Puerto Rico

On Tuesday June 23, the Special Decolonization Committee of the United Nations heard 30 petitioners who came to denounce from various perspectives the colonial situation of Puerto Rico. For the 34th time the UN committee approved a resolution requesting that the United States allow Puerto Rico to exercise its right to self-determination and independence. In 1953, the U.S. and colonial administrators lied to the UN in order to get Puerto Rico off the list of territories which still had not achieved self-determination.

Miami Herald caption: "People walk through the streets after Puerto Rican Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla gave a speech regarding the government's $72 billion debt on June 29, 2015 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

By Carlos Borrero | CounterPunch | March 12, 2015 The significance of a recently divulged plan of the Pentagon to carry out military exercises in Puerto Rico under the name “Operation Borinquen Response” between the 14th and 21st of this month must not be underestimated. On the pretext of the need to prepare for a […]

Weekly News Update on the Americas | January 5, 2015 As of Dec. 11 authorities had closed the Playa Grande beach area in the western region of a national wildlife refuge on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques following the discovery of pieces of inactive munitions there. The US Environmental Protection Agency said the US […]

There is no principle in international law more fundamental than the right of all peoples to self-determination. This is universally accepted by the entire world, yet nearly 70 years after the signing of the UN Charter, the United States continues to fight tooth and nail against this most basic human right.
On December 18, the U.S. was one of only seven countries to vote against a UN General Assembly resolution that passed with 180 votes affirming the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.

It is time to get Oscar Lopez Rivera out of prison.  He has been unjustly locked in prison for 33 years and is the subject of my most recent collaboration.

About Oscar López Rivera

With the holiday season underway and Eric Holder on his way out the door as Attorney General, many Puerto Ricans are stepping up their calls for President Barack Obama to pardon 71-year-old political prisoner Oscar López Rivera, who has spent the last 33 years behind bars for seditious conspiracy.

Note — I have not done this out of country thing for a long time. I used to travel when it was $10 a day, when sleepy fishing villages were villages and sleepy, when you could hitchhike to Panama from Nogales. Later days, really.
These 57 years of living have SEEN a whole lot, sometimes enough. So, saved up for honeymoon, postponed a year: in Puerto Rico for a week and then St. John Virgin Islands for another week. Of course, I am pumped up with stories, articles, poems, dirges, the whole nine yards.

Resistance to the global corporate education reform movement gained momentum last month as nearly 200 educators, students, and community allies from Mexico, Canada, and the US gathered in Chicago for the 11th Trinational Conference in Defense of Public Education.

Puerto Rico, is usually thought of as a tourism destination or is usually invisible in the U.S. media. In recent times, its fiscal and economic crisis has led to show up in the business pages of the mainstream media with inaccurate comparisons with Detroit or Greece whose fiscal crisis had attracted much media attention. As usual, the mainstream press looks at the illness without looking at the root causes. And the comparisons are usually risky because they tend to ignore history and the nuances of each case.