The Puerto Rican Government, under the auspices of the Authority for Electrical Energy, has fast-tracked a trans-island natural gas pipeline. The project is called Via Verde (The Green Way, in English). The pipeline will be 146 km long and rest on a 100 foot wide corridor. The proposed route cuts through a number of forest ecosystems and protected habitat, and threatens to displace hundreds of residents. This is essentially being done by decree, using Eminent Domian laws (as in Kelo v. City of New London). The damage will be major, as the attached evaluation shows.

Casa Pueblo of Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, is a community organization at the forefront of a growing popular movement to oppose the pipeline. The organization has a history of popular direct action beginning in the 1970’s when they led an island-wide movement opposing, and preventing, strip-mining in the region by Alcoa and other mining multinationals.
The Puerto Rican government claims the pipeline will reduce costs to the consumer but this has been challenged by University of Puerto Rico studies, as outlined in the attached. The plant that is to supply the natural gas was owned by Enron before it went bankrupt. This is significant because a pattern of monopoly control over the power grid is shaping up reminiscent of the situation in the 2000-2001 California Electrical Crisis.
The attached document (Spanish and English translated versions) also makes a powerful argument for a public policy in Puerto Rico promoting renewable photovoltaic energy and energy conservation. This is a well-researched plan with attainable goals. It would also make the pipeline redundant.
Please read the attached. It is 6 pages long, and we are working on a more stream-lined press release, but this evaluation contains the full scientific and economic arguments. I will send some recent press in Spanish and English. Here is a link to one article in Spanish. http://www.elnuevodia.com/uncrimenambientalelgasoducto-761375.html We are just getting started, but time is of the essence here. As in previous cases, the government and the multinational corporations with vested interests would like to ramrod this through with shock and awe techniques before we can mount a popular defense.
I urge you to look closely at this crisis situation and make efforts to report on and raise awareness about it. Please circulate this and help us get the word out. We need to put the spotlight on this environmental disaster in the making called Via Verde.
Please visit www.casapueblo.org or contact me for more info. I am in the process of building a dedicated page for information updates.
Thank you,

Alex Wolfe

Lolita Lebron
November 19, 1920 – August 1, 2010

Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebron dies at 89
(AP) – 4 hours ago
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Lolita Lebron, a Puerto Rican independence activist who spent 25 years in prison for participating in a gun attack on the U.S. Congress a half-century ago, died Sunday. She was 89. Lebron died at a hospital in San Juan of complications from respiratory disease, said Francisco Torres, president of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico. She had been hospitalized repeatedly in recent months for her ailments. Lebron was a leading figure in the small but passionate nationalist movement in this U.S. territory. “Lolita was the mother of the independence movement. This is an insurmountable loss,” said Maria de Lourdes Santiago, a member of the Caribbean island’s Senate from the Puerto Rican Independence Party.

Lebron was born Nov. 19, 1920, in Lares, in southwestern Puerto Rico, and moved as a young adult to New York, part of a mass migration from the island to the United States during the 1940s. There she developed her nationalist views and became a follower of movement leader Pedro Albizu Campos. In 1954, she and three other nationalists entered the U.S. Capitol with automatic pistols and opened fire from an upstairs spectators’ gallery onto the crowded floor of the House, firing nearly 30 shots. They unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and Lebron shouted “Viva Puerto Rico libre!” No one died in the attack but five U.S. representatives were wounded, including one congressman who was shot in the chest. Lebron later said that she never intended to kill anyone and that all four nationalists expected to be killed in the assault. She and the others — Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irving Flores and Andres Figueroa Cordero — received lengthy prison sentences. President Jimmy Carter granted them clemency in 1979 and they were released.

“We didn’t do anything that we should regret,” Lebron said upon her release. “Everyone has the right to defend their right to freedom that God gave them.” Back in Puerto Rico, Lebron continued to attend political rallies on the island, where the independence movement holds little sway with voters. The vast majority of people in Puerto Rico favor either becoming a U.S. state or maintaining the semiautonomous status they have now.

Lebron was arrested in 2001 at age 81 when she and five other people cut through a fence on the neighboring island of Vieques to protest the 1999 death of a civilian security guard killed by an errant bomb dropped during a U.S. Navy training exercise. The U.S. has since closed the Vieques bombing range. She was sentenced to 60 days in jail for trespassing. In recent years, Lebron tempered her support for violent struggle. “I think times have changed, and there is no need now to kill for freedom,” she told El Mundo newspaper in 1998. “I would not take up arms nowadays, but I acknowledge that the people have a right to use any means available to free themselves.”