Nationalism is like the universal ether: it penetrates all sectors. The Partido Republicano Puro falls under the weight of its error of political finality and tactics. Clarifying that the North American “state” is neither a state nor sovereign, and lacks international personality, and that it is a mere province, the entire foundation of that party crumbles. Statehood for Puerto Rico would be its extinction in the North American nation. No intelligent person, conscious of this truth, can continue to militate in that group. Its tactic of passionate cooperation with the regime could not have been more disastrous. It is a faction in full dissolution. There already exists within it the vanguard that, with true patriotic sense, has publicly requested of the leadership that it declare itself frankly for the absolute independence of its country. The next assembly of the “puros” will assume, for that sole consideration, a great public interest. The socialist governmental faction, defined until now in favor of “the permanent and indestructible union” between the United States and Puerto Rico, also feels the jolt of the nationalist emancipatory movement. That group will not be able to continue being annexationist and anti-socialist. It will have to define itself, in accordance with the socialist postulates of the North American socialist party, for the absolute independence of Puerto Rico. The pro-independence elements that militate within it in good faith will force that renovation in the next convention that is held. The Aliancista and Unionista factions, which have the same contradictory program of “state” or independence, in the alternative, have suffered a rude jolt recently with the political declarations in favor of absolute independence that the head of the Unionistas has just made, seconded by other directors of that group. As in reality, the Aliancistas and the Unionistas maintain the same program, and as the rupture between them is recent, the Aliancista sector feels the repercussions of these declarations and considers itself part of the conservative Unionista element obligated to combat them. The duel that “La Democracia” and “La Correspondencia”, organs of these factions, sustain, is of utmost interest for the observer who coldly contemplates the renovation that is forcibly being imposed on all the groups that until now have delivered the Homeland tied to the invader. -Well, and of the political moment in the Unión de Puerto Rico, what do you tell me? -A yearning for transformation manifests itself within it, which has resulted as extremely painful for that political body to be ossified. As a governmental element it has lost all its moral ascendancy and to reconquer it is perhaps making its last effort. The dilemma is clear: life or death. With the Yankees or with the Puerto Ricans. Alea jacta est. The Puerto Rican nation demands its immediate redemption and is prepared to combat the regime head-on. No one aspire to direct its destinies who is not willing to fulfill their duty of sacrifice for the cause of Homeland independence. -If the next assembly of the Unión defines itself for Independence as the only political solution for Puerto Rico, what would the Partido Nacionalista do? -The Partido Nacionalista is the living Homeland, and resolved to emancipate itself immediately by its own effort. It does not understand delays for its redemption from the military occupation that lashes it. That same thing, surely, the Assembly will have to say that celebrates independence as its only purpose, I think. Sr. Albizu Campos continues speaking of his party. I listen with respect: -We have made the public commitment not to cooperate with the regime. We reject executive positions. We limit ourselves to accepting the elective positions that emanate from the popular will. As soon as we receive the suffrage of the majorities, we will proclaim the constitution of the Republic twenty-four hours after the elections have taken place. Such are the definitive dispositions of our program. Any declaration of independence that a governmental faction makes, as the Partido Unionista is, will gladden us because it is a formal recognition of the nationalist consciousness that we have formed in the country. Nationalism has a sacred deposit. No political maneuver that is made, by any other group, will move it from its definitive trajectory towards the immediate attainment of the emancipation of the Homeland. We have a diaphanous political ideology that withstands analysis in broad daylight. Our tactic is resolute. It is necessary that men and women, self-sacrificing and brave, militate in our ranks. We are going to resolve without further delay the suppression of the North American military occupation in Puerto Rico. -Wouldn’t the Partido Nacionalista unite its forces with those of the Unión de Puerto Rico, no longer separating them from differences of ideals? -Nationalism has maintained pure the ideal of independence. It will not permit mixtifications of the same. It will not tolerate that it be profaned using it as a tactic to win elections that if they result victorious, our flag then serves as a carpet for the invaders. For those who truly want the independence of Puerto Rico there is a loving place for them. Come occupy your place in the ranks of true patriotism. -Then there would be two parties in Puerto Rico sustaining the same ideal, in my judgement it would be an unnecessary and inexplicable pugilato between brothers, I believe that each day we divide ourselves more here. I look with pain that perhaps the dream of my uncle, of the union of Puerto Ricans, may never be realized. Muñoz Rivera gave his life to that labor. We should remember it. -We nationalists do not understand pacts, coalitions, nor alliances. These combinations are made to attack the budget and we reject in advance the positions that the invader has used until now to corrupt our public men, demoralize the country, and submit it to its systematic exploitation. We offer to the good sons of this land the opportunity to fulfill their duty as patriots. From them we demand nothing less than complete sacrifice. Oath that must be taken when aspiring to form a rank in our group. Huyke said recently that he combated Albizu admiring and respecting him. I also think that nothing other than admiration and respect can be felt by every just and honorable citizen before the men of the Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico. Now I inquire of the President: -In your judgement, what reasons sustain the ideal of independence? -We will repeat here what we have repeated so many times on other occasions. That neither for moral reasons nor for material reasons, will independence ever be debatable. -Will the Partido Nacionalista go to the polls? -Yes, madam. The party firmly believes that the electoral route will be effective for the realization of its program and has thus foreseen it in its tactic for more than a year. The events that recently have shaken the mother Patria España, by overthrowing a regime by the electoral route, have come to corroborate the certainty of our procedures. -Will you go alone? -I believe it unnecessary to repeat what has already been said. Nationalism has to maintain itself pure in order to make every Puerto Rican a patriot willing to do everything for the independence of his country. -Tell me about your concept of the candidate. -The nationalist candidate has to be a patriot: that is to say, be willing to sacrifice everything for the emancipation of his land. Valiant. Upright. And this is the only candidate for whom every good Puerto Rican should vote. Supporting him constitutes effective cooperation for the emancipation of the elector and of his posterity. -Among the nationalist women, which, do you believe could be pointed out as future candidates? -This is a matter that concerns our convention. There exist Puerto Rican women, valiant, intelligent, self-sacrificing, and perhaps with greater disposition to sacrifice than men to assume the elevated mission of representing the emancipatory movement in any place and in any circumstance. I now make several questions that the president of the Partido Nacionalista does not answer. He tells me that it is his party that would have to answer them. It is not possible to make Sr. Albizu speak when he believes that he would compromise his party in some sense. I admire, also, that other manifestation so necessary to a man who represents a sector of opinion. We pass to another point. I ask: -Do you have faith in the intervention of women? -Women have shaken their slumber. Creator of the nationality, she has to have more zeal than man for the conservation of the Homeland in the plenitude of its right to be free, and she has to be an enemy of every individual or regime that pretends to curtail the plenary development of the opportunities that her children should enjoy. Her lineage must be the owner without exotic obstacles of the destinies of the Homeland. The woman, when she deposits her vote in the urn, will have to meditate and resolve to fix by that act the liberty or the slavery of her children. The dilemma will not exist for her. Her vote will determine the immediate emancipation of Puerto Rico. We speak of a total renovation of the country. Sr. Albizu tells me: -Integral nationalism has to make a Patria strong, cultured, wise, and powerful. It is inspired for that elevated end in the spiritual sources of our nationality. It is our dogma that every Puerto Rican be a physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual fortress. -Do you believe that our youth is educated for that? -Our system of public instruction is condemned by our own and by strangers that denatures, brutalizes, and demoralizes our youth so that it serves as an instrument to the invaders in their policy to destroy Puerto Rico. -Of instruction in English, what do you tell me? -In our recent conference at the University we analyzed the barbarity of imposing instruction in the language of the invaders, something condemned by all the pedagogues of the world. Some daring elements in the pay of the occupying power are the only ones that dare to give some explanation to this gross attack against the psychic life of our country. The president of the Partido Nacionalista has finished. When saying goodbye, I say to him: -I suppose that the nationalists will attend the assembly on Saturday. Sr. Albizu answers. -Many will go in their individual character, but the party will not send any commission. We have not received any invitation until now for said act. I shake with rejoicing the hand of the man who with admirable valor and nobility has taken in his charge the defense of the ideal of the independence of my Patria. June 1931. By Angela Negrón Muñoz “IT IS A MOCKERY OF THE FREEDOM OF THOUGHT TO PRETEND IN ITS NAME THAT THE USE OF THE WORD BE TOLERATED TO THOSE WHO LABOR AGAINST OUR HAPPINESS” ALBIZU CAMPOS SAYS To the chords of La Borinqueña, the valiant champion of the Puerto Rican cause, don Pedro Albizu Campos, advanced to the proscenium receiving an enthusiastic ovation of greeting. The eminent tribune censured claustrally the inconsistent actions of the directors that the country has had, the duplicity and disorientation of the consigned formulas, and the profanations of the word “Patria” committed in its sacred name, which the Partido Nacionalista is not willing to consent and will not consent anymore. He maintained that while he congratulates the Unionistas for the new pro-independence orientation of their program, it is indispensable that they make it good with their actions, the primordial one being the resignation from public posts not emanating from popular election since they are a source of political prostitution and their acceptance a profanation of the ideal. One cannot be with God and the devil. To define themselves also in the actions, he said that the regime, due to its exploitative finality, does not occupy itself duly with the true necessities of the people, such as public health and beneficence. That an infinity of Puerto Rican doctors, with egoistic aims, live adhered to that department whose labor is practically null. If the health department occupied itself with the health of the people, the canned meats that are sold would be confiscated if they were not sold within the term necessary for good conservation. He highlighted that the principal panegyrists of the regime are salaried by the same, which explains their devotion to the invading government, and that not only do they personally perceive checks but they have numerous relatives placed in the Government, their annual incomes being fabulous. That it is senseless and stupid to pretend that the country has tolerance before that spectacle. He denied Santiago Iglesias Pantín authority to intervene in national politics for being a foreigner and even less with the perverse and egoistic ends that he does so. Foreigners can only intervene in the national life of a foreign country with noble ends as Kosciusko, Palaski, Lafayette, Rochambeau, Lord Byron and others did whose names humanity venerates. But they must be energetically rejected when they are enemies of the Patria and it is therefore a mockery of the freedom of thought to pretend in its name that the use of the word be tolerated to those who labor against our happiness. He then addressed the economic problems. It is ridiculous to say that if we were independent we would lose the North American market, since the immense majority of commerce here is North American and it is they and not us who benefit from the market of our country… It is no less ridiculous to ask with what we would sustain ourselves independent. Currently no one sustains us, if not ourselves. The Yankee does not put a cent here that he does not take out fat profits. We pay the budget. With the dominion of our tariffs, we could sustain a budget of no less than $20,000,000, in addition to the benefits that free competition of all nations would report in our market, which would lower the present high cost of living. He gave the voice of alert to the sugarcane workers of the great crisis that threatens that industry, since the United States is rapidly converting itself into a nation producer and exporter of sugar and its competition would ruin the sugar producers from here. Finally, he entered into the terrain of international law and explained how the Partido Nacionalista, once owner of the suffrages of the majority, will constitute the Republic and by means of its diplomatic service will ask the entire world and the United States for its recognition as a sovereign Republic. That if the United States deny it, we will take them to an international tribunal, where, according to the jurisprudence established in the case of Finland against the empire of the Czars of Russia, our right will triumph. Before the dilemma of recognizing our Republic or shooting at our constituent convention and assassinating this people, said the orator- the United States will have no other recourse than to fall on the side of democracy, justice, and liberty that it so much proclaims or confront the terrible and fatal consequences of its abuse if they have the audacity to commit it. We will be, then, free, if we determine ourselves to be so. A tremendous ovation received the final words of the orator and eminent personalities of Guayama went up to the stage to ardently congratulate don Pedro. His brilliant oratory piece has promoted in Guayama excellent impressions heralding the triumph of the emancipatory cause of Puerto Rico.” PROCLAMATION OF THE PARTIDO NACIONALISTA ON THE OCCASION OF SEPTEMBER 23. PILGRIMAGE TO LARES. PROCLAMATION OF THE PARTIDO NACIONALISTA ON THE OCCASION OF SEPTEMBER 23, DAY OF THE HEROES AND MARTYRS OF INDEPENDENCE. SECOND NATIONAL ASSEMBLY Within a few days the sixty-third anniversary of the maximum feat of the patriotic annals will be fulfilled in which the national sentiment of independence was translated into facts and the Puerto Rican people from the heroic mountains of Lares inscribed among the decorous dates of the orb September 23. The emancipatory movement of Puerto Rico, which the Partido Nacionalista embodies today, is not a romantic movement; the philosophical and juridical ideas serve as sublime props, but it has its authentic ascendancy in an epic journey baptized with blood and is cemented in the categorical devotion of the good sons of this land for the cause of the unpostponable restoration of the republic. History attests that the independence of Puerto Rico, like all the redeeming ideals of humanity, has its heroes and its martyrs and nothing will purify the collective consciousness so much as meditation on that immaculate sacrifice, which has been and will always be above all the profanations, in the very immortal setting of its glorious apotheosis. The Partido Nacionalista will sponsor therefore again this year the patriotic national pilgrimage towards the sacred land of Lares that is the august tabernacle of the Patria. Our Partido is the same as the year before last by reason of the purity and the integrity of its ideology, invariable and immutable as the truth, but today it presents itself crowned by success, in the summits, not of the colonial power that it despises, but of the love and of the recognition and of the respect of our own and strangers, which is the only thing that interests it. Even the ambient ideas of the actual world favor us. The growth of the international consciousness is elevating each day more to the plane of right the relations between the States that traditionally were resolved by force. The absolute liberty of the powers is seen each time more curtailed when it violates rights of other States. The peoples already, as well as the individuals, have attained the right to the recognition of their juridical personality. The slavery of the countries yields before the concept of the family of nations. Already the mere name of “colony” is reprehensible, and Puerto Rico demands its entrance in the society of nations. We must always keep in mind, however, that the victory for the cause of independence depends exclusively on the national will that reaches the sacrifice to impose justice and the right. Let the entire Puerto Rican nation concur to the second national assembly that will be celebrated in Lares next September 23 to render a tribute of honor and gratitude and at the same time of solidarity and redress to the leaders of ‘68, who lit in Puerto Rico, before the Cubans in Yara, the holy fire of the liberty of the Patria, making shine in our sky the refulgence of the sword of Bolívar. Given in the city of San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico on the 15th day of September of 1931, year 63 of the proclamation of the republic. The National Junta, Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico. P. Albizu Campos, President Manuel Rivera Matos, General Secretary THE ACTS CELEBRATED BY THE PARTIDO NACIONALISTA IN THE CITY OF LARES ON THE TWENTY-THIRD DAY OF SEPTEMBER IN COURSE ALBIZU CAMPOS SPEAKS When the President of the Partido Nacionalista was announced to make use of the word the music played La Borinqueña while the public standing paid delirious applause that prolonged for several minutes. “The human tendency is to be parasitic. Only a spiritual conception of life elevates us to the offering of what we possess for a just cause. Our people in their moral decadence is a parasitic people. But this apotheosis is not a parasitic act. We do not come here to raise a myth, nor to live a past glory. It is very easy to speak of the glories of others, but that does not make glorious the one who speaks. We come here as an act of consecration to the principles that informed the men of ‘68. “We love and adore the Patria as a goddess. The last particle of our soil is a sacred thing and we will not permit that strange hands profane it. But higher than that cult is the cult of our progenitors and we will not permit that strange hands profane it. They represent the symbolism of the life that we possess and of our greatness before Eternity. The peoples who do not know their progenitors, are buried peoples, are dead peoples. We, when remembering today their memory, result unworthy successors of their memory. The peoples are ungrateful because the men are ungrateful; thus, our people does not know the descendants of those great men. And we have to honor their memory in their own flesh.” Then the orator entered to make an analysis on the transcendence of the personality. “The problem of Puerto Rico,” he said, “is the problem of its personality. There is no responsibility where there is no exercise of powers. A people governed by a strange power is an irresponsible people.” He said that Puerto Rico was in the conditions of a madman who has no personality before the law for being an irresponsible entity and a tutor is put on him to administer his goods. “The empire says to the colony: “I exercise the power because you are incapacitated”. And it disposes of all the lands and goods as a tutor. Puerto Rico passes in actuality before the world as a people of imbeciles who have no capacity to resolve their own affairs. To enjoy rights one must have personality and speak with the other powers as equals.” The orator analyzed the consequences of the negation of the personality in all the orders, especially in the educational order. He said that the empire established the educational system that suited its ends and therefore occupied itself with ensuring that the truth was not told in the schools. The orator also addressed the religious problem. He said that no religion in our country could be an enemy of our Independence; that no one in the name of Catholic or Protestant could combat the cause of our liberty. He manifested that Puerto Rico before the Holy See was an independent nation that enjoyed ecclesiastical sovereignty. That in its day the Partido Nacionalista would send a commission before the Vatican to raise the case of Puerto Rico. He manifested that all the religious institutions had to be nationalized. As this year the mass celebrated last year in honor of the heroes of ‘68 did not figure in the program, Sr. Albizu Campos personally addressed Rvdo. Martínez, of that parish. “Last year,” he said, “a Te Deum was sung in the church of this town and the Rvdo. Martínez pronounced the most eloquent discourse in the assembly that we gave in this same theater. The reverend Martínez revealed himself that afternoon as a true Puerto Rican. The reverend Martínez owes an explanation to his people of why that mass has not been celebrated. He must explain what secret coercions have impeded that the perfume of a prayer to the martyrs of our Independence be elevated today.” The orator finished by saying that that pilgrimage was an act of redress to the heroes of ‘68. Sr. Albizu Campos was carried on shoulders by the multitude, closing the assembly in the midst of a delirious enthusiasm. THE PARTIDO NACIONALISTA PROCLAIMS NINE DAYS OF MOURNING ON THE OCCASION OF THE DEATH OF DON PEDRO ANGLERO, SURVIVOR OF THE GRITO DE LARES Each time that a free man disappears, the Patria trembles and the future is clouded: the one, feeling in its most intimate essences the painful attack of Destiny and the other, suffering the orphanage of the constitutive virtues of hope. Hence, when manhood descends from its august pedestal obeying iron and eternal laws, it is necessary to staunch the wound with a vision of eternity, for otherwise the sense of spiritual harmony will succumb to the weight of the disgrace. The heroes of the great odyssey of Lares made the heart of their Patria palpitate for the same reason that those venerable trunks had taken root in the bottom of the Puerto Rican Spirit. From then to this part, the Patria, reviled in hours of jubilation by the detractors of the Ideal, kept very deep in its entrails the ashes of its glorious dead, sure that the enemies of Liberty, for lacking the vision of the eternal, are not in the disposition to respect the sacred ashes of the dead. But today, shaken the very essence of the Patria by the death of the survivor of the odyssey of Lares, don Pedro Angleró, at the age of one hundred and ten years, it seems to us that the prominent figures of the Revolution of ‘68 make their appearance in the proscenium of their people and impose silence, with the moral authority that induced them to defend, in not a distant day, the reason of the ideals and the transcendence of the libertarian thought. Don Pedro Angleró, in the moment in which the Patria, pained and bleeding, mourns the absence of its true sons and sinks in the desperation of historical fatalism, has died today, in the Barrio Obrero, of this city of San Juan Bautista, for physical life. A centennial leader has died, in whose veins was beating
the redemption of a people subjugated by the power of force and by the negation of some of its sons. The sublime standard of the Borincan epic has fallen, and, in falling, with the sadness of the great and the happiness of the beautiful of soul, it has risen with the elegance of the martyrs who always rise above the tabernacle, being in communion with the perfume of sacrifice. Above the tabernacle of disillusionments has leaped this noble defender of morality and this priest of justice; above the tabernacle that indifference raises in hours of negative potentiality, to impose the beheading of faith and decree that the vital force of Right resides in the imposition of inequality and not in the