Democracy in Egypt, Repression in Puerto Rico

By Robert Meeropol

Rosenberg Fund for Children

February 15, 2011

http://www.rfc.org/blog/article/877

Luisa (a pseudonym) has been receiving Rosenberg Fund for
Children (RFC, www.rfc.org) support since she was 15 years
old. She's now a student at the University of Puerto Rico
(UPR), the largest university in the Caribbean and the
premier Spanish-speaking institution of higher learning
under the control of the United States. Recently she's been
in touch with our staff and a Board Member because the
computer we purchased for her when she entered college three
years ago required repair. When our Board Member called her
last week to get details, he heard screaming in the
background when Luisa answered. Luisa said she couldn't talk
because she was running from pepper spray and police with
night sticks. (She got away....)

Since December hundreds of UPR students have been passively
occupying their campus to protest massive tuition increases
that have made it impossible for almost one third of the
undergraduates (5000 out of 16,000) to re-enroll in classes
this semester. The students have not been destructive, even
organizing brigades to keep the campus clean. But the
government decided to attack them. The parent of another RFC
beneficiary wrote on January 27th: "Levels of violence used
against Puerto Rican non-violent striking students have
risen exponentially. I strongly urge you to open the photos
and videos (available at http://pr.indymedia.org/) of
yesterday's actions, brought to you by the incredible press
people of Puerto Rico, who were also subject to direct
police threats ... [and] were physically attacked, just as
the students were."

Police attacks on the students and journalists echo those
that took place in Cairo, except none of the national
television networks in the United States chose to broadcast
the photos and videos of Puerto Rico that were readily
available to them. Repression in Cairo was headline news,
but similar attacks on non-violent students in our Puerto
Rican colony were swept under the rug. Videos from UPR show
police firing rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper spray, as
well as applying pressure point holds to the non-resisting
students' necks to cause intense pain. Women's groups joined
the protests after videos were released of police groping a
female student's breasts.

Meanwhile, the conservative Republican Governor Luis Fortuño
of Puerto Rico was on a Heritage Foundation-sponsored trip
to California. He became a most-favored Latino leader in the
Republican Party after he laid off 20,000 public sector
employees and began systematically dismantling UPR, which
just happens to be a center of liberal and left-wing
activity.

The student strike continued into this month despite the
police violence. On February 7th police armed to the teeth
with shotguns, rifles, and submachine guns were forced to
retreat when the students were reinforced by union members.
To protect the students, the workers formed a human chain
that even the masked SWAT team could not break.

Our federal government's and national media's willful
blindness to what is happening within what is technically
United States territory, while focusing its attention on
Egypt, is monumental hypocrisy. These students are
struggling to save their university. They are risking their
bodies, and even their lives, so they can attend school! It
is past time for all progressives to speak up in support of
these courageous young people.

[Robert Meeropol is the younger son of Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg. In 1953, when he was six years old, the United
States Government executed his parents for "conspiring to
steal the secret of the atomic bomb." Since 1990 he has
served as the Executive Director of the Rosenberg Fund for
Children (www.rfc.org), a non-profit, public foundation that
provides for the educational and emotional needs of both
targeted activist youth and children in this country whose
parents have been harassed, injured, jailed, lost jobs or
died in the course of their progressive activities.]

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