Insurrection

One morning last week, a green sedan rolled into the palm-shaded cobblestone square before San Juan's Fortaleza, the 300-year-old residence of Governor Luis Mufioz Marin. Out of the car burst six members of Puerto Rico's desperate little Nationalist Party. Armed with pistols, rifles and a machine gun, they sprinted for the palace entrance. Yelling "Viva Puerto Rico libre," one Nationalist got off a wild submachine-gun burst. From the arcade, from parapets, from rooftops, guards poured fire down on the attackers.

Dust and chips flew as bullets rattled off the old Spanish walls. One attacker got as far as the portico. There he fell, sieved by bullets. Another, hit a dozen times, moaned: "I'm already dead. Please don't shoot me any more." The answer was another blast of fire. Of the six Nationalist attackers, four died, another was badly wounded, the sixth taken prisoner.

Hate & Terror. That was the first sign of trouble stirring in the U.S.'s tiny (3.435 sq. mi), poverty-stricken Caribbean territory--trouble which quickly spread to the steps of President Truman's residence in Washington (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). Soon violence erupted in a blaze of gunfire all over the island. Seventy Nationalists seized the town of Jayuya, killing four policemen, firing the post office, police station, Selective Service headquarters and 20 homes. In Ponce, Mayaguez, Utuado, half a dozen other towns, Nationalists attacked police stations with small arms and Molotov cocktails.

From San Juan, Governor Mufioz

Marin called out the National Guard. In scores of sharp, bloody little battles, the guardsmen hunted down the terrorists with bazookas, tanks and planes. Desperate and determined as they were, the rebels were no match for the soldiers. Hundreds of Nationalists were rounded up and imprisoned. By the end of the second day, Governor Munoz could report that Puerto Rico's worst uprising since the U.S. took over the island from Spain in 1898 seemed well under control. When police cornered diehard Nationalist Chief Pedro Albizu Campos, 59, in his San Juan headquarters, Governor Mufioz Marin ordered the besiegers to move cautiously. He wanted to cast no cloak of martyrdom over the Nationalists' hero.

Cape & Hamburg. Up to that point, even Puerto Rican police had no real conception of the Nationalists' full, fanatic plans. They had begun to look on sickly, yanqui-hating Pedro Albizu Campos as no more than a noisy reminder of the days when "independence" was the rallying cry of all diehard Caribbean extremists. The son of a wealthy Spanish sugar merchant and his father's Negro mistress, he had gone to Harvard ('16), returned to Puerto Rico embittered by a World War I hitch in a Puerto Rican Negro regiment.

He founded his Nationalist Party (estimated membership: 1,000) in the '205, strutted the streets of Puerto Rican villages clad in flowing cape and Homburg. After President Roosevelt's visit in 1934, he shrieked: "Cowards, you should have received Roosevelt with bullets but you greeted him with flowers." In 1936 one of his terrorists assassinated the island police chief. As a result of the murder, Albizu was arrested for conspiring to overthrow

U.S. rule in Puerto Rico and sentenced to ten years in Atlanta federal prison.

When he returned to Puerto Rico in 1947, Albizu found that he was a back number. He spent much of his time talking bitterly to a few followers at the mountain home of Blanca Canales Torresola, cousin of the man shot dead last week on the steps of Blair-Lee House. Most Puerto Ricans had come to realize that independence, with the accompanying loss of tariff advantages and tax refunds, would be economic suicide. And in recent years, Puerto Rico had won more & more self-rule. Only two years ago Puerto Ricans had elected their own governor for the first time; last weekend, just before the rebellious Nationalists struck, the islanders were to register for a plebiscite, preparing the way for a constitution they would write themselves.

Defiance & Tear Gas. The attempted assassination of President Truman brought swift action from Mufioz Marin. Crying "This is lunatic gangsterism," he ordered Albizu Campos brought in at all costs. Police threw tear gas into Albizu's beleaguered headquarters. From the balcony, Albizu waggled a soiled white towel on the end of a broom in token of surrender.

In the police station later that day, his hair standing out in greying spikes, his eyes afire, Albizu Campos was still playing the role of Puerto Rican liberator. "The nation," he proclaimed, "is passing through its glorious transfiguration."

But the show was over. Mufioz Marin soberly took note of the "tragic and useless" death of 31 Puerto Ricans. Said he: "A government founded on votes cannot be destroyed." Albizu Campos and his diehards had been joined, he said, only by the island's Communists, ready as always to promote chaos. Albizu Campos himself faced trial on charges of attempted murder and insurrection against the Puerto Rican government.

By week's end the island's calm was restored and Puerto Ricans showed authoritatively what they thought of Albizu Campos' Nationalist terrorism. In even greater numbers than in the election year of 1948, they turned out to register for the vote on a constitution reaffirming self-rule, but keeping for themselves the rights and privileges of U.S. citizens.

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