By P. Albizu Campos
More than 20 municipalities have defined themselves pro immediate Constituent Convention of the Republic.
In a solemn joint assembly of all the political parties in Aguas Buenas, three weeks ago, held in the City Hall of the patriotic city, under the presidency of its Mayor, Don Rafael González, the national will pro immediate Constitutional Convention of the Republic was defined.
After that impressive patriotic definition, imposing acts have been held in the same sense in some 20 municipalities of Puerto Rico.
In addition, we daily see the spontaneous public manifestation in all the municipalities of the Nation.
It is indisputable that the national will demands the immediate holding of the Constituent Convention of the Republic.
What factors are delaying the glorious moment of the organization of the Republic through the only existing means, that is, the Constituent Convention?
The struggle of parties.
We refer, of course, to the governmental parties that have been cooperating with the present regime.
These parties persist, after the formal recognition made by the Executive Power of the United States of the independence of Puerto Rico, in continuing in the sterile struggle that they have sustained throughout the North American regime and whose result has been nothing other than national ruin.
The leadership of these parties has not quite understood the definitive change that the statute of Puerto Rico has undergone vis-à-vis the United States.
Until the moment in which the Cabinet of the United States under the presidency of Mr. Roosevelt recognized the right of Puerto Rico to be a free, sovereign and independent nation, our Homeland suffered a military intervention under the North American empire and in that situation the organization of parties of cooperation with the will of the United States, supplied the colonial machinery for the development of interventionist politics.
Nationalism refused, as a dogma of its action, to serve those ends and with the sacrifice of its women and its men, with the death of heroes and martyrs, it was able to oblige the North American empire to recognize that the national will of Puerto Rico was unwavering — that our nation would never submit nor ever tolerate the continuation of the present regime; that Puerto Rico was a free, sovereign and independent nation; and that it was the duty of the United States to recognize our right in the concert of free, sovereign and independent nations.
To our demand has responded world opinion, and very especially the unanimous opinion of the nations of our race, where the United States has vital interests that can fix its destiny in history.
The present North American Executive Power has seen these facts with objective sense and in search of a permanent solution to the relations of the United States with Latin America, has resolved to recognize the right of Puerto Rico to independence as a national necessity.
Already in the year 1906, the eminent Dominican, Exmo. Sr. Dr. Américo Lugo, in the Pan-American Conference of Río de Janeiro, raised in the name of the great Dominican nation, the following resolution: “That in the interest of the well-being of all the Americas, the United States recognize the immediate independence of Puerto Rico.”
The high significance of said resolution is discovered when we realize that on that date there did not exist in Puerto Rico an openly nationalist movement, although the pro-independence sentiment was always what guided the majority of the population.
The transcendental resolution remained on the table because there was no definitive claim from Puerto Rico.
The North American delegation could argue, with a semblance of reason, that the Puerto Rican national will had never pronounced itself against the North American intervention in our Homeland.
It is also to be remembered that the North American delegation did not dare to combat the proposition in its substance and decidedly admitted the principle that involved said resolution, that for the general well-being of the Americas, empires could not exist in this hemisphere and subjugated nations in the same; and that Puerto Rico had to be recognized as a defined nation and by that sole fact with the right to figure in the concert of the free nations of the Earth.
Faithful to historical truth, we also record that the North American delegation did not pronounce itself in any hostile way against that legitimate claim that the exalted Dominican delegation made, without receiving even an insinuation from any existing organization or political party in Puerto Rico.
That is to say, that the principle that involves the recognition of nations in their right to independence is not of the exclusivity of the intervened nations to claim it for themselves, but that it is claimable by all the nations affected by the negation of that right.
Latin America has seen in the case of Puerto Rico the absolute proof of the danger that the empire of the United States represents for its independence. Especially has that reality fallen with terrible rudeness against our sister nations of the Caribbean: Cuba, Haití and the Dominican Republic.
After 1906, we were to contemplate the military occupation of Haití and of the Dominican Republic and of other Central American nations. Of course, formal intervention in Cuba continued as a permanent national regime.
Dr. Américo Lugo, the eminent Dominican jurist, nor the wise delegation that he presided, of the heroic nation creator of liberators, was not alone, then, when, without the consent, without the petition of anyone in Puerto Rico, he formally claimed before the Pan-American Conference of Río de Janeiro in 1906, as a vital question to the general well-being of the Americas, that the United States recognize the independence of Puerto Rico.
Next June a Pan-American Convention will probably meet in Buenos Aires, in the Argentine Capital, at the request of the Government of the United States to establish a regime of permanent peace in the Americas.
Latin America and the entire world knows that the United States has maintained a state of war against Puerto Rico for 38 years, a state of war that Nationalism has unmasked before world opinion and before Puerto Rican national opinion, in such a way that our rejection is seconded by the rejection of all the free nations, and very especially the nations of our race.
It is a certainty that the North American delegation to said Conference will be interrogated by the Latin American delegations about the situation of Puerto Rico under that state of military intervention that has culminated in the assassination of heroes and martyrs and in the imprisonment of patriots.
The United States, consulting its vital world interests, and in anticipation of that decisive moment for its history, and in order to invest its plenipotentiaries with its moral authority so that they may be spokespersons for an ideology of international peace, has declared by voice of its Executive Power that it recognizes the right of Puerto Rico to constitute itself as a free, sovereign and independent nation.
Without that prior declaration the North American delegation to the future Congress of Buenos Aires would not have moral entry to said act. Its plenipotentiaries would appear stained with the facts that have brought the rejection of the national conscience and of the international conscience, facts carried out in Puerto Rico.
The United States, with that recognition by its Executive Power of our right to independence, places itself in a moral position that we must recognize frankly.
It is up to Puerto Rico to give proof of its national capacity to peacefully make its interests respected and guarantee its existence as a sovereign nation.
We cannot allow that in Buenos Aires the North American delegation can say with a semblance of reason, that we have been indifferent to the recognition of our right to independence that the Executive Power of our Homeland has imparted.
To avoid that there is only one path, and it is the organization of the legitimate power of Puerto Rico. The immediate organization of that power.
The entire nation, we have pointed out, pronounces itself on the peremptory necessity of the immediate holding of the Constituent Convention, which is the only means that exists for the organization of the legitimate power of the Homeland.
We have just pointed out that the struggle of parties — and of colonial parties — pretends to maintain itself after the recognition of the independence of the Homeland.
Such an absurdity is impossible to conceive, but it is a real and positive fact.
It is the only delaying circumstance for the organization of the Constituent Convention of the Republic.
The leaders of those parties want to perpetuate, already in the Republic, the hatreds, the selfishness inherent in a policy of colonial slavery.
We must insist with the directors of responsibility of those organisms that there is no right to such an attack against the existence of the nation.
It is of meridian necessity, it is of peremptory necessity, an immediate truce in the struggle of parties that have no reason to exist in the Republic, and since they have done nothing for the good of the nation during all its existence, they must fulfill the duty of helping the organization of its legitimate power.
Their directors and their affiliates have their place of honor in the Constituent Convention of the legitimate power of the Homeland, because the honors inherent in patriotic executions, the nation does not skimp nor is slow to confer them.
To the Constituent Convention we must go with that loftiness of views.
Every united front pro Constituent Convention, forcibly has to combat any delay for the advent of the convocation of the Constituent Convention; it has to destroy the fallacy inherent in prejudices engendered by unconfessable hatreds that an electoral struggle continues, whose result is full futility for all who intervene in it and in grave prejudice to national interests.
And in this case it is a matter of nothing less than our existence as a sovereign and independent nation.
No one has the right, under any pretext, to delay for a second, the constitution of the legitimate power of Puerto Rico.
The electoral struggle is useless and detrimental and it is the duty of every good Puerto Rican to suppress it immediately, because that is the basis of national reconciliation.
Let us go to the truce of God; let us suspend the struggles of parties, because there is no need for them and because they endanger the most precious good of the Homeland, its independence.