The Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico (, PNPR) was a Puerto Rican political party founded on September 17, 1922, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.Reinaldo E. Gonzalez Blanco. El Turismo Cultural en Ponce durante el Plan Ponce en Marcha, 1900–2000. Neysa Rodriguez Deynes, Editor. Ponce, Puerto Rico: Professional Editions. 2018. p.15. Its primary goal was to work for Puerto Rico's independence. The Party's selection in 1930 of Pedro Albizu Campos as its president brought a radical change to the organization and its tactics.
In the 1930s, intimidation, repression and persecution of Party members by the government, then headed by a U.S. president-appointed governor, led to the assassination of two government officials, the attempted assassination of a federal judge in Puerto Rico, and the Rio Piedras and Ponce massacres. Under the leadership of Albizu Campos, the party abandoned the electoral process in favor of direct armed conflict as means to gain independence from the United States.
By the late 1940s, a more US-friendly party, the Partido Popular Democrático (PPD), had gained an overwhelming number of seats in the legislature and, in 1948, it passed Ley de la Mordaza (Gag Law), which attempted to suppress the Nationalist Party and similar opposition. The Puerto Rican police arrested many Nationalist Party members under this law, some of whom were sentenced to lengthy prison terms. With a new political status pending for Puerto Rico as a Commonwealth, Albizu Campos ordered armed uprisings in several Puerto Rican towns to occur on October 30, 1950. In a related effort, two Nationalists also attempted to assassinate US President Harry S. Truman on November 1, 1950, in an effort to call international attention to issues related to Puerto Rico's political status, but the attempt failed. The last major armed event by the Nationalists occurred in 1954 at the US House of Representatives when four party members shot and wounded five Congressmen.
After Albizu Campos's death in 1965, the party dissolved into factions and members joined other parties, but some continue to follow the party's ideals in one form or another, often informally or ad hoc, to this day.Protesta interrumpe mensaje del gobernador. Antonio R. Gómez. El Nuevo Dia. Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. 25 July 2013. Retrieved 25 July 2013.
Historical context
After four hundred years of colonial domination under the Spanish Empire, Puerto Rico received sovereignty in 1898 through a Carta de Autonomía (Charter of Autonomy). This Charter of Autonomy was signed by Spanish Prime Minister Práxedes Mateo Sagasta and ratified by the Spanish Cortes.Ribes Tovar et al., p.106–109 Despite this, just a few months later, the United States claimed ownership of the island as part of the Treaty of Paris which concluded the Spanish–American War.
Opponents to the colonial government argued that the profits generated by this arrangement were one-sided, enormous for the United States. [google.com]
When the war ended, U.S. President McKinley appointed Charles Herbert Allen as the first civilian governor of Puerto Rico. Though Allen had a business background, his financial administration of Puerto Rico was strikingly unsound. He ignored the appropriation requests of the Puerto Rican House of Delegates, refused to make any municipal, agricultural or small business loans, built roads at double the costs of preceding administrations, and left 85% of the school-age population without schools. Rather than making these requested infrastructure and education investments, Allen's budget raided the Puerto Rican treasury. His administration re-directed tax revenues to no-bid contracts for U.S. businessmen, railroad subsidies for U.S.-owned sugar plantations, and high salaries for U.S. bureaucrats in the island government.Thomas Aitken, Jr.; Luis Munoz Marin: Poet in the Fortress, pp. 60–61; Signet Books/New American Library, 1965Manuel Maldonado-Denis; Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation, pp. 70–76; Random House, 1972
Allen's financial acumen improved considerably when he returned to the U.S., and resumed his own personal business interests. In 1901, Allen resigned as governor and installed himself as president of the largest sugar-refining company in the world, the American Sugar Refining Company. This company was later renamed as the Domino Sugar company. In effect, Charles Allen leveraged his governorship of Puerto Rico into a controlling interest over the entire Puerto Rican economy.Ribes Tovar et al., p.122–144
In 1914, the Puerto Rican House of Delegates voted unanimously for independence from the United States. In 1917, the US Congress passed an act by which it granted citizenship to Puerto Rican residents. This was overwhelmingly opposed by the island's political leaders. Critics said the US was simply interested in increasing the size of its conscription pool to get soldiers for World War I.Manuel Maldonado-Denis; Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation, pp. 65–82; Random House, 1972
United States "Manifest Destiny"
By 1930, over 40 percent of all the arable land in Puerto Rico had been converted into sugar plantations, which were entirely owned by Domino Sugar Company and U.S. banking interests. These bank syndicates also owned the entire coastal railroad, and the San Juan international seaport.
This was not limited to Puerto Rico. By 1930 the United Fruit Company owned over one million acres of land in Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico and Cuba.Rich Cohen; The Fish That Ate the Whale; pub. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012; pp. 146–150 By 1940, in Honduras alone, the United Fruit Company owned 50 percent of all private land in the entire country. In Guatemala, the United Fruit Company owned 75 percent of all private land by 1942 – plus most of Guatemala's roads, power stations and phone lines, the only Pacific seaport, and every mile of railroad.Rich Cohen; The Fish That Ate the Whale; pub. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012; p. 174
The U.S. government supported all these economic exploits, and provided military "persuasion" whenever necessary.
Founding of the Nationalist Party
The origins of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party date to 1917, when a group of Union Party members in Ponce, dissatisfied with the attitude of the Union Party of Puerto Rico towards the "granting" of U.S. citizenship, formed the "Asociación Nacionalista de Ponce" (Ponce Nationalist Association). Among its founders were Guillermo Salazar, Rafael Matos Bernier, J. A. González, and Julio César Fernández. These men also founded the newspaper El Nacionalista.Neysa Rodriguez Deynes, Rafael J. Torres Torres and Carlos Aneiro Perez. Breviario sobre la Historia de Ponce y sus Principales Lugares de Interes. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Model Offset Printing. 1991. Page 63.
The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party was formed as a direct response to the American colonial government. In 1919, José Coll y Cuchí, a member of the Union Party of Puerto Rico, felt that the Union Party was not doing enough for the cause of Puerto Rican independence. Coll y Cuchí and some followers left to form the Nationalist Association of Puerto Rico in San Juan. Under Coll y Cuchí's presidency, the party convinced the Puerto Rican Legislative Assembly to approve an Act that would permit the transfer of the remains of the Puerto Rican patriot, Ramón Emeterio Betances, from Paris, France, to Puerto Rico.
The Legislative Assembly appointed Alfonso Lastra Charriez as its emissary since he had French heritage and spoke the language fluently. Betances' remains arrived in San Juan on August 5, 1920. A funeral caravan organized by the Nationalist Association transferred the remains from San Juan to the town of Cabo Rojo, where his ashes were interred by his monument.
By the 1920s, two other pro-independence organizations had formed on the Island: the Nationalist Youth and the Independence Association of Puerto Rico. The Independence Association was founded by José S. Alegría, Eugenio Font Suárez and Leopoldo Figueroa in 1920. On September 17, 1922, these three political organizations joined forces and formed the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Coll y Cuchi was elected president and José S. Alegría (father of Ricardo Alegría) vice-president.
In 1924, Pedro Albizu Campos joined the party and was named vice-president. Alegría was named Nationalist Party president in 1928 and held that position until 1930. By 1930, disagreements between Coll y Cuchi and Albizu Campos as to how the party should be run, led the former and his followers to leave and return to the Union Party. Albizu Campos did not like what he considered to be Coll y Cuchí's attitude of fraternal solidarity with the enemy.Luis Muñoz Marín, By A. W. Maldonado, Pg. 86, Publisher: La Editorial, Universidad de Puerto Rico, (December 1, 2006), , On May 11, 1930, Pedro Albizu Campos was elected president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party.
The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party maintained that, as a matter of international law, the Treaty of Paris following the Spanish–American War could not have empowered the Spanish to "give" to the US what was no longer theirs. Under Albizu Campos's leadership during the years of the Great Depression, the party became the largest independence movement in Puerto Rico.
In the mid-1930s, there were disappointing electoral results and strong repression by the territorial police authorities. The party staged some protests that developed into celebrated incidents because of police overreaction: The October 1935 Rio PiedrasThe Imprisonment of Men and Women Fighting Colonialism, 1898 – 1958: 1930 – 1940. Retrieved 18 October 2012. and the Ponce massacres. In these, government forces fired on unarmed civilians.Rovira, "Remember the 1950 Uprising of October 30: Puerto Rico"Victor Villanueva, "Colonial Memory and the Crime of Rhetoric: Pedro Albizu Campos" . Washington State University, Program in American Studies. Common Reading Assignment. Also in College English, Volume 71, Number 6. July 2009. National Council of Teachers of English. (Also appearing as "Colonial Research: A Preamble to a Case Study" in "Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process", Gesa Kirsch and Liz Rohan, editors. Southern Illinois University Press.) Page 636. Retrieved 21 October 2012. After the Río Piedras massacre, in December 1935, Albizu Campos announced that the Nationalist Party would withdraw from electoral participation while the United States kept control. Albizu Campos began to advocate direct, violent revolution.
Nationalist Party during 1930–1950 Nationalist Party partisans were involved in a variety of dramatic and violent confrontations between 1930 and 1950:
In the 1930s, the party founded the official youth organization Cadetes de la República, headed by Raimundo Díaz Pacheco, and the Hijas de la Libertad (Daughters of Freedom), the women's branch of the Cadetes and in which Julia de Burgos served as secretary general. On April 6, 1932, Nationalist partisans marched into the Capitol building in San Juan to protest a legislative proposal to establish the current Puerto Rican flag as the official flag of the insular government. Nationalists preferred the flag used during the Grito de Lares. A melée ensued in the building, and one partisan fell to his death from a second floor interior balcony. The protest was condemned by the legislators Rafael Martínez Nadal and Santiago Iglesias; and endorsed by others, including the future leader of the statehood party, Manuel García Méndez.
On October 24, 1935, a confrontation with police at University of Puerto Rico campus in Río Piedras resulted in the deaths of 4 Nationalist partisans and one policeman. The event is known as the Río Piedras massacre. This and other events led the party to announce on December 12, 1935, a boycott of all elections held while Puerto Rico remained part of the United States.