Biography
Early Activism for Independence, Political Involvement, Renouncing Citizenship and Vieques
Puerto Rican socialist. Since the 1940s Juan Mari Bras has been at the center of Puerto Rico’s struggle for self-determination and independence. His substantial contributions to sustaining the ideal of independence have been made in various arenas: in Puerto Rico through his political activism, in testimony before the U.S. Congress, and through his frequent appearances before the United Nations Special Decolonization Committee. As a consequence of his political beliefs and activities he has been persecuted and harassed for much of his political life.
Early Activism for Independence
Born into a family with strong independence convictions, Juan Mari Bras assumed a leadership role in the independence movement in the 1940s, when autonomist and independence sentiment was at its strongest. In 1944, at age sixteen he founded the Puerto Rican Youth for Independence. In the same year he enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico and joined the Independence Society of the University (SIU). He was expelled from the university in 1947 for his involvement in a student strike to protest the chancellor’s decision not to permit Nationalist Party leader Pedro Albizu Campos to speak at a campus event. Albizu Campos had been recently released from a federal penitentiary, where he was incarcerated after being convicted of seditious conspiracy. Juan Mari Bras continued his studies in the United States at American University and returned to Puerto Rico and helped established the Movimiento Pro Independencia Puertorriqueño (MPI) in 1959.
With the founding of MPI, Juan Mari Bras emerged as one of the most important independence and socialist leaders in Puerto Rico’s history. Along with César Andreu Iglesias, a prominent intellectual and socialist activist, Mari Bras established Claridad in June 1959. The MPI news-weekly, which is still in circulation, provided “information and analysis for the Puerto Rican nation to regain its national sovereignty.†MPI sought to build a nonpartisan united front of Puerto Rican independence organizations to more effectively confront the “forces of imperialism†(Silén, p. 411). During the 1970s he frequently testified before the United Nations Committee on Decolonization to impress upon the international community that despite the United States having designated Puerto Rico as a commonwealth in 1952, it was deprived of sovereign powers and was still a colony. The Decolonization Committee remains an important forum for opponents of Puerto Rico’s colonial status (whether independence or prostatehood advocates). In 1967 MPI signed a “protocol of cooperation†with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) led by Stokely Carmichael. Both organizations were, according to its leaders, “in the vanguard in a common struggle against United States imperialism†(Bigart).
By 1971 MPI, which had been seriously undermined by COINTELPRO covert actions, suffered a series of crises and essentially disbanded. According to an informant, the FBI “seriously disrupted the MPIPR ranks and created a climate of distrust and dissension†(Churchill and Wall, p. 78). From the ashes of MPI, the Socialist Party of Puerto Rico was founded in 1971. It subscribed to Marxist Leninist philosophy in solidarity with Puerto Rico’s working class, and was committed to achieving independence. Despite its militant anticolonial rhetoric and stinging denunciations of the Puerto Rican government as a colonial regime, the socialists were inscribed as a legitimate electoral party that fielded candidates; at one point Juan Mari Bras was the party’s gubernatorial candidate. Although he did not advocate armed revolutionary struggle to achieve independence, Mari Bras interpreted U.S. colonialism and militarism as acts of violence by an imperialist power that the people of Puerto Rico had a legal right to confront if they chose. He believed “there is a diversity of forms and means by which the Puerto Rican people are striving for independence†(Kihss 1974a). Consequently, he did not condemn the bombing campaigns of FALN, the Macheteros, or other clandestine revolutionary organizations. Unlike the other Puerto Rican political parties, the Socialist Party recruited members from the New York Puerto Rican population. He was a supporter of the socialist government of Cuba and met with Fidel Castro a number of times. Mari Bras served as the secretary general of the Socialist Party until 1983.
Political Involvement
In Puerto Rico, Juan Mari Bras has been a very visible and tireless activist on a variety of issues that are pivotal to Puerto Rican notions of national identity, social and economic justice, and political equality. He was also the founder of Causa Común Independentista, which he described as an educational project dedicated to promoting wide understanding of the Puerto Rican struggle to achieve sovereignty. Juan Mari Bras has been a frequent and combative witness before the U.S. Congress when it has held hearings on Puerto Rico’s political status. During 1963 Congressional hearings, Mari Bras said “I warn you, in the name of thousands of patriots struggling for independence in my country, that the attempt to secure on a permanent basis the chains of our colonial subjugation, will only produce such friction and struggle that the situation could very well degenerate into an American Algeria†(Wagenheim, p. 219).
Mari Bras was also an influential voice in the international campaign to release the five Puerto Rican nationalists incarcerated in U.S. prisons since the mid-1950s. At a New York rally in 1974, Mari Bras “hailed the heroic example†of the five whom he called “the longest held political prisoners in the American hemisphere†(Kihss 1974a). In 1979 President Jimmy Carter, citing “humane considerations,†commuted the sentences of the imprisoned nationalists. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Juan Mari Bras traveled to the United Nations and in often scathing language denounced the United States as imperialists for economically exploiting Puerto Rico. He accused the United States of genocide against the Puerto Rican people, citing the sterilization of 35 percent of women of childbearing age and the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to the continental United States. These policies were logical outcomes “of the deplorable economic conditions of colonialism†(Kihss 1974b). Mari Bras was an outspoken critic of “the blood tax†(Fernández, p. 202). This term refers to the extension of the U.S. military draft to Puerto Ricans. As a territorial possession of the United States, Puerto Rico is denied congressional representation, and since it is not a state it is excluded from the presidential election process. Since Puerto Rico lacks representation in government—and thus any capacity to affect U.S. foreign policy—Congress has exempted Puerto Rico from federal taxation. Puerto Ricans contend that military conscription is a surreptitious levy (a blood tax) on their youth. The Nationalist Party vehemently protested the conscription of Puerto Rican youth during World War II and the Korean War, and Mari Bras and the Socialist Party continued to resist this inequity of colonialism.
Renouncing Citizenship and Vieques
In 1994 Juan Mari Bras voluntarily renounced his U.S. citizenship before the U.S. consul in Venezuela. He did so in order to affirm the existence of a unique Puerto Rican citizenship that was originally recognized under previous federal legislation and never explicitly terminated. The United States Department of State issued a certificate of renunciation of citizenship, but soon after doubted the wisdom of the decision. Mari Bras defiantly rejected U.S. sovereignty over his personhood when he declared; “Don’t count on me to put those shackles back on, I freed myself from the indignity of a false citizenship, that of the country that invaded mine, which continues to keep the only country that I owe allegiance to as a colony. There is no force that could force me to be a citizen of that country againâ€(RamÃrez Ferrer). In November 1995 the Department of State reversed its decision and revoked the loss of nationality certificate.
Mari Bras was actively engaged in a more recent nonpartisan island-wide campaign, which he saw as “a new patriotic offensive†and a “raising up of a great national liberation movement†to force the U.S. Navy to stop using the inhabited island of Vieques for military training, including aerial bombing and ship to shore shelling (Cruz). Before the Special Decolonization Committee, Mari Bras called on the navy to end the bombing immediately and leave Vieques forever. He told the committee that the “United States military had promulgated the Vieques crisis with the sole purpose of affirming the domination of Puerto Rico, despite the consensus in the commonwealth that it must cease its activity there. In continuing military exercises on Vieques, raw force had prevailed against what was right†(United Nations).
Targeted by the FBI
Through its COINTELPRO operations, the FBI targeted Juan Mari Bras for particularly aggressive surveillance and harassment. It organized a sustained campaign of disinformation and character assassination in an attempt to compromise his effectiveness as a respected leader of Puerto Rican independence forces. Mari Bras testified before the United Nations that the FBI was conspiring with other agencies against the independence movement, and presented an affidavit from a former secretary employed by the FBI that provided an account of COINTELPRO operations conducted against Mari Bras (Teltsch, p. 23). Throughout the 1970s the independence forces were targets of violence that the neither the FBI nor the government of Puerto Rico seemed capable of containing. In 1973 the Claridad offices were firebombed, and in 1978 Mari Bras’s home was firebombed as well. In March 1976, Mari Bras’s twenty-three-year-old son, Santiago Mari Pesquera, an independentista and anti–Vietnam War activist, was murdered. Despite a history of attempted intimidation by the FBI and the police and tragic personal loss, Juan Mari Bras has remained a steadfast opponent of U.S. colonialism and an unrepentant activist for Puerto Rican self-determination.
Bibliography and More Information about Juan Mari Bras
Bigart, Homer. “Puerto Rican Nationalist Group and Carmichael Form Alliance.†New York Times, January 27, 1967, p. 17.
Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars against Domestic Dissent. Boston: South End Press, 1990.
Cruz, José A. “Grito de Lares Celebrated.†People’s Weekly World, October 5, 2002. www.pww.org/article/view/2072/1/112/
Fernández, Ronald, SerafÃn Méndez, and Gail Cueto. Puerto Rico: Past and Present. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Kihss, Peter. “20,000 Rally Here for Puerto Rican Independence.†New York Times, October 28, 1974a, p. 35.
Kihss, Peter. “A Puerto Rican Sees Genocide.†New York Times, October 31 1974b, p. 8.
RamÃrez Ferrer, Julio. “Two Opposing Political Forces Speak on Citizenship Ruling.†The San Juan Star, January 6, 1998. www.puertorico-herald.org/issues/vol2n10/maribras-ramirez.shtml
Silén, Juan Angel. Historia de la nación Puertorriqueña. 2nd ed. RÃo Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Edil, 1980.
Teltsch, Kathleen. “F.B.I. Role to Get a Hearing at U.N.†New York Times, June 8, 1975, p. 23.
United Nations. Special Decolonization Committee. “Special Decolonization Committee Hears Petitioners on Puerto Rico.†Press Release GA/COL/3-35, 2000. www.independencia.net/noticias/com descONU35.html
Wagenheim, Kal, and Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim, eds. The Puerto Ricans: A Documentary History. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1994. See also Cointelpro; Puerto Rican Independence Movement; Puerto Rican Nationalist Uprising; Puerto Rican Political Prisoners; and Vieques and Culebra.
Pedro Cabán
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Muere histórico lÃder independentista puertorriqueño Juan Mari Brás
San Juan, 10 sep (PL) El histórico dirigente izquierdista puertorriqueño Juan Mari Brás falleció en la madrugada de hoy en su residencia de San Juan, después de una prolongada convalecencia.
Mari Brás de 83 años de edad, fundador en 1959 del Movimiento Pro Independencia (MPI) de Puerto Rico y en 1971 del Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño (PSP, marxista-leninista), murió tranquilo en su hogar en San Juan acompañado de su esposa Martha Brás Vilella.
Su yerno Enrique (Kike) Estrada dijo que los detalles del funeral de Mari Brás se ofrecerán en el transcurso del dÃa.
El deceso del dirigente socialista, fundador junto al periodista y sindicalista César Andreu Iglesias del semanario independentista Claridad, se produjo a eso de la 1:45 horas, según la agencia puertorriqueña Inter News Service.
Mari Brás consiguió a partir de 1959, inspirado en la Revolución Cubana y en su máximo lÃder, Fidel Castro, imprimirle a la lucha por la independencia de Puerto Rico un matiz combativo, después del reflujo que produjo la persecución desatada contra el nacionalismo boricua tras el levantamiento armado de 1950, cuando se proclamó la segunda República de Puerto Rico.
El dirigente polÃtico ostentaba la ciudadanÃa puertorriqueña después de una ardua batalla legal que se originó cuando en 1994 se presentó a la embajada de Estados Unidos en Venezuela a renunciar la ciudadanÃa estadounidense, que Washington impuso a los boricuas en 1917.
En 1946 participó en la fundación del Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP), del cual se distanció al radicalizar su visión revolucionaria.
Expulsado de la Universidad de Puerto Rico (UPR) por participar en la huelga estudiantil de 1948, debió marchar a Estados Unidos y en 1954 se graduó de abogado en la Escuela de Leyes de la American University, en la capital estadounidense, a la que ingresó al tener que dejar la Universidad George Washington durante la persecución anticomunista del senador Joseph McCarthy.
La salud del lÃder izquierdista comenzó a complicarse tras sufrir una caÃda el 31 de mayo de 2009 en su residencia en el sector Dulces Labios, en la occidental municipalidad de Mayagüez, donde nació el 2 de diciembre de 1926.
A causa de ese accidente, fue sometido a una intervención quirúrgica en la cabeza en el Centro Médico en RÃo Piedras, la que estuvo a cargo del doctor Eric Carro, con el propósito de succionarle unos hematomas subdurales que le causaban presión cerebral.
Mari Brás salió bien de esa cirugÃa, pero en diciembre de 2009 estuvo bajo cuidado intensivo en el hospital Bella Vista de Mayagüez como consecuencia de una pulmonÃa.
En esa oportunidad, los médicos le descubrieron un nódulo en el pulmón izquierdo, que le trajo otras complicaciones de salud.
El lÃder izquierdista murió con la profunda tristeza, recordó su yerno Estrada, de que jamás se esclareció quiénes estuvieron en 1976 detrás del asesinato de uno de sus hijos, Santiago (Chagui) Mari Pesquera, de 23 años.
En diciembre de 2009, su hija Rosa Mari Pesquera, portavoz de la Comisión por la Verdad y la Justicia, presentó documentos desclasificados del Buró Federal de Investigaciones (FBI) que ubican a los exiliados cubanos Reynol RodrÃguez González y Frank Eulalio Castro Paz en una conspiración para asesinar a Mari Brás.
El FBI estuvo al tanto de una conspiración para matar al dirigente socialista dos meses antes de que el 24 de marzo de 1976 asesinaran a su hijo, pero nunca lo alertó.
