UPR strike offensive starts to expose hidden scandals

University of Puerto Rico, Feb. 14. Photo: Omar Rodríguez Ortíz / estudiantesinforman.com

Some 15,000 people defied the administration’s ruling Feb. 12 and marched into the Rio Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico to demand that the police be removed from campus and to reject the imposition of the $800 tuition hike that excludes more than 10,000 students from university education. This led to one more victory. On Feb. 14 Gov. Luis Fortuño ordered police out of the campus. The following vivid description of these events by Puerto Rican investigative reporter Jesús Dávila for NCM News is slightly condensed here.

The orgy of violence unleashed by the national police in an effort to contain the student uprising had an unexpected result: It opened such a wide breach in the wall of internal support for Gov. Luis Fortuño that it has allowed complaints and information about criminal plans and the squandering of the University of Puerto Rico treasury to flow through it.

Meanwhile, the strike continued unabated at the university. That weekend [Feb. 12] a human wave surrounded the UPR, blocked traffic with a sit-in on one of the main thoroughfares and later entered the main university campus. There students once again took over the Tower [the main office building] — to the cheers of the crowd — and even danced defiantly less than a yard from the police who were beseiged by the students.

Thus the pitch of this crisis rises just as various social protests are shaping up. The president of the Puerto Rican Bar Association, Osvaldo Toledo, chose civil disobedience to confront a U.S. District Court order and is being held in federal jail. The protest by attorneys, in a case in which the state can seize their headquarters, joins the university crisis and is inspired by it.

Some 72 social, civic and political entities, including all the opposition parties, joined the gigantic Feb. 12 march.

[Adapting the lyrics of a popular plena song,] “Last night at the UPR you hit my Lola charlatan, last night at the UPR charlatan, come hit her now!” parents and student sympathizers sang at a line of cops that watched them from a prudent distance. The song referred to Feb. 9’s violent incidents [where police fondled a student’s breasts while arresting her]. So shocking was the riot police’s scandalous actions against the students that it provoked a crisis within the pro-government officials to the point where some of the police involved were removed and UPR President José Ramón de la Torre had to resign after demanding the police withdraw from the 11 campuses in the system.

Similarly, the first report arrived of a student being fired from his job in tourism as retaliation for participation in the strike.

In fact, professors, administrative employees, and the cleaners and maintenance union closed down the campus on Feb. 10-11 in order to prevent further violent confrontations.

Gov’t plots to frame up students

The Puerto Rican Association of University Professors reported having information about a Feb. 7 meeting where people from the highest governmental levels evaluated that “everything was working out fine” in the UPR crisis and that the only thing missing was a death — to be blamed on the students. After this news was made public, NCM News obtained specific information about the participants in this alleged meeting and their links to Santa Catalina Palace, the government headquarters.

The fact is that on Tuesday, Feb. 8, anti-riot units known as “shock troops” fondled female students in the vicinity of the school of social sciences, after which a crowd of students forced them to retreat. The next day the police began videotaping students who painted slogans in the traditional “Street of Consciousness.” This taping is a blatant violation of the law against creating a police dossier of citizens conducting legal activities.

A group of students surrounded the police and attempted to physically prevent the continuation of the illegal practice. A few minutes later the shoving, beating, throwing stones and even paint began. Riot police, arrest units and a squad of mounted police went into action, beating all who came nearby and arresting indiscriminately those they caught, leading the courts to throw out the charges.

The students dispersed but reappeared on the other side of the campus in a march that quickly grew to more than 1,000 demonstrators. When two cops tried to confront the crowd as they arrived in front of the General Studies building, the students forced them out of the way, with a police cap sent flying through the air.

When motorbike police squads arrived, the students let them enter only to surround them and throw them off their vehicles. The mounted units fared no better as the students aimed stones at the riders, who had to retreat. As the riot police arrived, the students vanished only to reappear minutes later, surrounding the University Tower where since mid-morning the Brotherhood of Unaffiliated Non-Educational Staff was controlling the rectory, demanding the immediate withdrawal of the police.

The day ended as two community marches in support of UPR entered the campus and with the news that attorneys for the Confederation of University Professors had began preparing criminal complaints against police for torturing students.

In a remarkable development, a student member of the Board of Trustees, Rene Vargas, made a formal request for copies of the inventory of the wealth of properties without heirs. By law this property was turned over to the UPR during the last 80 years. Vargas was told that these properties are sold as soon as they are received.

This raises two problems: “Where is the accounting that guarantees that all benefits are being received?” and a bigger question, “How could the Governmental Development Bank accept these properties, which no longer exist, as part of collateral for a $100 million line of credit?”