Google 'Police Chief Riggs' and it hits memorials of fallen law enforcement. The man was a brutal tyrant, not to be memorialized.

Pedro Albizu Campos – Nationalist Party President - Speech January 1934

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

In 1930, Albizu became president of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico. The Nationalists were dedicated to one overwhelming cause: achieving independence for Puerto Rico as quickly and unconditionally as possible. This included the reclamation of all Puerto Rican lands, the nationalization of all banks, the reinstatement of Spanish as the primary language of public school instruction, and the elimination of tariff payments to the United States.

This platform of unconditional independence became more compelling as the Great Depression swept through Puerto Rico, and hunger gripped the island. As the great Depression deepened, the US banks that controlled Puerto Rico’s sugar plantations cut wages all over the island. Starvation was rampant, and during the last six months of 1933, eighty-five strikes and protests erupted in the tobacco, needlework, and transportation industries. The bitterest conflict, however, was in the cane fields.

On January 11, 1934, Albizu, as head of the Nationalists Party, addressed a crowd of 6,000 people. Albizu spoke to the people for two hours about their work, their land, and their island. He recited “Puerto Rico, Puerto Pobre,” a poem by Pablo Neruda. El Emparcial ran his entire speech on its front page. When he finished, the crowd of 6,000 applauded for over five minutes and asked him to lead the workers through the bitter sugar cane strike. In a twentieth-century version of David versus Goliath, Albizu Campos and the Nationalists were waging a revolution against the most powerful nation in history.

Note: Google his speech, not easy to find, but worth reading once found.

Cancer Transplanting 1931 - Dr. Cornelius Rhoads

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, Harvard Medical School, joined the newly formed Rockefeller Anemia Commission to set up a research laboratory in San Juan Presbyterian Hospital. Shortly after his arrival in San Juan, on the night of November 10, 1931, Rhoads got drunk at a party. He emerged to find his car stripped and the tires flat. When he returned to his lab that night, in a foul mood and still drunk, he scrawled a note to a friend named Fred Stewart, who was a medical researcher in Boston:

I can get a damn fine job here and I am tempted to take it. It would be ideal except for the Puerto Ricans – they are beyond a doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men to inhabit this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them. They are even lower than the Italians. What the island needs is not public health work, but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the entire population. It might not be livable. I have done my best to further the process of their extermination by killing off eight and transplanting cancer into several more… All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.

The letter was discovered and created an uproar. La Democracia and El Mundo published a photograph of Rhoads’s letter. Copies were sent to the governor of Puerto Rico, the League of Nations, the Pan-American Union, the American Civil Liberties Union, newspapers, foreign embassies, and the Vatican. They were offered as evidence of systemic and lethal US racism toward Puerto Ricans.

Rhoads was never indicted and suffered no professional consequences for his actions. During WWII, he was commissioned as a colonel and assigned as chief of medicine in the Chemical Weapons Division of the US Army. It positioned him as a talented biological warrior and created a niche for him in US medical and military circles. In 1949, Rhoads was featured on the cover of the June 27 issue of Time magazine. Puerto Ricans, to their astonishment, realized that exterminating eight Puerto Ricans and transplanting cancer into several more had been an excellent career mover for Rhoads.

 

Pedro Albizu Campos – Rise of a Nationalist

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

Ponce’s La Cantera was one of the island’s poorest districts. Albizu rented a wooden house on a dirt road and from a hill behind his house, he could see the Central Constancia sugar cane plantation. The vista showed an infinity of cane: thousands of rows, multiplied in successive mirrors, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Albizu was practicing poverty law, and his clients were simple people – mostly sugar can workers and jibaros – who paid with chickens, vegetables, and sometimes a simple thank-you. Albizu had no savings or property, but he was building something more important: a reputation as a man of principle, a man who could be trusted. This reputation grew when he started writing for El Nacionalista de Ponce and advocating for independence around the island.

From 1927 to 1930, he traveled to Cuba, Panama, Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, campaigning and networking for his revolution. When he spoke about US banks owning Puerto Ricans’ land, the US Navy controlling their borders, the US Congress writing their laws, and US companies paying them starvation wages in the sugar fields, everyone knew what he was talking about.

 

Pedro Albizu Campos – Harvard Law 1921

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

Albizu was born out of wedlock to a local mestizo named Julian Campos, who died when he was four. His father was a wealthy merchant who refused to acknowledge his dark-skinned son, so Albizu ran barefoot through the Barrio Tenerias of Ponce. His maternal Aunt, Rosa Campos, adopted him.

In 1914, Pedro Albizu Campos became the first Puerto Rican to be admitted to Harvard College. He wrote articles for the Christian Science Monitor and was voted president of the Cosmopolitan Club, which sponsored visits from foreign scholars and dignitaries. An exceptional student, he graduated with honors in 1916 and was admitted to Harvard Law School.

When the United States entered WWI, Albizu volunteered and served as a first lieutenant in the US Army. He helped to organize and train the Third Battalion Infantry of Puerto Rico and was the only “colored” officer at Camp las Casas, the army training base on the island. Both in the army and during a military tour through the American South, Albizu encountered widespread racism.

By the time he returned to law school in 1919, Albizu had made a decision, he would never be one of ”them.” The United States would never take him, his people, or his homeland seriously. Albizu devoted himself to the cause of Puerto Rican independence.

In 1921, Albizu graduated from law school as class valedictorian and received multiple job offers. Albizu refused them all and returned to his hometown of Ponce to pursue his growing obsession: the independence of Puerto Rico.

Nationalist Party Founded 1912

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

Founded in 1912, the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico quickly developed a clear and elegantly simple political platform: the complete and unconditional independence of Puerto Rico from the United States. Their objective was not outright military victory; rather, the aimed to focus international attention on the colonial status of Puerto Rico.

The Cadet Corps was the official youth branch of the Nationalist Party. By 1936, over 10,000 cadets were marching and training in twenty-one towns. All of them reported to Pedro Albizu Campos, the president of the Nationalist Party. The Cadets of the Republic also had a female component, the Nurse Corps of the Liberating Army, also known as the Daughters of Freedom.

Nearly every cadet and nurse, except for the officers, was between fourteen and twenty-five years old. The cadets posed no danger to the US regime. But they did represent a symbolic threat – and so, until the mid-twentieth century, many were shot and killed in police stations and at Palm Sunday parades, in town squares and dark alleys, in broad daylight and at dawn.

First Civilian Governor 1900 – King of Sugar

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

Charles Herbert Allen was the first civilian governor of Puerto Rico [1900-1901]. Though he never served in the armed forces, he loved to dress in military regalia and have people address him as “colonel.” He arrived like a Roman conqueror with a naval cannon salute, infantry band, and hundreds of armed men. During his one year as governor, he developed a passion for business. He wrote:

Puerto Rico is a beautiful island with its natural resources undeveloped, and its population unfit to assume the management of their own affairs.

The yield of sugar per acre is greater than in any other country in the world.

On September 15, 1901, Allen resigned as governor. He then headed straight to Wall Street, where he joined the House of Morgan as vice president. He built the largest sugar syndicate in the world, and his hundreds of political appointees in Puerto Rico provided him with land grants, tax subsidies, water rights, railroad easements, foreclosure sales, and favorable tariffs. He used his governorship to acquire an international sugar empire and a controlling interest in the entire Puerto Rican economy.

By 1907 his syndicate, the American Sugar Refining Company, owned or controlled 98 percent of the sugar-processing capacity in the United States and was known as the Sugar Trust. Today his company is known as Domino Sugar.

Yale Historian Bailey W. Diffie noted in 1931, “land has passed into the hands of a few large corporations. The sugar industry, tobacco manufacturing, fruit growing, banks, railroads, public utilities, steamship lines, and many lesser businesses are completely dominated by outside capital. The men who own the sugar companies control both the Bureau of Insular Affairs and the Legislature of Puerto Rico.”

Sugar Conquest

Puerto Rican Series

Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, 1971

Undoubtedly gold and silver were the main motivating force in the Conquest, but Columbus on his second voyage brought the first sugarcane roots from the Canary Islands and planted them in what is now the Dominican Republic. For almost three centuries after the discovery of America no agricultural product had more importance for European commerce than American sugar. Cane fields were planted in the warm, damp littoral of Northeast Brazil; then in the Caribbean islands – Barbados, Jamaica, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Guadeloupe, Cuba, and Puerto Rico – and in Veracruz and the Peruvian coast, which proved to be ideal terrain for the “white gold.”

Legions of slaves came from Africa to provide King Sugar with the prodigal, wageless labor he required: human fuel for the burning. The land was devastated by this selfish plant which invaded the New World, felling forests, squandering natural fertility, and destroying accumulated soil humus.

The demand for sugar produced the plantation, an enterprise motivated by its proprietor’s desire for profit and placed at the service of the international market Europe was organizing. Internally, however, the plantation was feudal in many important aspects, and its labor force consisted mainly of slaves.

It was the fate of the “sugar islands” – Barbados, the Leewards, Trinidad-Tobago, Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Santo Domingo – to be incorporated one by one into the world market and condemned to sugar until our day. Grown on a grand scale, sugar spreads its blight on a grand scale and today unemployment and poverty are these islands’ permanent guests.

Hurricane Ciriaco 1898 – Disaster Capitalism

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts 

Shortly after the 1898 US invasion, Hurricane San Ciriaco, one of the largest in Caribbean history, destroyed thousands of Puerto Rico farms and nearly the entire 1898 coffee bean crop.

The United States sent no money. Instead, it outlawed all Puerto Rican currency and declared the island’s peso with a global value equal to the US dollar, to be worth only sixty American cents. Every Puerto Rican lost 40 percent of his or her savings overnight. Then, in 1901, a colonial land tax known as the Hollander Bill forced many small farmers to mortgage their lands with US banks.

Interest rates were so high, that within a decade, the farmers defaulted on their loans, and the banks foreclosed. These banks then turned a diversified island harvest – coffee, tobacco, sugar, pineapple, and other fruits – into a one-crop cow. That crop was sugar. The very first civilian governor of Puerto Rico, Charles Herbert Allen, used his brief tenure to become the King of Sugar.

Charter of Autonomy 1897 – Spanish American War 1898

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

In 1897, the Spanish prime minister signed the Charter of Autonomy which granted Puerto Rico the right to its own legislature, constitution, tariffs, monetary system, treasury, judiciary, and international borders. After 400 years of colonial rule, the charter created the free Republic of Puerto Rico. Elections for the new legislature were held in March 1898, and the new government was scheduled for installation in May.

On May 12, 1898, cannon blasts awakened everyone in San Juan as twelve US battleships, destroyers, and torpedo boats bombarded the city. San Juan became a ghost town as 30,000 residents fled the city. The Spanish-American War, declared by the United States on April 25, had arrived in Puerto Rico. On July 21, 1898, the US government issued a press release stating, “Puerto Rico will be kept, once taken it will never be released. It will pass forever into the hands of the United States.” On July 28, 1898, General Nelson Appleton Miles, commander in chief of the American army, marched into Ponce.

The national US perception was clear: Puerto Ricans were ignorant, uncivilized, morally bankrupt, and utterly incapable of self-rule. The US would protect them, tame their savagery, manage their property, and deliver them from four hundred years of solitude. Eugenio Maria de Hostos, the great Puerto Rican educator, summed it up as follows: “How sad and overwhelming and shameful it is to see Puerto Rico go from owner to owner without ever having been her own master, and to see her pass from sovereignty to sovereignty without ever ruling herself.”

 

Spanish Rule 1493-1897

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

The abuse of the island started early. In 1493, Columbus made his second voyage to the New World with seventeen ships, 1200 men, horses, cattle, guns, and smallpox. When he reached Puerto Rico, the Taino Indians welcomed Columbus, but they made a big mistake: they showed him some gold nuggets in a river and told him to take all he wanted. This started a gold rush.

Spain named the island Puerto Rico (meaning “Rich Port”) and invaded with embroidered bibles and African slaves. They enslaved the Tainos as well: every Taino over the age of fourteen had to produce a hawk’s bell of gold every three months or have their hands cut off.

Three centuries later there were no Tainos left, but the situation hadn’t changed much. In 1812, the Spanish constitution was extended to Puerto Rico, and the island became a province of Spain. In 1823, it was abolished. In 1824, the Spanish governor was given absolute power over Puerto Rico.

On September 23, 1868, nearly 1000 men rose up in the town of Lars to demand independence from Spain. By midnight they’d taken over the municipal seat of government, deposed the Spanish officials, arrested the Spanish merchants, and hauled them off to jail. The next afternoon, the Spanish militia from nearby Pepino routed the rebels.

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Puerto Rico Series

This series excerpts from a few books [War Against All Puerto Ricans being a primary source] and lays a groundwork of historical reference. Puerto Ricans have clashed with the United States before, an assassination attempt of President Truman and fired shots in the House of Representatives, wounding five lawmakers. There are significant Puerto Rican communities in the United States, especially in NYC, Bay Area, and Hawaii. Puerto Ricans span all ethnicities, all colors.

Before the 2020 earthquakes and even before the 2017 hurricane that largely destroyed the island's electrical grid, Puerto was on the horizon for debt default, and the debt still exists even after earthquakes and hurricane, no forgiveness. The Puerto Rican debt crisis is still a dominating issue.

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

Spanish Rule 1493-1897

Charter of Autonomy 1897 – Spanish American War 1898

Hurricane Ciriaco 1898 – Disaster Capitalism

Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, 1971, Excerpts

Sugar Conquest

War Against All Puerto Ricans

First Civilian Governor 1900 – King of Sugar

Nationalist Party Founded 1912

Pedro Albizu Campos – Harvard Law 1921

Pedro Albizu Campos – Rise of a Nationalist

Cancer Transplanting 1931

Pedro Albizu Campos – Nationalist Party President - Speech January 1934

Albizu Meets Chief of Police Riggs – January 1934

Governor Winship Strike Breaker - January 1934

The Rio Piedras Massacre 1935

Police Chief Riggs Assassinated 1935

Female Sterilization 1937

The Ponce Massacre - Palm Sunday March 21,1937

The Ponce Massacre - Photographed and Filmed

The Ponce Massacre Museum

Albizu Imprisonment – 1937 to1943

Albizu Returns to Puerto Rico – 1947

Gag Law 1948

Lolita Lebron

The Battle for Paradise

Puerto Rican Debt in the News

Further Lucifer Effect Resources

Lucifer Effect Series

Books:

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills

Cold War to the Terror War by Alfred McCoy, photographs from Abu Ghraib.

Escape from Freedom by Eric Fromm, first step a fascist leader takes in a democratic society.

The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib by Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel.

Oath Betrayed by Steven H. Miles professor of medicine and bioethics.

Without Sanctuary, a documentary catalogue of lynching postcards

Photography of the Holocaust by Janina Struk

Film:

Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment [1985]

Das Experiment is a German film based on the SPE that has been widely shown around the world.

Repetition by Polish artist ArturZmijewski. A forty-six minute film that highlights the seven days paid volunteers spent in his mock prison.

Faces of the Enemy, Sam Keen show how archetypes of the enemy are created by visual propaganda that most nations use against those judged to be the dangerous “them,” “outsiders,” “enemies.”

The Marine Machine a full, graphic depiction of the making of a Marine by William Mares

The Wave, a powerful docudrama of this simulated Nazi experience captured the transformation of good kids into pseudo Hitler Youth.

Suicide Killers by French filmmaker Pierre Rehov viewed many Palestinians in Israeli jails who were caught before detonating thier bombs or had abetted would-be attacks.

Links:

www.lucifereffect.com

www.prisonexp.org

Quotes:

We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil. Martin Luther King

Milgram’s Authority Study

Lucifer Effect Series

The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963.

The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram

Harpers 1974

The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts

Methods from Milgram’s paradigm:

- Prearranging some form of contractual obligation, verbal or written, to control the individual’s behavior in pseudo-legal fashion.

- Giving participants meaningful roles to play that carry with them previously learned values and automatically activate response scripts [teacher, guard]

- Presenting basic rules to be followed that seem to make sense before their actual use but then can be used arbitrarily and impersonally to justify mindless compliance.

- Altering the semantics of the act, the actor, and the action. Replacing unpleasant reality with desirable rhetoric, gilding the frame so that the real picture is disguised.

- Creating opportunities for the diffusion of responsibility or abdication of responsibility for negative outcomes; others will be held responsible.

- Starting the path toward the ultimate evil act with a small, seemingly insignificant first step, the easy “foot in the door” that swings open subsequent greater compliance pressures, and leads down a slippery slope.

- Increasing steps on the pathway that are gradual.

- Gradually changing the nature of the authority figure from initially “just” reasonable to “unjust” and demanding, even irrational.

- Making the “exit costs” high and making the process of exiting difficult by allowing verbal dissent, which makes people feel better about themselves while insisting on behavioral compliance.

- Offering an ideology, or a big lie, to justify the use of any means to achieve the seemingly desirable, essential goal. Most nations rely on ideology, typically, “threats to national security,” before going to war or to suppress dissident political opposition. - When citizens fear that their national security is being threatened, they become willing to surrender their basic freedoms to a government that offers them that exchange. Erich Fromm’s classic analysis in Escape from Freedom made us aware of this trade-off, which Hitler and other dictators have long used to gain and maintain power: namely, the claim that they will be able to provide security in exchange for citizens giving up their freedoms, which will give them the ability to control things better.

- There are no male-female gender differences in obedience.