For those unfamiliar with Puerto Rican politics, a little info about the Ferrés is in order. This immensely rich clan, based in the southern coast city of Ponce, is led by the aging patriarch Luis A. Ferré. For the last four or five decades he's been the main leader of the right-wing statehood movement, which favors making PR into the 51st state of the American union. In the mid-sixties he formed the New Progressive Party and made himself its gubernatorial candidate. The NPP won the 1968 elections and Papa Ferré became the first statehooder governor, and the third elected governor in the nation's history. As governor, he used inside information to make himself an amazingly huge fortune in real estate and to generate enormous sales for his cement company, Puerto Rico Cement. In the early seventies his son, Antonio Luis Ferré, founded a daily newspaper, El Nuevo Día, which was- and still is- openly right-wing, anti-communist and friendly to the idea of Puerto Rico's political annexation and cultural assimilation into the United States.
Other family members worthy of mention are Antonio Luis's sister, Rosario Ferré, an internationally acclaimed novelist (who now writes in English out of pure snobbery), and Antonio Luis's children, Luis Alberto and Maria Luisa, who are now taking the reins of El Nuevo Día.
Rosselló's harassment campaign against El Nuevo Día is real, it is not a product of the Ferré's imagination or an attempt on their part to extort the governor. The lawsuit is worthy of public support, since from the very beginning of his governorship in 1993, Rosselló has consistently failed to show any respect for the Puerto Rico press corps. The governor's press secretary, Pedro Rosario-Urdaz, and his executive secretary, Angel Morey, have made themselves notorious because of their cynicism and insolence in their dealings with the press. If Rosselló wins in his war against a news medium as powerful as El Nuevo Día, no doubt he will carry out even more crude reprisals against other newspapers, and TV and radio stations that question the official government propaganda.
However, this intra-elite conflict must be viewed in its proper perspective. The Ferré's have been very clever in their invocation of the noble ideals of freedom of the press. But, what has been El Nuevo Día's and the Ferré family's record regarding the defense of democratic freedoms and the interests of the Puerto Rican people?
In the eighties El Nuevo Día carried out a ferocious campaign to put a rival daily, El Reportero, out of business. The Ferré's newspaper alleged in strongly worded articles that El Reportero was nothing more than a mouthpiece of the Popular Democratic Party (the NPP's arch-rival), and that it had serious financial problems and irregularities. These last allegations made investors and lenders shun El Reportero as if it were the plague. Indeed, El Reportero went under in the late eighties.
El Nuevo Día was also instrumental in the downfall of the El Mundo newspaper by publishing articles that scared off investors that could have saved it from bankruptcy. The disappearance of El Mundo in 1990 left El Nuevo Día as the only daily for the general public in Puerto Rico. There was El Vocero and The San Juan Star, but El Vocero was- and is- a gory tabloid for sickos who like to look at grisly pictures of people who were murdered the previous day, and The San Juan Star was until a few weeks ago available only in English, a language that most Puerto Ricans don't know. In any case, The San Juan Star, which has been around since 1959, is a newspaper by and for gringo beach bums who care nothing about Puerto Rico. It is stridently right-wing and implacably hostile towards Puerto Rican independence and progressive causes.
In spite of the fact that his paper knocked off two newspapers, Antonio Luis Ferré still wants to portray himself as a gallant savior of freedom of the press. In presenting the El Nuevo Día-Puerto Rico Cement lawsuit against the Rosselló administration, he claimed, with no hint of sarcasm, to defend the right of Puerto Ricans to be informed. I'm sure the laid off El Mundo and El Reportero employees must have been delighted when they heard Antonio Luis's words!
In 1993 Claridad, a leftist, pro-independence weekly, uncovered a multimillion dollar tax fraud scheme that El Nuevo Día was carrying out in concert with then-Internal Revenue Department (Hacienda) secretary Manuel Díaz-Saldaña, who is now head of the Puerto Rico government's General Accounting Office (Contralor). Díaz-Saldaña is an admitted member of Opus Dei, one of the creepiest right-wing Catholic organizations in existence. El Nuevo Día, which has been so insistent on demanding access to Rosselló administration documents, steadfastly refused to grant Claridad access to internal documents that would have proved or disproved the existence of tax fraud. Claridad had to take El Nuevo Día to court, but lost its case.
When between 1991 and 1993 Claridad published several cover stories about this fraud and about how El Nuevo Día was cynically taking advantage of its position as the de facto only daily newspaper in Puerto Rico by manipulating public opinion, the Ferrés responded promptly. Maria Luisa Ferré, now co-director of El Nuevo Día, ordered the Hermes bookstore to remove Claridad from the newsstand. Hermes, which belonged to the Ferrés, was during its brief existence a hideout for yuppie pseudo-intellectuals. The guys that sell newspapers in 65th Infantry Avenue were told that they could not sell El Nuevo Día if they kept selling Claridad. El Nuevo Día told them that it was company policy, in other words, a decision made by the Ferrés.
When denouncing government arm twisting, El Nuevo Día has also publicized abuses against other members of the press corps, like the courageous radio talk show host Luis Francisco Ojeda, and the staffs of the TeleOnce TV station, and the Noti-Uno radio station. However, its pages have not made a single mention or even an indirect reference to Claridad, a newspaper that since its founding in 1959 has been subjected to every kind of abuse and attack conceivable by the Puerto Rico government and by the US government's repressive forces.
Between 1968 and 1972 Claridad and Impresora Nacional (the printing press used by Claridad) were victims of at least one hundred violent attacks. In 1971 both were firebombed, costing thousands of dollars in damage. Did Antonio Luis Ferré and his newspaper show any solidarity? What did his father do? After all, he was governor during those four years. If El Nuevo Día had been the object of only one of those attacks, no doubt governor Luis A. Ferré would have turned the country upside down in order to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice. On March 16 1974 a right-wing terrorist group riddled Impresora Nacional with bullets. The watchmen inside returned fire and in the ensuing shootout two outstanding progressives, Domingo Vega and Manuel De J. González, were wounded. However, up to this date, nobody has ever been indicted, much less thrown in jail, for bombing or shooting Claridad or Impresora Nacional.
During those four years (1968-1972), the left wing of the independence movement experienced first-hand governor Luis A. Ferré's love for democracy and civil liberties. The offices of the progressive Movimiento Pro Independencia in downtown Río Piedras were burnt and fired upon by a right-wing mob led by the neo-fascist senator Palerm (That's right! He was a senator!). That night, Puerto Rico's Kristallnacht, the activists inside the besieged building defended themselves from the brownshirts with guns and everything else they had while the police stood by. In that battle, which lasted all night, Fran Cervoni, one of our greatest painters, was wounded by a bullet while battling the mob.
Also in that period, the infamous Fuerza de Choque (a cross between an American riot squad and a South American-style urban warfare force) twice entered the Río Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico, cracking skulls, breaking bones and murdering student Antonia Martínez. All this and much more, in addition to the violence against Claridad and Impresora Nacional. A quarter of a century later, El Nuevo Día portrays Luis A. Ferré as a benevolent statesman and philanthropist while Rosselló, whose intolerance towards dissent never reached the brutal extremes of Ferré, is described as a Caribbean version of Pinochet.
In 1976 independentista activist Santiago Mari-Pesquera was murdered, precisely when his father, Socialist Party secretary general and Claridad founder Juan Mari-Brás, was running for governor. This crime, no doubt an act of right-wing terrorists working in tandem with local police and US intelligence, remains to this day unpunished and unsolved. Would the authorities have reacted the same way if the son of any other gubernatorial candidate had been murdered? What if they had killed the son of El Nuevo Día's founder? When was the last time El Nuevo Día mentioned Santiago?
What about Puerto Rico Cement's employees? What democratic freedoms do they enjoy? When they went on strike in the seventies, the Ferrés responded to their legitimate demands by importing scabs from Florida, hiring thugs from a private security firm, framing union leaders in order to put them behind bars, and establishing a company union. Luis Alberto Ferré, son of Antonio Luis, gallantly defends freedom of expression in high-profile posh events in and out of Puerto Rico, but those PR Cement employees that try to organize a strike will not find any democratic recourse.
PR Cement's and El Nuevo Día's choice for lawyer in their lawsuit against Rosselló is rather interesting. It's none other than José Trías-Monge, former chief justice of the Puerto Rico Supreme Court and one of the arquitects of our colonial 'compact' with the USA. Trías-Monge recently vindicated the independence movement by affirming the colonial nature of the current Puerto Rico-US relationship, which he had such an active role in forging back in the forties and fifties. However, he still hasn't shown any remorse for his role as jailor of the Puerto Rican nationalists, or for having been the main author of 'La Mordaza', the infamous law that from 1948 to 1958 made it for all practical purposes a crime to advocate independence.
Commenting on Rosselló's persecution against El Nuevo Día at a press conference on December 9, Trías-Monge stated that this is the first case in his memory that a governor and high officials of his government take reprisals against a newspaper for engaging in criticism.
Is Trías-Monge a cynic, or is it that he's never heard of Claridad these last 38 years? For El Nuevo Día, Claridad doesn't exist either. Nobody from Claridad was invited to the aforementioned press conference. When José Javier Colón and Ramón Bosque presented their excellent book on political espionage and persecution in Puerto Rico (Las Carpetas: Persecución Política y Derechos Civiles en Puerto Rico) on December 11, nobody from El Nuevo Día showed up to cover the event. As far as the Ferrés are concerned, the only repression and persecution that takes place in Puerto Rico is the one that is aimed at them. Nobody else matters.