Puerto Rican Nationalist Party
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Flag of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party |
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President | Antonio (Toñito) Cruz Colón |
Founded | September 17, 1922 |
Ideology | Puerto Rican independence |
Colors | Black and White |
Notable past presidents *José Coll y Cuchí *Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos |
and view a portion of the Albizu Documentary Trailer made in English here. | |
You may watch newsreel scenes of the Ponce Massacre here |
You may listen to one of the speeches made in Spanish by Albizu Campos here |
The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (Spanish: Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico, PNPR) is a Puerto Rican political party which was founded on September 17, 1922. Its main objective was to work for Puerto Rican Independence. The election in 1930 of Pedro Albizu Campos as its president of the Nationalist Party brought a radical change to the organization and its tactics.
In the 1930s, intimidation, repression and persecution of Party members by the government, then headed by a U.S. president-appointed governor, led to the assassination of two government officials, the attempted assassination of a federal judge in Puerto Rico, and the Rio Piedras and Ponce massacres. Under the leadership of Albizu Campos, the party abandoned the electoral process in favor of direct armed conflict as means to gain independence from the United States.
By the late 1940s, a more US-friendly party, the Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico, had gained an overwhelming number of seats in the legislature and, in 1948, it passed "Puerto Rico's Gag Law", which attempted to suppress the Nationalist Party and similar opposition. The Puerto Rican police arrested many Nationalist Party members under this law, some of whom were sentenced to lengthy prison terms. With a new political status pending for Puerto Rico as a Commonwealth, Albizu Campos ordered armed uprisings in several Puerto Rican towns to occur on October 30, 1950. In an related effort, two Nationalists also attempted to assassinate US President Harry S. Truman on November 1, 1950, in an effort to call international attention to issues related to Puerto Rico's political status, but the attempt failed. The last major armed event by the Nationalists occurred in 1954 at the US House of Representatives when four party members shot and wounded five Congressmen.