The State of Human and Civil Rights in Puerto Rico: A Report from a Member of the ACLU Delegation
By Angelo Falcón (May 7, 2011)
"This is a big deal," a prominent elected official told me, "The ACLU coming to Puerto Rico is really big and most people down here don't realize it." I just got back from Puerto Rico from my participation as part of a delegation organized by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to investigate charges of human and civil rights violations there.
I joined Oscar-nominated actress Rosie Perez, baseball star Carlos Delgado, and the new head of LatinoJustice PRLDEF Juan Cartagena, in a panel led by Anthony Romero, the director of the ACLU. We spent two whirlwind days, May 2 and 3, hearing testimony from University of Puerto Rico (UPR) students who were the objects of excessive police violence and free speech violations, as well as from union leaders, journalists and members of Afro-Boricua (Villa Cañona in Loiza) and Dominican (Villas del Sol) communities. We also spoke to Puerto Rico's top government officials, the President and Rio Piedras Campus Chancellor of UPR, members of the Puerto Rico House of Representative and Senate, and the leadership of the Police Department. We also viewed videos provided by those who were victimized as well as from the government.
We had received in-depth briefings from the staff of the ACLU. This included their 3-person office in Puerto Rico directed by the indefatigable attorney William Ramirez as well as the seasoned human rights investigator that was sent weeks ago to research the issues in Puerto Rico, Jennifer Turner. Mike Soto-Class of Puerto Rico's Center for a New Economy provided us with a fascinating overview of the economic and social issues facing Puerto Rico today. From New York, I had also been following the situation in Puerto Rico through the limited US media reports that existed, the extensive media coverage from Puerto Rico and through radio bemba.
The issue for the delegation was not to determine whether or not there was excessive police force used against those protesting university policies, the government's budget cuts, massive public worker layoffs, and the access of journalists. There clearly was, based on media reports, the videos and the testimony we heard. Rather, the questions for our delegation and the ACLU are:
Is there a pattern and what is the extent of police abuse of protesters and public housing, Afro-Boricua, Dominican and other communities?
What was the role of the government and police authorities, if any?
Were there First Amendment violations of freedom of expression at UPR and at demonstrations at El Capitolio, the Sheraton Hotel and other locations where this was alleged?
Is the Government of Puerto Rico, including the Police Department and UPR, seriously addressing these allegations of abuse?
The ACLU informed us that they will continue to collect information on these issues through interviews, government documents and other sources to include in a report to be issued in September. This report will cover incidents going back five years over two administrations and will include recommendations to address whatever problems are identified that will be shared with the Government of Puerto Rico and federal agencies such as the US Department of Justice. The ACLU has already requested some months ago that the US Department of Justice conduct an investigation and plans to meet with Thomas Perez, the head of their Civil Rights Division, to discuss our findings.
Along with the additional research to be conducted, the ACLU will also receive feedback on a draft of the report by a high-level advisory board they are assembling that will include actor Bernicio Del Toro, former governor and U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey, and filmmaker and political activist Kerry Kennedy, as well as the members of the Puerto Rico delegation. Depending on the response by the Government of Puerto Rico, the ACLU will also consider launching a lawsuit, as they have done against the police departments of Los Angeles, Virginia, Maryland and other jurisdictions.
In our delegation's meetings with government officials we found much defensiveness, as was to be expected, but we were struck at the almost complete denial that anything was wrong. The government's position was to take the offensive by arguing that the delegation also take up the rights of those majority of students, faculty and staff at the University of Puerto Rico who wanted to go to class and work but were denied their right to do so by protesters. In a May 2nd letter to ACLU's Romero, Puerto Rico's Secretary of State Kenneth McClintock wrote:
". . . we request that your investigation include the deprivation of constitutional, legal, regulatory ad contractual rights of thousands of students, professors and employees whose academic and professional lives were interrupted by the conduct of demonstrators not protected by the First Amendment."
They also pointed to acts of lawlessness by student and others who engaged in acts of violence, vandalism and intimidation. The implications were that these were conditions that justified any wrongdoing or illegal violations of free speech that occurred, and that our delegation would be condoning such lawlessness. When asked, given the level of violence involved, what they would have done differently to prevent it, they had, again to our surprise, no response.
In separate meetings with top government officials presided over by McClintock, the UPR Administration hosted by Rio Piedras Chancellor Ana Guadalupe and UPR President Miguel Muñoz, a member of the Legislature, the Governor's Chief of Staff, the Attorney General and the Independent Police Monitor, we received the same message. To our pleasant surprise, in our meeting with the top brass of the newly-formed task force for civil rights reform at the Police Department, presided over by the Superintendent José Figueroa Sancha, there was much more openness and the admission that mistakes had been made. They informed us that they were instituting a series of concrete reforms to address the problem.
Perhaps the most disappointing meeting was the one with the leadership of the University of Puerto Rico. The expectation was that, as a university, there would be more support for the rights of students to assemble and speak out than they displayed. Instead, what we heard was the official government position denying that anything was wrong and asserting that their main concern was not with police misbehavior but with protecting the rights of the majority of students who wanted to attend classes. When asked why the university did not conduct its own investigation by faculty on the many complaints of police abuse, they responded that the police was already conducting such an investigation.
Our delegation expressed our sympathies to the Rio Piedras Campus Chancellor, Ana Guadalupe, who was the object of violence herself from student protestors. She was the person who introduced a 30-day resolution banning protests on campus. It had been in effect two times. She told us that it had expired and was no longer in effect. Subsequent to this meeting, we discovered that she had, in fact, renewed it on February 24th for a third 30-day period. This policy, along with the university's introduction of free speech zones on the campus that limit where students can demonstrate, will be reviewed by the ACLU to determine whether or not they violate First Amendment guarantees of free speech.
A recurring question was why there was so much violence associated with the UPR protests when similar protests on other campuses such as at the University of California at Berkeley and Rutgers University did not produce such violence. The government and UPR officials didn't have an answer to this question, but in talking to students and others, there was the general feeling that this was the result of an extraordinary level of political polarization in Puerto Rico and a resulting lack of accountability of the police. We expressed concern about provocative public statements by top government officials that may have exacerbated the situation and given license to police to exceed their proper role.
The delegation held a town hall meeting at the UPR Law School attended by over 200 to hear directly from the students affected. We heard testimony from students, faculty and parents describing acts of excessive violance and inappropriate behavior by police. This was an emotionally intense session in which those testifying described in detail situations where students who were peacefully protesting were badly beaten, sexually harrassed, bullied and intimidated by police. Although they were cyncial about whether filing formal complaints against the police would lead anywhere, the delagation urged them to do so, if only to better document their case.
Given a history of violent confrontations on the Rio Piedras campus, in 2005 UPR's Academic Senate adopted a Non-Confrontation Policy, which sought to ensure "a climate of tolerance and respect for diversity expected of the university community." In order to avoid physical confrontation it called on UPR: "1) To guarantee the freedom of speech of all the components of the university community, 2) To establish as institutional policy the use of all resources possible to avoid the intervention of the Police of Puerto Rico in university matters, 3) To establish mechanisms of dialogue and communication... during situations of conflict." In December, the university's President ignored this policy and called for the police to come on campaus. Was this change in policy necessary and was it the cause of the violence that occurred on the campus?
There was also the intimation by the government and UPR officials we met with that since all but one of the delegation did not reside in Puerto Rico, we really didn't understand how things functioned on the Island. Romero pointed out that the ACLU, for example, sued the Los Angeles Police Department although he didn't reside there --- his mandate is to protect rights of US citizens no matter where they reside. Carlos Delgado pointed out that he was a resident of Puerto Rico and found the situation unacceptable. Rosie Perez, Juan Cartagena and I all resided in the New York metropolitan area, but were all well-informed about the situation in Puerto Rico.
Rosie Perez perhaps best captured the situation in Puerto Rico when she found a "culture of fear" there. There were also too many government officials who seemed ill-informed about the rights contained in the US Constitution and the fact that they applied in Puerto Rico. Their cavalier attitude toward the many cases of excessive police violence and inappropriate behavior was troubling.
The direct presence of Anthony Romero, the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), buttressed by the participation of organizations like LatinoJustice PRLDEF and NiLP, during this process assures that there will be an effective follow-up. There are plans to meet with the US Department of Justice and other federal agencies to discuss our preliminary findings and explore ways they could address the problems we found. But one of the biggest challenges will be to bring this story to the American public. The people of Puerto Rico, after all, are all US citizens and the weakening and abuse of their human and civil rights affects all Americans.
And, by the way, the above is solely my personal take and may not necessarily be the view of the ACLU or the other members of the delegation.
If you would like further information about the forthcoming ACLU report on Puerto Rico, or have information that would be useful to this investigation, contact Jennifer Turner of the ACLU at jturner@aclu.org .
Angelo Falcón is President of the National Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP). He is the editor of The NiLP Network on Latino Issues. Falcón co-edited the book, Boricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the Making of Modern New York City, and the author of the Atlas of Stateside Puerto Ricans.