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Puerto Rico: Hands Off Campus Strikers! (Class-Struggle Defense Notes) For more than five weeks, students at the University of Puerto Rico have been on strike to protest budget cuts, tuition hikes and moves by the government to privatize university services. The strike began on April 21 at the main Río Piedras campus in the capital city, San Juan, and spread across the island, paralyzing the eleven-campus public university with its enrollment of 65,000. In an effort to break the strike, riot cops surrounded the main gates of Río Piedras on May 14 to deny food and water to students occupying the campus. But hundreds of the students’ supporters broke the blockade, tossing bags of food and bottles of water over the heads of the police. The strike has received wide support among workers, teachers, and community organizations in Puerto Rico and among student groups, intellectuals and others internationally. On May 18, a coalition of Puerto Rican public employees unions carried out a one-day strike in support of the students’ demands. As the Miami Herald (23 May) observed, “Not since Puerto Rico rallied to chase the United States Navy out of Vieques a decade ago have so many different social sectors rallied around a single cause.” The strike is taking place against a backdrop of widespread anger and discontent throughout the island over government austerity measures, mass layoffs of public employees and rising unemployment. Last October, a one-day general strike and mass rallies protesting austerity measures paralyzed San Juan. Puerto Rico remains a colony of U.S. imperialism, and it is ultimately Washington that holds the whip hand over the Puerto Rican masses. It is crucial for the U.S. working class to stand in solidarity with the striking students and the embattled unions. Victory to the student strike! For the right of independence for Puerto Rico! We print below a May 29 letter by the Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—addressed to Puerto Rico governor Luis Fortuño protesting a recent brutal police attack against student strikers and their supporters. * * * The Partisan Defense Committee vigorously protests the police assault on students, trade unionists and independence advocates who protested at the Sheraton Hotel in San Juan on May 20 in support of the University of Puerto Rico campus strike. Shock Forces (Fuerzas de Choque) agents brutally attacked protesters with tasers, clubs, tear gas and pepper spray. Dozens were injured, including Central Labor Federation president Luisa Acevedo, Puerto Rican Labor Federation president José Rodríguez Báez and Hostosian National Independence Movement co-president Julio Muriente. Police arrested Public Buildings Union member Miguel Angel Ramos Linn and students Gabriel Muriente Pastrana, Angel Santiago Díaz and José Pérez, who was hospitalized after police tased him several times. The PDC demands that no legal charges or reprisals be brought against the strikers and their supporters. The University of Puerto Rico strike was provoked by your government’s draconian budget cuts and efforts to privatize university services, as well as threats to limit tuition waivers for students and to increase summer tuition. Earlier this month, police blocked deliveries of food and water in an unsuccessful attempt to starve out strikers at the Río Piedras campus, and the father of one striker was arrested for trying to deliver food. The PDC joins the Puerto Rican trade unions, students and professors in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Spain and Venezuela, and prominent individuals like Cuban singer Silvio Rodríguez and Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, as well as the Cuban government, who have solidarized with the strike. Hands off student protesters and trade unionists!
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