Powerful memorial honors slain Machetero leader

It was standing-room-only Nov. 18 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Labor Center here in Manhattan as hundreds of supporters of Puerto Rico’s liberation from U.S. colonial rule gathered to pay tribute to the assassinated Filiberto Ojeda Ríos.

Rafael Cancel Miranda

Comandante Ojeda Ríos was leader of the Popular Army of the People, commonly known as the Macheteros. He was killed on Sept. 23 in an FBI assault on his home in Puerto Rico.

The large attendance at this event was particularly noteworthy because the U.S. government has announced a witch hunt against pro-independence Puerto Ricans and their sympathizers. The threat of arrests has been openly publicized and widely distributed via Puerto Rican newspapers since the cold-blooded killing of 72-year-old Ojeda Ríos.

The U.S. government chose to carry out this assassination on Sept. 23—the date known in Puerto Rico as “el Grito de Lares” for the day in 1868 when Puerto Ricans began their struggle against Spanish colonial rule.

Antonio Camacho Negron

The New York event was sponsored by the September 23rd Pro-Independence Network, which includes ProLibertad, Socialist Front of New York, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party of New York (PNPR-JNY) and its youth section, October 27th Committee, Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), National Pro-Independence Movement Hostosiano (MINH), ANSWER, Socialist Workers Party, Party for Socialism and Liberation, International Action Center and Workers World Party.

Most of the talks were in Spanish, showing the militant nature of the struggle of Puerto Ricans to resist colonial occupation. Speakers included former political prisoners Rafael Cancel Miranda, Antonio Camacho Negrón and Pam Africa. Messages were heard from Ojeda Ríos’s widow, Elma Beatriz Rosada Barbosa, as well as imprisoned Black journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In a short videotape of an interview made in the 1990s, Ojeda Ríos thoughtfully explained the political basis for the clandestine movement to free Puerto Rico.

Attorney Roger Wareham of the D-12 Movement spoke, as did representatives from the PIP, the PNPR-JNY and its youth.

Rafael Cáncel Miranda, who had been in Cuba when the state-sponsored murder took place, began his remarks by stating to the crowded room that “being here makes me feel like fighting.” He continued that the FBI had “made a grave mistake because there isna bullet that can silence and kill a people who struggle and resist being conquered. The real terrorists are the North American [government] and the class that supports it.”

Even though the U.S. ruling class wishes to silence those who support independence, said Roxana Badillo from the PIP, the pro-independence movement is “alive and well and not dying as the press wishes to portray it.” She compared the tactics the U.S. government uses today to terrorize the Puerto Rican people to “that old and illegal COINTELPRO”—the “counter-intelligence program” used in the 1960s and 1970s to break up liberation movements in the U.S.

“Empires can seem omnipotent and all-powerful, but they are transitory, as history has shown us,” said Antonio Camacho Negrón. “What is not transitory is love and dignity. To be a revolutionary is to practice and function through the preservation of life.” The U.S. government “does not understand the depth and breadth of the assassination of Filiberto,” said Camacho.

The event included cultural performances by Don Divino, Yerbabuena and Prisionera and concluded with the singing of La Borinqueña.