Boricua Popular Army
The Ejército Popular Boricua (in English: Boricua People's Army; EPB-Macheteros) is a political organization group -military based in Puerto Rico, in the United States and other countries, which supports the independence (decolonization) of Puerto Rico from the US under socialism.
Organizational history
The EPB is known by other nicknames, for example the macheteros and the Puerto Rican Popular Army according to the press. At its strongest its members numbered approximately 5,700 in the US and other countries. The EPB usually operated with a clandestine structure of cells composed of six or seven people. The EPB has been blamed for many violent assaults against targets of the United States Armed Forces and robberies since 1978. The most notable leader of the EBP during its existence was Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, murdered by the FBI in 2005.
Origin of the movement
The EBP is considered a branch of the Armed Forces of National Liberation (Puerto Rico), a similar group also founded by Ojeda. Ojeda had extensive contact with the General Directorate of Intelligence, Cuba's foreign espionage agency since it was established in that country in 1961.
The EPB used the nickname macheteros to invoke the legend of a band of Puerto Ricans who united between July 2 and August 12, 1898 during the Spanish-American War in Puerto Rico to defend the colony from invasion The Macheteros were usually armed only with the machete, which is more useful as a tool for cutting sugar cane than as a weapon against a modern army. In the last battle of the campaign, the macheteros served under the command of Captain Ricardo Hernaíz's Spanish regulars in the defense of the Aibonito Pass (August 12). The resistance, which successfully stopped the enemy's advance, was ultimately futile, because the next morning Spain surrendered with the affirmation of the Treaty of Paris and the island was annexed to the United States.
The EPB was never affiliated with the FALN, as the FBI alleges in its disinformation media. The reader can consult http://puertoricoentresiglos.wordpress.com/tag/lucha-armada/page/2/ by historian Mario Cancel who proposes "González-Cruz's premise is that revolutionary nationalism has been the unifying element of the most emblematic political resistances of the 19th and 20th centuries. The codification of revolutionary nationalism implies that there is another nationalism that is not revolutionary and that is sometimes identified with what Pedro Albizu Campos called Athenaist nationalism in 1930, and Luis Muñoz Marín bad nationalism in the Godkin Conferences of 1959. Albizu Campos was referring to the tradition of José de Diego and its definition would include the cultural nationalism of the current populist tradition. Muñoz alluded directly to albizuism. González-Cruz establishes an interpretative proposal in three stages. A first nineteenth-century phase that I will call revolutionary separatism which revolves around the revolution of 1868 but includes violence in 1897 and 1898 during the invasion of the United States. A second phase continues that I will call revolutionary nationalist, which revolves around the activities of the Nationalist Party between 1933 and 1954. This is the experience that Muñoz Marín tried to relate to Francoism and Italian and German fascism."
Notable attacks
In August 1978 the EPB admitted its role in the murder of police officer Julio Rodríguez Rivera when militants tried to hijack his patrol car. In 1979 the EPB targeted members of the United States Navy, which It had bases on the island at that time. On December 3, militants shot a bus full of technical sailors, killing two of them and wounding nine. Responsibility was taken by the EPB, the Volunteers of the Puerto Rican Revolution and the Armed Forces of Popular Resistance. There was another shootout, in which another sailor was killed and three wounded. The attack was in retaliation for the murder in prison of a member of the Macheteros by prison guards, who were retired marines.
On January 12, 1981, the EPB perpetrated an unprecedented act of bravery in Puerto Rico, infiltrating the Muñiz Air National Guard Base, a part of the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in Carolina, Puerto Rico, in the outskirts of the capital San Juan. The intruders destroyed or damaged ten A-7 Corsair aircraft and one non-flyable F-104 Starfighter, then operational aircraft in the US Air Force and Navy. The damage cost $45 million and impacted the military establishment. around the island.
The EPB's largest maneuver was the September 12, 1983 robbery (Operation White Eagle) of the Wells Fargo warehouse in West Hartford, Connecticut, an act in which they managed to escape with seven million Dollars. During the escape, the macheteros threw some of the loot from a building to create a distraction. In their claim of responsibility, the macheteros declared that the robbery was a protest against the "men and mechanisms infected by greed that exert too much pressure on our elected officials, state agencies, and social aspirations in that country, and indeed in Puerto Rico.".» Under the laws of Puerto Rico and the United States, the robbery was a terrorist act due to the violence against security guards.
Recent activity
As time went by, EPB became less active than at the beginning of its fight. In 1998, the macheteros took responsibility for the detonation of a small bomb by a power plant in the San Juan area, which caused some blackouts.
On September 23, 2005, what is celebrated in Puerto Rico as the anniversary of the "Grito de Lares" FBI agents surrounded a home in the villages of Hormigueros, working on a tip that Ojeda Ríos had found among themselves. According to the FBI, before they could hit the port and present the arrest warrant, a person began pulling the agents out of the house. In the shootout that occurred then, Ojeda Ríos received fatal injuries. In the autopsy that occurred later, he had concluded that the EPB chief bled to death for several hours.
Current status
Supporters of the cause of independence claim that the United States has no need to maintain its control over the island, because Puerto Rico is already integrated into the US economy. Foreign services and products invested in Puerto Rico as a part of the overall economic strategy of the US so the island is well developed to have autonomy. One of the foundations of this argument is the other territories annexed in the Spanish-American War, the Philippines and Cuba have already achieved their independence a long time ago. However, those who support the cause of independence are a minority that barely obtain around 4% of the votes in each referendum. Many Puerto Ricans believe that the island should claim statehood, while even more residents are content with the current system of an unincorporated commonwealth, because Puerto Ricans do not pay federal taxes. The most common complaints people have is the great presence of the military on the island that controls many territories of Puerto Rico as had happened in the case of the Puerto Rican island Vieques in 1999.
EPB suffered from the FBI's Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) strategy, which began in the 1960s to suppress subversive groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Ku Klux Klan.