Ponce Massacre

Ponce massacre
Outbreak of the Ponce Massacre
Location	Ponce, Puerto Rico
Date	21 March 1937 3:15pm (EST)
Target	Supporters of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party
Attack type	massacre
Weapons	Thompson submachine guns, tear gas bombs, machine guns, rifles, pistols
Deaths	21 (19 civilians and two police officers). The civilian casualties included women and children; the policemen died from friendly fire.
Non-fatal injuries	235 civilians wounded
Perpetrators	Governor Blanton Winship via the Puerto Rico Insular Police

External video

Newsreel scenes related to the Ponce massacre Here

The Ponce massacre was an event that took place on Palm Sunday, 21 March 1937, in Ponce, Puerto Rico, when a peaceful civilian march turned into a police shooting in which 19 civilians and two policemen were killed, and more than 200 others wounded. Most of the dead were reportedly shot in their backs. The march had been organized by the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party to commemorate the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico by the governing Spanish National Assembly in 1873, and to protest the U.S. Government's imprisonment of the Party's leader, Pedro Albizu Campos, on sedition charges.

An investigation led by the United States Commission on Civil Rights put the blame for the massacre squarely on the U.S.-appointed Governor of Puerto Rico; Blanton Winship. Further criticism by members of the U.S. Congress led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to remove Winship in 1939 as governor.

Governor Winship was never prosecuted for the massacre and no one under his chain of command - including the police who took part in the event, and admitted to the mass shooting - was ever prosecuted or reprimanded.

The Ponce massacre remains the largest massacre in post-Spanish imperial history in Puerto Rico. It has been the source of many articles, books, paintings, films, and theatrical works.

Several days before the scheduled Palm Sunday march, the Nationalists had received legal permits for a peaceful protest from José Tormos Diego, the mayor of Ponce. According to a 1926 Puerto Rico Supreme Court ruling, government permits were not necessary for the use of plazas, parks or streets for meetings or parades. However, as a courtesy to the Ponce municipal government, the Nationalists requested the permit nevertheless.

However, upon learning about the march, the US-appointed governor of Puerto Rico, General Blanton Winship, ordered the new Insular Police Chief, Colonel Enrique de Orbeta, to contact Mayor Tormos and have him cancel the parade permit. He ordered the police chief to increase the police force in the southern city, and to stop, "by all means necessary", any demonstration conducted by the nationalists in Ponce. Without notice to the organizers, or any opportunity to appeal, or any time to arrange an alternate venue, the permits were abruptly withdrawn, just before the protest was scheduled to begin.