THE REAL NEWS
PAUL JAY: And just another–one more time, Michael is president emeritus at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. He’s chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin. He’s also a member of the board of The Real News Network. And all kinds of other stuff.
If there’s one important story that gets almost zero coverage today, it is the Puerto Rican independence movement, the whole Puerto Rican politics. Perhaps maybe in New York there’s more, but across the country and nationally there’s virtually no consciousness of Puerto Rico, period. Tell us more about your involvement.
MICHAEL RATNER: And that’s ebbed and flowed, of course. In the ’50s, when I was a kid, some Puerto Rican nationalists shot up the U.S. Congress. They didn’t kill anybody, but that was front page everywhere. So you got some consciousness then of Puerto Rican independence. Of course, Puerto Rico was made a colony in 1898. It was originally a Spanish colony. The U.S., claiming it was helping push Spain out, just decided to stay and occupy it as a territory of the United States. And so it has a history of incredible colonialism–and still continuing. And we can tell stories about everything from sterilization to finishing off the farming, you know, to having a military base on Vieques, an island off Puerto Rico, that did bombing runs. It’s just an incredibly exploited piece of land, exploited so badly that essentially Puerto Ricans were better off (at least in their view) economically by moving to the United States.
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But it really in some way–I didn’t come at it on my own. I came at it because it was such a huge issue in New York at the time and because I was representing the draft. I got there through the draft, by representing Puerto Ricans who weren’t going to serve in Vietnam and who said, we’re independent. And I came up with 30 different legal reasons why they shouldn’t serve–you know, false treaties, occupation, they don’t vote, all these things. We lost almost every case, but in some ways we won them all: none of them, I think, wound up going to jail, because by the time I litigated them and got them sympathetic and–it’s a longer story.
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