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, including War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis 2015 and The Battle for Paradise by Naomi Klein 2018, and lays a groundwork of historical reference and conflict. Puerto Ricans have clashed with the United States before, including an assassination attempt of President Truman and fired shots in the House of Representatives that wounded 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 Hurricane Maria in 2017 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 Maria, no forgiveness. And the Puerto Rican debt crisis is still a dominating issue.

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015

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

Sugar Conquest

War Against All Puerto Ricans

First Civilian Governor 1900 – King of Sugar

Nationalist Party Founded - 1912

Campos – Harvard Law 1921

Campos – Rise of a Nationalist

Cancer Transplanting - 1931

Campos – Nationalist Party President - Speech January 1934

Campos 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 1937

The Ponce Massacre - Photographed and Filmed

Campos Imprisonment - 1937 to1943

Campos Returns to Puerto Rico - 1947

Gag Law 1948

Wikipedia

Attempted Assassination of Truman - 1950

United States Capitol Shooting - 1954

The Battle for Paradise by Naomi Klein 2018

Puerto Rican Debt - Pre Hurricane Maria - 2017

Puerto Rican Exodus – Post Hurricane Maria
Puertopia
Puerto Rico Organizing
Puerto Rico Agronomics
Puerto Rico Tax Haven

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.