Hon. Rafael Martínez Nadal, President of the Insular Senate. San Juan, Puerto Rico.
My very dear sir:
The national convenience that the representation to which the Nationalist party has the right on the Insular Board of Elections be respected motivates this communication.
The electoral law has been a means of tyranny that the interventionist regime has brandished against the nation by means of the political parties that have sponsored its destructive policy. It has always been manipulated to assure the triumph of the most loyal and submissive governmental faction in certain moments. Of course, everything possible has been done to impede the development of Nationalism, which is the only opposition movement against North American intervention. In the present electoral legalistic state, only the Unión Republicana and the Liberal party will have voice and vote in the Insular Board of Elections, the Socialists only voice, the Partido Nacionalista was eliminated.
All the governing parties, uniorrepublicanos, liberales and socialists, are against the present electoral legalistic state, for one reason or another, and their directors have spoken of the necessity there is to create an electoral law that gives guarantees to all sectors of opinion.
We have seen with great astonishment that all that preaching is reduced to conceding voice and vote to the Socialist party in the Insular Board of Elections, with which we agree, of course, because that is a right of which it would be a gross immorality to deprive the cited political collectivity.
To Nationalism, however, they intend to completely dispossess it of all representation in the Insular Electoral Board. Now then, every electoral law is made to give guarantees to the opposition to the government. The governing parties do not need guarantees, because the power does not limit itself to giving them guarantees, but rather grants them all the privileges to keep them strong, because they are the instruments of its policy. Thus the Unión Republicana, the Partido Liberal and the Partido Socialista, while they are as they are, governing parties, the regime will ensure their development by all the means at its disposal, which are all, in a tyrannical foreign intervention like the one that wants to hold our sovereignty.
What is more, to distribute the budget among those parties, -of course, excluding the highly remunerated positions which the Yankee power disposes of at its whim-, elections are not necessary. This observation is so certain that the Yankee power in no way takes into consideration the electoral result when it divides the budget among the governing parties. And it should not be forgotten that all the interference of those parties in the present regime is limited to the participation of their adherents in the subordinate positions of the budget, to handing over, in the sacred name of Puerto Rico, all the vital interests of the Homeland to its interventionist enemies.
The parties called governing parties in this regime, by virtue of the same, are impotent to do anything affirmative in defense of Puerto Rico. If they wanted to take any initiative, they would necessarily run into the interventionist regime, which would deny them the budgetary good and condemn them automatically to extinction. The same insular legislature has served to verify its uselessness to defend the patriotic interests before the absolute veto that gravitates over all its legislation.
We do not want to discourse on the grave responsibility incurred in constituting a “governing” party under foreign military tyranny, such as the one that prevails here. But we must call attention to the fact that there is no right to continue serving as a dupe to the Yankee power to obstruct the development of Nationalism, which represents the militant claim to the absolute independence of the Homeland; to be the sole arbiter of its destinies in all orders of its national life.
We will be told that they want to work stealthily in favor of the patriotic interests in the same enemy tents. That tactic is as ineffective as has been proven in the thirty-five long and terrible years of Yankee and demoralizing intervention, because it tends to weaken the virile fiber of nationality.
We appear through your mediation before the legislative body that you have the honor to preside over, so that the stain that weighs on the history of the legislature for having lent itself to the systematic obstruction of nationalism, which is the only cause that is ours absolutely as Puerto Ricans, is not repeated.
The Partido Nacionalista, despite all the arbitrariness of the regime, has maintained in the polls, in all the elections, from 1920 to here, the protest against foreign interference in the affairs of Puerto Rico, maintaining its right to absolute independence intact. Currently, its ideology informs all public opinion. As the only opposition party, it is the most called upon to have representation in the Insular Electoral Board.
I take the opportunity to express to the Mr. President of the Insular Senate the most distinguished consideration.
S.S.S., P. ALBIZU CAMPOS President of the Partido Nacionalista