Campos Meets Chief of Police Riggs – January 1934

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans

A few days after the speech, Colonel Riggs, the police chief of Puerto Rico, invited Campos to lunch at the El Escambron Beach Club. Campos 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, Campos met with Riggs. Riggs offered to donate $150,000 to the Nationalist Party, to ensure that Campos won the Senate seat that year or in 1936, and to make Campos governor of Puerto Rico within ten years. In exchange, Campos would back down and lets Riggs take care of the strike. Campos 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.

Campos – Nationalist Party President - Speech January 1934

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans

In 1930, Campos 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, Campos, as head of the Nationalists Party, addressed a crowd of 6,000 people. Campos 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, 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.

 

Campos – Rise of a Nationalist

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans

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.

Campos 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. Campos 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.

 

Campos – Harvard Law 1921

Puerto Rican Series

War Against All Puerto Ricans

Campos 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 Campos ran barefoot through the Barrio Tenerias of Ponce. His maternal Aunt, Rosa Campos, adopted him.

In 1914, 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, Campos encountered widespread racism.

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

In 1921, Campos graduated from law school as class valedictorian and received multiple job offers. Campos 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.”