Class struggle in Puerto Rico

SINCE HE took office in January, Gov. Fortuño and his administration have been restructuring the way the state operates. As a result, there has been a rapid and drastic change in consciousness. Could you talk about how past events have led up to this?

Sahir: Our committee [CCHD] understands that the government of Fortuño has been so far one of the most homophobic governments that Puerto Rico has had so far. We saw that in the debates prior to the election, and in the statements made by representatives of his party, the PNP, that they did not believe in the rights of the LGBT community.

Right now, for example, there is a proposed bill in the Puerto Rican House of Representatives, House Bill 1725, which potentially prohibits discrimination in the workplace against anyone based on sexual orientation. It's a bill that's very important, and we've been pushing for an amendment that would include transsexual people, because they're one of the marginal groups that face the most discrimination because of their physical appearance.

What's happened? Nobody in the Puerto Rican Senate or House of Representative wants to work with the legislation. They ignore it. Fortuño and the legislative branch are also opposed to a revision of the island's Civil Code that would recognize civil unions, so that same-sex couples could enjoy the same legal protections and labor benefits as everyone else.

We've also seen how the government has conceded political terrain and space to [Christian] fundamentalist, right-wing sectors when it comes to relating to the LGBT community. For example, we have had multiple demonstrations and debates, yet they [the PNP] have only responded to the interests of the fundamentalist movements.

The fundamentalists threaten with their votes and by mobilizing their people. For example, in many municipalities and schools, the fundamentalists want to impose a period of religious reflection. This would allow these groups to impose their beliefs and win over political terrain. They are intent on showing that homosexual people are an abomination and don't deserve rights.

Giovanni: You asked about the change in consciousness and the fast-paced nature of this development. The reality is that, yes, this has happened at a rapid pace. Last semester, when we organized protest against the budget cuts, the protests were small--they didn't exceed 200 people. On the other hand, every other protest throughout the whole island since Fortuño came into office has been steadily increasing in size.

IT'S CLEAR that the question of class is recurrent. Rafael, you are part of a militant union where these issues might crystallize. How do you see this developing within the union?

Rafael: Before we start talking about the union, I want to talk a little bit about what the compañeros have said. In 2006, Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vilá of the Popular Democratic Party [PPD, the island's liberal party] proceeded to close down the government for two weeks, during a budget crisis. He did this in coordination with Fortuño, who used to be the Residential Commissioner in Washington.

But there were only a handful of militant groups that were willing to stand up to such an intimidating act. They were on the streets with the slogan, "The rich should pay for the crisis," and that this was class warfare. But the whole state apparatus was against the mobilizations--in particular, the Popular Democratic Party.

This battle was hard, but it was important because it created a level of consciousness among the handful of militants. It planted a seed, even though a lot of people didn't mobilize. Then, the FMPR's teachers' strike of 2008 crystallized as a mass movement with a clear class content, where the socialist sectors--specifically the MST--were one of the forces that was leading the process.

Again, the whole state apparatus was mobilized against the strike. But the people in general were receptive to the class content of our struggle, even though they were not willing to join the fight. But once there was a change of administration, from Acevedo Vilá to Fortuño, various factors came together.

For its part, the PPD now assumes a supportive attitude towards things they would have been against before, trying to capitalize on the situation. As a bourgeois party, we know how far the PPD is going to get with its opportunism. But this is part of the struggle [in the leadership of the movement] that's developing.

Now to address your second question, I would say that in the FMPR, there has been a massive reactivation. We are talking of 26,000 [government employees] laid off already. It's apparent that the families of the workers are being affected.

When I have asked in my classroom, "How many people have been affected?" I have seen five, six or seven students raise their hands per classroom. A similar thing happened in the UPR, where a student stated that he didn't care about layoffs because they didn't affect him. But immediately afterwards, another student stood up in class and said that both his parents were laid off.

With examples like these, one can start seeing how the Puerto Rican bourgeoisie is losing its hegemony. People don't think that this is the best that this world has to offer. In truth, they suspect that there's a group of vandals who are trying to steal from the people. This is key. Even though it's not a revolutionary mood, this loss of hegemony opens up a space.

I want to address another difficulty that we face as workers--that is, how we can elevate consciousness to its highest level possible through action. In addition to labor struggles, there are developing fights around landless people's rights, including part of the Dominican immigrant population. All this is starting to accumulate, which creates the possibility for actions at a grander scale.

Even with this, there is a limit to making socialist arguments and having a revolutionary framework. Nevertheless, this struggle will reach farther than any in the past in Puerto Rico, even though it's limited by not having a long-term vision. We have to take the greatest advantage of the situation so that we can advance to the next step. Things are very fluid, even though we face great obstacles.

THE GLOBAL economic collapse has lowered of standard of living of workers worldwide. The ruling classes internationally have responded by blaming this on vulnerable sections of society. In Puerto Rico, I would imagine, they would try and blame Dominican immigrants.

Rafael: I think they're using the façade of fighting crime in order to justify the withering of civil rights, and thereby establish a repressive force. They're trying to use crime to justify their economic restructuring.

The bourgeoisie of Puerto Rico, which is part of the American bourgeoisie, has developed by extracting its wealth from the government's budget in a very parasitic form. In Puerto Rico, there's no longer a strong agricultural economy, and heavy industry is not under the control of the local bourgeoisie.

At the moment, there's an international capitalist crisis--[economic] warfare going on between foreign capitalists and local capitalists. They need to devour other local capitalists before bigger capitalists eat them. How can they, then, obtain the extraordinary profits that will allow them to jump ahead? Well, by taking a larger portion of the governmental budget.

Because in agriculture, they're not going to find those rates of profit, nor in heavy industry. And when you consider that these massive layoffs are directly related to this section of local capitalists trying catapult itself ahead [through privatization], you start to realize their real intentions. This dynamic is fully exposed now. It is unmasked.

But for now, I haven't seen that the government and the local capitalists have blamed the crisis on certain sections of society.

Sahir: I can say what the reflection of the LGBT community is. This right-wing government has a commitment to the Christian fundamentalist groups in Puerto Rico. By withholding legislation that would protect the LGBT community, they're basically using the community as a scapegoat. But we're not the only ones. I agree also with Rafael's statement that the government uses crimes as a façade.

CRIME IS being used as a smokescreen to implement repression. One of the most obvious examples came on August 21, 2009, in the Avenida Universidad near UPR, where police attacked groups of students.

Giovanni: Fortuño already had a plan in place before he won the elections. Part of that was reinforcing the state police, which they openly talked about. They knew that all the measures they were planning would create resistance.

They decided, therefore, to appoint FBI agent José Figueroa Sánchez as State Police Superintendent of Puerto Rico. He was the second in command for the FBI's 2005 assassination of [Puerto Rican independence leader] Filiberto Ojedas Ríos, and he was the first in command when the FBI attacked the press in 2006 in the midst of a raid against pro-independence activists. So the former sub-director of the FBI in Puerto Rico now directs the police.

The project of the police department is to integrate itself regionally--which implies that both local municipal cops and state police are in cooperation with the FBI, which reinforces repressive aims.

Crime in Puerto Rico, one has to acknowledge, is very high. It's a country that has a high rate of murders per year, one comparable to countries that are in the middle of a civil war. But the murder rate has been high for the past few decades.

What's changed has been the state propaganda and the agitation it is trying to evoke. Every time there's a murder, the government tries to exaggerate it. It appears in the headlines, newspapers get more sensationalist. All this plays a role in trying to convince a terrorized group of people that repressive tactics like curfews are their only hope.

The media talks about a crime wave as if it is uncontrollable. But what's not mentioned is how crime is related to deep social problems--how crime is related to the lack of adequate mental health care and the lack of adequate access to stress release for a group of people. The levels of violence at a national level are higher every day, and this obviously will have an effect in how people relate to one another. The youth are obviously part of that contradiction, and are under attack.

That said, I agree with the other compañeros that crime prevention is being used as a façade. They're trying to connect crime with alcoholic beverages and the consumption of drugs, using civil order laws that before were never enforced by the police. They're trying to use today's context to justify more police presence on the streets, and to try and hold back university students from organizing. The best thing to come out of this has been the student reaction.

WHAT CONTINUITY do you see between the student strike of 2005 and the strike process developing now?

Giovanni: One of the things that characterized the strike of 2005 was that not a week passed between the announcement of a tuition hike and the approval of a general strike in the university. There was no time for socialist and non-socialist sections of the left to prepare the base of the movement for a strike that was projected to be long and arduous--which was not far from what happened. There was no organization at the base. The strike was declared, and it was only in the midst of the strike that the university department committees and strike committees started to form.

Now, we are not doing it like that. We all learned our lesson that before going into a long process like an indefinite general strike, one needs to have connections with the student masses that are concrete and tightly knit. There's also the task of doing intense propaganda and information for people to be conscious of not only the particular attack, but also how it is connected to its social content.

WHAT IS the relationship between the process among students in UPR and the teachers in the FMPR?

Rafael: A positive development is happening, which is a flux of ideas, suggestions and different forms of organization between the rank and file [of the union] and the main hub for the UPR system. We need to find the best way for that dynamic to extend to the public high school system, where young adults have the capacity of developing student organizations and actively talking politics.

Now, from the point of view of the labor movement, we still are a little stuck. The majority of the labor unions in Puerto Rico don't have an effective participatory process. Unfortunately, the bureaucratized leadership is sometimes more interested in members' dues than in the struggle. They say: "Well, they laid off half of the union, but at least I have the other half." One can notice that an important faction of the leadership of the labor movement is afraid to organize its masses and generate the democratic process.

In a way, sections at the base of these unions have the capacity of surpassing their bureaucratic leadership, and that's one of the challenges that we have today. Certainly, there are a couple of unions mobilizing and doing their actions, but if we take out the FMPR, what remains is very limited. A lot of unions have talked about the general strike, but it has been at the higher level and not at the base. That is one of the weakest links the labor movement in Puerto Rico, and we need to figure out how to overcome it.

HOW DO you see those issues in relation to the Peoples' Strike of 1998, where a lot of these questions were also present?

Rafael: In the case of the People's Strike of '98, there was an assembly called with delegates from different unions. It was that joint assembly, convened in Loiza, Puerto Rico, which was key towards gathering strength.

This has not happened yet. I believe that in this moment, the organizational development, the disposition for people to fight, the level of consciousness in general is right now above the Peoples' Strike. But we still have the same fundamental problem--the fact that the bureaucratic sectors in the labor movement fear the development of autonomous actions in self-defense, and they want to control the process from the top. And that kills the momentum--it castrates it. But I think one has to plow with the oxen one has.

One of the other great difficulties we have is the involvement of women in these processes. The difficulties that compañeras have in the class struggle in Puerto Rico are immense. Remember, good portions of the people laid off are women. Good portions of those laid-off women have husbands who don't work, and good portions of them are very conservative. That's a specific problem that pertains not only to the base of the FMPR, but relates to the whole public sector were working class women are heavily employed.

I would add one more detail, and that is the element of us as socialists. It's essential to have the ability to identify the most advanced sections of the working class and make an extraordinary effort to give it a basic form in the least amount of time possible. We have a lack of a revolutionary framework, but we need to take advantage of this massive opening to give it an ample social perspective.

We have fertile ground right now. I would compare it to that 1905 revolution [in Russia], where there was a massive opening that allowed a revolutionary framework to be formed for future struggles.

As socialists, we have a huge task to be able to identify those most advanced sections and inject the much-needed socialist content of class with a vision for social transformation, because this lays the basis for the process to move forward without losing its orientation. Without this revolutionary framework, the movement can easily be co-opted by the Popular Democratic Party or by any other populist movement.