Puerto Rican Terrorism in the 1980s

                                               Puerto Rican Terrorism in the 1980s

White, sandy beaches. Sprawling resorts with neatly manicured golf courses and breezy seaside restaurants. Well-tanned couples sipping rum on balconies overlooking cobblestone streets. Lush rain forests filled with the soothing sounds of coquí frogs ("koh-KEE") and the pitter-patter of rain droplets falling on tree leaves. Bombs exploding airplanes into smithereens and bullets ripping through the flesh of U.S. soldiers. Rockets raining down on federal agencies and courthouses. Lawyers and truck drivers mowed down in cold blood in broad daylight.

Puerto Rico, an island territory of the United States, was defined by these starkly contradictory images throughout the 1980s. Most Americans may be surprised to learn that 20 years before 9/11, Puerto Rican nationalist groups fervently devoted to the independence of Puerto Rico from the United States had made domestic terrorism a fact of life for the residents of New York, Chicago and Puerto Rico. Unlike al-Qaeda, their cause was not to eradicate Western culture from the face of the planet, but it was awfully close: to eradicate so-called U.S. imperialism from the face of Puerto Rican politics and culture.

Puerto Rico terrorism, which was born in the 1950s and reached its zenith in the 1980s, has always been linked to the question of the island's political status. Technically, Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the United States subject to U.S. authority but retaining certain autonomous powers, such as the right to vote for its own governor. But in reality, the island exists in a political limbo between U.S. statehood and full independence.

The result has been a political culture that may seem schizophrenic to outsiders. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens by birth, but if they choose to live on the island rather than on the mainland United States, they do not enjoy all the benefits of citizenship enjoyed by natives of other U.S. states. For example, islanders do not have full representation in the U.S. Congress.

They do elect a "resident commissioner" who sits on House committees and votes on legislation that comes before those committees, but the commissioner cannot vote on final legislative bills that come before the full House. Although islanders do not have the right to vote for U.S. President in the general election, both the Democratic and Republican parties hold primaries on the island and their respective candidates campaign actively there for primary votes to achieve the nomination. Islanders do not pay federal income taxes, yet the currency is the U.S. dollar. Puerto Rico has its own Olympic team and Miss Universe contestant, but no separate delegation to the United Nations. The official language of the state courts and public schools is Spanish, but the language of the federal courts is English. The contradictions abound.

Puerto Rico's complicated relationship with the United States has been the dominant force in every election since 1952, when the island went from being a colonial possession to becoming a semi-autonomous U.S. commonwealth entitled to vote for its own governor and make other choices about how to govern itself. Since then, Puerto Rico's voters have been almost equally torn between remaining a U.S. commonwealth and becoming the 51st state of the United States. Since 1952, gubernatorial candidates favoring continuation of Puerto Rico's commonwealth status have won 10 elections, while those favoring statehood have won six, with the successful party almost always eking out a victory by only a few percentage points. The parties' won-lost record would be more evenly divided if not for the fact that the legendary and beloved architect of Puerto Rico's commonwealth status, Luis Muñoz Marín, won the governorship four consecutive times in the commonwealth's early years.

The governorship has see-sawed between the two main political parties ever since Muñoz Marín departed the scene. In 1964, Muñoz Marín was succeeded by a member of his own party, Roberto Sánchez Vilella. Four years later, the pro-statehood party won the governorship for the

first time, electing Luís A. Ferré, the wealthy scion of a family that made its fortune in the cement business. Four years after that, Ferré was defeated by pro-commonwealth candidate Rafael Hernández Colón, who subsequently lost the governorship in 1976 and 1980 to pro- statehood candidate Carlos Romero Barceló. Hernandez Colón re-took the governorship in 1984 and 1988; the statehood candidate won in 1992 and 1996; the commonwealth candidate won in 2000 and 2004; the statehood candidate won in 2008, and the commonwealth candidate won in 2012. Judging by these see-saw results, Puerto Ricans have been of two minds about their political future for well over a half-century.

In every election, a very small but disproportionately vocal minority of voters have voted in favor of independence, with most favoring a European-style socialist democracy and a much smaller proportion favoring a communist republic modeled after the Cuban system. Because pro- independence voters habitually account for less than 6 percent of the electorate, their influence at the ballot box has been minimal. As small as it is, the pro-independence vote could conceivably swing an election to one of the two major parties in a close race. But in what could be seen as a measure of the polarization of Puerto Rican politics, pro-independence voters would rather see the election go by default to the candidate with whom they most disagree (the pro-statehood candidate) than to hold their noses and affirmatively vote for a candidate with whom they disagree at all (the pro-commonwealth candidate).

Because pro-independence voters did not wield much clout through the ballot box in the 1980s, their political agenda was hijacked by small groups of violent militants who claimed to speak for them through increasingly brazen acts of terrorism both in Puerto Rico and in the U.S. mainland.

Puerto Rican nationalists were the most active terrorists in the United States and its territories during the 1980s. From 1980-1982, Puerto Rican terrorists accounted for fifty-three of the 122 terrorism incidents (43 percent) that took place in that period. As many as ten different Puerto Rican groups claimed responsibility for bombings and assassinations during the early 1980s. (Smith, 1994, 22).

The two most prolific of these groups were the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (the Armed Forces of National Liberation, or "FALN") and the Ejército Popular Boricua (the "Boricua Popular Army"), otherwise known as Los Macheteros (the "Machete Wielders"). The FALN operated mostly in the continental United States, while the Macheteros operated almost entirely on the island.

Puerto Rican terrorism first attained national and international notoriety in 1950 when two Puerto Rican gunmen attempted to assassinate President Harry Truman in Washington, D.C., and again in 1954 when four Puerto Ricans sprayed the U.S. House of Representatives with gunfire, wounding five congressmen. These incidents were followed by two decades of relative inaction on the part of Puerto Rican nationalists until the rise of the FALN in the mid-1970s. The FALN's predecessor organizations declared that their goal was to undermine "the imperialist power base on the island [and] to hasten a crisis which would shake the foundation of the Puerto Rican colonial world and enable the struggle to move on to the offensive and toward victory." (Sater, 1981, 6). The FALN concentrated its attacks on targets in the continental United States, mostly through bombings of banks and corporate headquarters in New York and Chicago in what the group described as an armed struggle against U.S. capitalism and imperialism.

The FALN's first operation was the firebombing of five New York City banks on October 26, 1974, which, along with other largely symbolic bombings, caused extensive property damage but no loss of life. The attacks soon became much more violent, however. First, a New York City policeman was lured into a booby-trapped apartment in East Harlem and was severely injured in a bomb explosion. Then, in January 1975, the FALN bombed the historic Fraunces Tavern in New York City during the lunch hour, killing four people and injuring 63 others. Subsequent attacks by the FALN targeted department stores, hotels, government offices, and military installations as well as banks and businesses in New York City, Chicago and, to a lesser extent, on the island. Between 1974 and 1981, a total of 120 bombings were attributed to the FALN.

At the beginning of the 1980s, the FALN's terrorist activities were in full swing. In early 1980, FALN operatives took over the Carter-Mondale headquarters in Chicago and bound and gagged seven campaign workers. FALN operatives also took over George H.W. Bush's campaign headquarters in New York, where they bound and gagged 10 people. The FALN raised the stakes in March 1980 when it threatened in a Colombian newspaper to launch an attack on U.S. nuclear reactors, warning the United States that "you must remember . . . that you have never experienced war in your vitals and that you have many nuclear reactors." (Sater, 1981, 1). In April 1980, police discovered a list of some 100 U.S. business executives in a vacant Jersey City apartment believed to have been a safehouse for an FALN member.

But the FALN was dealt a series of near-fatal blows before it could deliver on these threats. Shortly after the campaign break-ins in 1980, 11 FALN members were arrested in Evanston, Illinois, and charged with conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government as well as other charges. Three years later, in June 1983, four FALN members were arrested in Chicago and charged with seditious conspiracy, various weapons charges, and conspiring to obstruct

commerce by robbery. All 15 of the FALN defendants were found guilty, and most received lengthy prison sentences. "The arrests of numerous members of the FALN in 1982 and 1983 . . . seriously eroded the ability of this American-based organization to carry out planned bombings. Although FALN leader and fugitive William Morales continued to run FALN operations from Mexico during this time, the organization was largely ineffective." (Smith, 1994, 22-23).

Even after the initial arrests in 1980, however, the FALN remained a feared presence for some time. In early 1981, the publication Executive Risk Assessment reported that "the U.S. Army is gravely concerned about increasing FALN threats against Puerto Rican members of the armed forces." (Sater, 1981, 18). That same month, callers claiming to represent the FALN telephoned a series of bomb threats to Army recruiting stations in New York City, New Haven, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Canton, Ohio. A number of death threats also were made against Army recruiters, including on Puerto Rican recruiter who barely escaped assassination in Waukegan, Illinois. One writer predicted in October 1981 that the United States had not seen the last of the FALN: "[T]he decline in activity in the United States appears to be a temporary phenomenon due, perhaps, to the capture of the eleven FALN members in April 1980. As new cadres appear, we should see a resurgence of FALN terrorism in the United States." (Sater, 1981, 19).

Even before the FALN began fading from the headlines, the Macheteros burst onto the scene with a wave of violence that stretched well into the 1980s and gave Puerto Rican terrorism a much bloodier cast. To the extent that the birth of the Macheteros can be traced to any single incident, it was the July 25, 1978, killing of two pro-independence students at Cerro Maravilla by the Puerto Rico police. In a written communiqué, the Macheteros accused then-Governor Carlos Romero Barceló, a fervent advocate of statehood, of ordering the cold-blooded execution of the

students in an act of state terrorism. The Macheteros vowed that they would impose revolutionary justice on those responsible. According to one sympathetic author, the Cerro Maravilla killings "revived the armed struggle for independence in Puerto Rico and the United States," inspiring the Macheteros to commit at least 18 separate acts of violence over the ensuing eight years. (González-Cruz, 2008, 152). Those acts can be divided broadly into three categories: "immediate defense actions in response to the violence of the state, symbolic actions aimed at confirming the colonial conflict and asserting the right to self-determination, and supply actions to obtain material resources." (González-Cruz, 2008, 153).

Although the incident is largely forgotten, the Macheteros actually came to public attention one year before the Cerro Maravilla incident when members of the group, who also were attached to the Teamsters union, assassinated Alan Randall, a prominent, U.S.-born labor lawyer who lived in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of San Juan and represented corporate management in bitterly contested disputes with labor unions. (André, 1987, 11-13). Two men slipped into Randall's garage behind him, closed the door, and fired two bullets into his chin and neck with a .32 revolver before escaping to a waiting car and disappearing in the morning traffic. Randall's family was destroyed; his wife committed suicide four months later by jumping off the top of a 23-story building one block away from the murder site, and his son is widely believed to have also committed suicide. The Randall assassination could fall into the category of "symbolic actions aimed at confirming the colonial conflict and asserting the right to self-determination."

Although the Randall assassination is rarely mentioned in the literature about the Macheteros, its brutality became the organization's hallmark. Unlike the FALN, which focused on the destruction of property rather than human life, the Macheteros seemed to measure their

success by the amount of blood they spilled in the name of anti-imperialism. "[O]f all the Puerto Rican groups, the Macheteros . . . have been [among] the most prolific, daring, and violent." (Smith, 1994, 116). On December 3, 1979, the Macheteros joined with other clandestine groups to carry out the machine-gun ambush of a U.S. Navy bus that resulted in the deaths of two sailors and left more than a dozen sailors injured. On January 12, 1981, the Macheteros blew up nine Corsair aircraft belonging to the Puerto Rico National Guard and worth more than $40 million at Muñiz Air Base in Isla Verde. Although there was no loss of human life, the operation was "one of the most daring terrorist attacks in U.S. history." (Smith, 1994, 116). In an equally sensational pair of attacks in May 1982, the Macheteros killed two U.S. sailors in reprisal for U.S. military exercises conducted on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques and, three days later, killed a policeman in reprisal for violent evictions carried out by police in the Villa San Miedo and Loiza communities. In the eyes of Macheteros sympathizers, all these killings fell into the category of "immediate defense actions in response to the violence of the state." (González-Cruz, 2008, 153).

U.S. authorities took the Macheteros very seriously. According to one writer sympatheticto the group: “During the 1980s, the FALN and other organizations devoted to the cause of independence have been the target of some of the [FBI’s] most intense covert operations.” In August 1985, more than 300 heavily armed FBI agents and U.S. marshals participated in raidsthroughout Puerto Rico, “kicking in doors, conducting warrantless searches, wrecking thecontents of homes, impounding personal property and arresting scores of activists on ‘John Doe’ warrants.” (Churchill, 1988, 368).

Notwithstanding the counterattacks, on Sept. 12, 1983, the Macheteros carried out their first action outside Puerto Rico. They held up a Wells Fargo armored-car depot in West Hartford, Connecticut, and got away with $7 million in what ranked as the largest cash robbery in U.S.

history at the time. The money, which was never recovered, was believed to have been used to finance subsequent bombings and attacks by the Macheteros in the name of Puerto Rican independence. Just over a month after the Wells Fargo robbery, in October 1983, the Macheteros launched a rocket-propelled grenade at the FBI field office in Puerto Rico's capital city, San Juan. On January 23, 1985, they launched a light anti-tank weapon at the U.S. federal courthouse in San Juan. In 1986, the Macheteros claimed responsibility for several attacks on military facilities on Puerto Rican territory.

Interestingly, the Wells Fargo robbery in Connecticut was only the latest of five attempts by the Macheteros to rob Wells Fargo trucks. In September 1982, the group had opened fire on a Wells Fargo truck carrying more than $800,000 from San Juan to the city of Naranjito but failed to get away with any money. Ballistics experts matched one of the rounds fired at the scene to the weapon that was used by the Macheteros to kill a Navy enlisted man four months earlier. In November 1982, the Macheteros robbed another Wells Fargo truck of approximately $300,000 and killed an innocent civilian at a nearby gas station. In the spring of 1983, the Macheteros tried again but fled before the armored vehicle arrived. In a fourth attempt, the Macheteros killed the driver of a Wells Fargo truck and made off with nearly $600,000 in cash and checks. These funds, along with the $7-million haul from the Wells Fargo heist in Connecticut later that year, "supported the outbreak of Puerto Rican terrorism that took place between 1984-1986." (Smith, 1994, 117).

More than two decades later, Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States remainsno closer to a solution. In a plebescite conducted in tandem with the gubernatorial election in 2012, islanders first were asked whether they favored the present commonwealth status, and second they were asked which of the three options – statehood, commonwealth, or independence – they preferred. A majority rejected commonwealth status and expressed a preference for statehood. However, more than 500,000 of the 1.9 million voters who expressed displeasure with commonwealth status chose not to express any preference on which status they preferred. Thus, although statehood won the most votes among the three statuses, more than a half-million voters abstained from that question. Muddying the waters further, the incumbent governor, a statehood advocate, lost re-election to the candidate of the commonwealth party at the same time asstatehood “won” the referendum. The results led one analyst to conclude: “The island remains bitterly divided over its relationship to the United States and many question the validity of this week's referendum.” (Fox, 2012). The question is whether and when another wave of terrorism will follow.

Works Cited
André, Armando. “Macheteros Tronquistas Asesinaron Al Abogado Alan Randall.” Crónica

Gráfica Apr. 1987. Print.
Christoffersen, John. “Feds oppose release of Puerto Rican nationalist.” Contra Costa Times 19

Apr. 2012. Web. 18 Mar. 2013.

Churchill, Ward, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party.Massachusetts: South End Press, 1988. Print.

Fox, Ben, et al. "Puerto Rico Statehood Vote Wins Largest Share and Governor Luis FortuñoConcedes Defeat.” The Huffington Post. 07 Nov. 2012 Web. 18 Mar. 2013.

González-Cruz, Michael, et al. “Puerto Rican Revolutionary Nationalism: Filiberto Ojeda Ríos and the Macheteros." Latin American Perspectives 35 (2008): 151-165. Print.

Sater, William F., “Puerto Rican Terrorists: A Possible Threat to U.S. Energy Installations?” RAND Corporation. 1981. Print.

Smith, Brent L. Terrorism in America: Pipebombs and Pipedreams. New York: SUNY Press, 1994. Print.