The US and Puerto Rico: a short history of colonialism and injustice (THREAD) #FvckTheFourth #PuertoRicoLibre

VIEQUES: I’m going to start off with the US military use of Vieques, because the history of that is FUCKED UP. Vieques is a small island that is part of PR, which in the 1940’s the US began to use to train its navy, but mostly to test BOMBS

They bombed the island for 55 years. They only stopped because the entire island protested the negligent use of this land so fiercely that they had to pull out. However, after leaving they never cleaned the territory, leaving a number of unexploded bombs on the island.

To this day, bombs still explode on the island & its very dangerous to go to certain areas as there are still bombs all over the island that could blow at any moment, something that my mom herself saw when she was younger. Not only that, but they completely ravaged the ecosystem

Affecting the wildlife, infusing fish with heavy metals and affecting the population of turtles and crabs. AND they left the population of Vieques with a cancer rate that is about 27% higher than that of the mainland due to the toxic elements of these bombs.

STERILIZATION: the US, under FDR’s rule, sterilized poor Puerto Rican women without their informed consent. By the 1980’s they had sterilized 39% of the island’s women.

RADIATION EXPERIMENTS IN PRISON: the US conducted illegal experiments in prison, particularly targetting political prisioners who advocated and fought for PR’s independence, a notable victim being Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos.

He retold the horrors of being imprisioned for “conspiracy against the US,” and talked of being a subject of these experiments, which was corroborated by burns on his body due to intense radiation. The US called him crazy, but later under Clinton’s preidency they confirmed that

They had in fact conducted these inhumane radiation experiments from the 50’s to the 70’s

CORNELIUS RHOADS: an american doctor, sponsored by the rockefeller institute, deliberately and very illegally infected Puerto Ricans with cancer cells. At least 13 patients died.

This doctor chose puerto ricans because he saw them as (in his own words) “the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men to ever inhabit this sphere... I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off and transplating cancer into them”

And then he went on to describe how his team of american physicians took delight in abusing and torturing the subjects.

Im gonna take a little break from writing this thread because im very upset rn just thinking about the abusive and oppressive history of the US in my home. Ill be back with multiple more crimes against puerto rico that the us doesnt talk about soon.

Hello im BACK! Let’s talk about taxation without representation: puerto ricans have no voting presence in congress nor do we have the right to vote for president! However, as a colony all choices made by these political entities affect us, doesn’t seem very fair, does it?

Especially when you consider that Puertoricans do pay taxes and have less benefits than those in the mainland and were only made citizens so we could fight for the US in WW2, they literally only added us to use us.

BIRTH CONTROL: that’s right! They didn’t just sterilize our women, but in the 50’s, when birth control laws were strict in the mainland, two ‘esteemed’ doctors came to the island and tested the pill on poor puerto rican women. These pills in their early stages of testing had

Around 3 times the hormones, and at least three women died in connection to the pills, but no further investigations were carried out to see if other deaths were related.

Coming up soon: economic impacts of the jones act, cultural suppression attempts on the island, the ponce massacre and delayed reaction after maria (if you have any suggestions of other topics to talk about, please hit me up!!! There are so many that some slip through the cracks)

Ok babes lets go onto CULTURAL SUPPRESSION: in the 1940’s a law by the name of “ley de mordaza” was implemented. What this meant was that Puerto Ricand were not allowed to show ANY patriotism, which included baning our flag. The US also forced schools to teach english as a main

Language. Evidently this didnt work, but it wasn’t until 1998 that schools were allowed to switch back to spanish as their language of instruction.

ECONOMY: whooo baby this is gonna be VERY bare bones because the economy here is INSANE thanks to, you guessed it, colonialism

Ok so the Jones Act was enacted in 1917 to make us citizens, however this implanted cabotaje laws that are in place to this day, which doomed us to be one of the poorest countries in america from the start. How? This law forces puerto rico to use the US merchant marine

This applied to ALL products. This means that when we need to import anything they have to stop in the us first, switch all the goods to US ships and THEN go to the island. The Us merchant marine is one of the most expensice in the WORLD.

If Puerto Rico were not tethered to this, it is estimated that imported products would frip 40% and that we wiulf dave 150 million in product export as well.

Also, a (not so) fun fact: puerto rican trade amounts to 25% of the US merchant marine’s income... do with that what you will....

AND DONT GET ME STARTED ON HOW THE JONES ACT WAS CATASTROPHIC AFTER MARIA

Actually yes, lets talk about that. In the immediate afternath of the hurricane, where people needed help QUICKLY the jones act was still in place. This meant that the foreign aid ships were in our docs, but since they werent US merchant marine ships, they were not allowed

To unload their aid. I will never forget nor forgive that. It took days before congress approved a brief suspension of the jones act for the ships to doc. I cant help but think how many lives were lost because we were denied the autonomy to let these ships in which much needed

Supplies. 4,645 deaths, and i will never ever forget that trump did not give a fuck about us and that it took so long to give us aid. We are second class citizens at best.