By Juan Gonzalez, Columnist
New York Daily News (February 16, 2011)

A student strike at the University of Puerto Rico has forced the resignation of its president and sparked the second political crisis in a year for the island’s rulers. José Ramón de la Torre, head of the 60,000-student system, resigned Friday after a series of violent clashes between students and riot police.

Some 200 people have been arrested and scores of students injured, prompting professors and university workers to walk out for two days last week in sympathy with the students. On Monday, conservative Gov. Luis Fortuño finally relented and pulled back the hundreds of riot police that had been occupying the system’s 11 campuses for weeks.

It was the first police occupation of the university in more than 30 years. Students began boycotting classes in early December to protest a special $800 annual fee Fortu̱o imposed this semester to reduce a huge government deficit. That fee Рequal to more than 50% of annual tuition Рstunned the university community, given that more than 60% of UPR students have family incomes of less than $20,000 a year.

Student leaders persuaded the trustees to reject similar tuition hikes Fortuño proposed last spring. They did so by conducting massive sit-ins and barricading themselves in buildings on all the campuses for two months, and by running a sophisticated Internet and media campaign that garnered much public support.

Fortuño’s pro-statehood New Progressive Party, which controls both houses of the Puerto Rico legislature, responded by packing the board of trustees with new appointees, guaranteeing him complete control this time around. Local courts cooperated by banning student protests on university grounds. Most experts expected the students would be too exhausted from last spring to challenge the governor again.
Those experts were wrong.

Inspired by the youth revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, the students refused to simply go home. They presented more than 200 pages of proposals to university officials on ways to trim budget costs without huge tuition increases. Under Puerto Rico law, the commonwealth government must spend 9.6% of its budget on the university’s operation. The Fortuño administration, which recently pushed through the biggest corporate and individual tax cuts in Puerto Rico’s history, has laid off thousands of government workers and wants even greater privatization of public services. To underscore his message, Fortuño was a featured speaker this weekend at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

The striking students at UPR know this is not simply a conflict with their trustees. They are up against the forces of the entire Fortuño administration. The way they see it, the future of a great public university, one that has educated generations of low-income citizens in Puerto Rico, is at stake.

By Geraldo Rivera
Fox News Latino (February 24, 2011)

“Do you compare what is happening here at the University of Puerto Rico with what is happening in Cairo?” A reporter for Channel 6 the island’s public television station asked me that as I surveyed the barricaded main gate of the sprawling Rio Piedras campus on the outskirts of San Juan. Standing outside the wall of desks piled high to prevent police access to the school Wednesday, the premise of the reporter’s question was so farfetched it took my brain awhile to translate it from Spanish into English.

Cairo? Where hundreds died to overthrow a dictator? No, I don’t think there is any valid comparison between Cairo and Puerto Rico, which is like many other student uprisings against tuition and fee increases made necessary by budget deficits from England to California. In fact, the students are much more like the public employees demonstrating on the streets in Madison, Wisconsin; they’re trying to conserve privileges their government can no longer afford.

But when I did get the reporter’s comparison straight in my head, it made clearer the motivation of the kids who have boycotted classes and disrupted this 60,000 student, 11 campus system since December. They really do believe that their sometime violent protest against the imposition of a special $800 fee is part of the grand and historic youth movement shaking autocratic governments in the Middle-East.

“This is a battle for the future of Puerto Rico!” exclaimed one of the earnest student leaders of the strike, 26-year old, third year law student Xiomara Caro in an interview we did sitting in the midst of dozens of students who like Xiomara have not attended class in weeks.

Barely recovered from a destructive 62 day spring 2010 shutdown caused by yet another student strike over fees, this new disruption was another challenge to Republican governor Luis Fortuño efforts to bridge the island commonwealth’s yawning budget deficit. And like everything else in Puerto Rico, the imposition of the $800 fee is an issue stoking the island’s bitter partisan divide. The pro-statehood New Progressive (Republican) Party supports the governor. The pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party opposes his every move, and these supposed grownups are egging on a confrontation that has made a mockery of the university’s academic ambitions. The disgraced former PDP governor Acevedo Vila even marched in solidarity with the striking students, many of whom are pro-independence activists or socialists.

On the day I was there one group of militant students physically prevented a professor from entering his classroom. Another group turned away anti-protest students trying to go to school. No education is happening, some classrooms are trashed, desks and supplies are everywhere, scores of students and cops have been hurt, dozens of kids have been arrested, millions in U.S. taxpayer money is being squandered, and even stateside politicians are piling on this pointless exercise.

Referring to attempts by the riot police to restore order at the university, Chicago-area congressman Luis Gutiérrez, a Democrat, took to the floor of the House Wednesday to urge his fellow members to condemn what he calls the human and civil rights violations in Puerto Rico.

“What faraway land has seen student protests banned, union protestors beaten and free-speech advocates jailed? The U.S. colony of Puerto Rico!” Guitérrez said, also calling Governor Fortuño, who won election in a landslide in 2008, “a dictator.”

And this passion is supposed to be about that $800 annual fee imposed on students who pay a grand total of less than $50 per credit for quality education; far less than any other state university in the United States?

The congressman’s over-heated rhetoric struck a raw nerve with Republican supporters of the governor. The island’s Resident Commissioner in Washington Pedro Pierluisi condemned Guitérrez’ remarks, saying, “To compare Puerto Rico to an authoritarian country is beyond the pale. It demeans not merely my constituents, but also millions of men and women who suffer under real dictatorships who are truly oppressed, and lack the dignity that comes only with genuine freedom.”

As I told that reporter for Channel 6 who asked about the P.R.-Cairo comparison, I was young once, and angry at everything from the Vietnam War to the lack of black and brown university studies. And I participated in many acts of sometimes unruly civil disobedience on and off campus. The young people of the world were in revolt then and we activists felt that we too were at the center of the universe.

This long and sometimes violent protest at the University of Puerto Rico, though, seems especially counter-productive and pointless. I realize that an additional $800 school expense is a lot of money for families with $20,000 annual income, but I also remember with shudders that I had to work and borrow my way through college and law school, graduating deeply in debt.

It is time for the striking students at least to allow non-striking students and teachers to get back to class. If this year follows last year as essentially wasted academically, their university stands on the verge of becoming just another dysfunctional joke in the partisan chaos that characterizes modern-day Puerto Rico.

Geraldo Rivera is a Senior Columnist for Fox News Latino.

Desde Washington Blog
By José A. Delgado
El Nuevo Dia (March 4, 2011)
translated from Spanish by NiLP
From NiLP FYI

Each time you read a headline that a Puerto Rican born in the United States makes his living in Puerto Rico, there are people who are offended when that person is considered a boricua. For Congressman Luis Gutierrez, born in Chicago and of Puerto Rican parents, the recent criticisms of New Progressive Party (PNP) legislative leadership and other statehooders are nothing new. While in the neighborhoods of Chicago he was the “Puerto Rican” guy, in his high school in San Sebastian, Puerto Rico he was considered by some as the “gringo.”

But do not think that prejudice is limited to the statehooders who do not forgive Gutierrez for helping to stop status bills driven by the PNP in the U.S. Congress. When Joseph Acabá – born to Puerto Rican parents in California – was selected as the first Puerto Rican astronaut in the NASA program, I heard voices from the island that questioned whether he should be considered Puerto Rican. There are also some who have challenged the Puerto Ricanness of Sonia Sotomayor – the first Hispanic to hold a seat in the United States Supreme Court – having been born in the Bronx, New York.

The political uncertainty of Puerto Rico is also seen in debates on the cultural identity of a people whose natives are also U.S. citizens. In the latest political status bill being pushed by the PNP in the U.S. Congress, the idea of allowing the vote on the island’s future political status to those born on the island but living outside Puerto Rico has been incorporated. This plan, however, has given no role to the children of those born in Puerto Rico, although they may have spent much of their lives in Puerto Rico and have returned to the United States.

Somewhere, considered the promoters of the latest status legislation (2499), you had to draw the line. It is clear that there are Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico who urgently need to be given a tour of major Puerto Rican communities in the United States. They know that those who claim Puerto Rican cultural identity in America, especially without being born in Puerto Rico, do not do so to make a profit. They do it because they feel it deep in their DNA and unashamedly proclaim it with pride, even though a few – there and here – insist on looking at them over their shoulders.