The Workers’ Socialist Movement of Puerto Rico denounces US imperialism
The history of Puerto Rico since 1898 has been shaped by US imperialism and the consequences of its imperialist Monroe Doctrine. The arrival of US troops on the shores of Guayanilla was immediately followed by the intensification of monopoly capital by American corporations. During the first half a century, appropriation of surplus value from Puerto Rican agrarian labor was rooted in an agrarian economy dominated by US-owned sugar mills, in which US monopoly capital usurped all coastal lands. Later, the US empire built an industrial economy, essentially a populist bourgeois-developmentalist project, legitimized by the imposition of a Commonwealth, cementing our colonial, peripheral dependent condition. Puerto Rico was an emporium for US transnational corporations, which the empire showcased as a 'development success' that it had in store for Caribbean and Central American nations willing to submit themselves to its economic interests. This 'development success' required launching counterinsurgency warfare on the island against the militant anti-colonial Puerto Rican labor movement.
The US empire has since turned Puerto Rico into a captive market for its industrial goods, a trampoline for launching economic warfare in the region, and a geopolitical bastion for its military interventions in the Caribbean and South America. The resurgence of US imperialist military interventions in Latin America, particularly in Venezuela and Cuba, is a continuation of its past interventions in Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Grenada. The US empire used its colony of Puerto Rico as a pivot for launching these military operations. For these reasons, we the MST denounce US military imperialism not only in our nation, Puerto Rico, but in the Caribbean archipelago and Latin America.
We reaffirm our commitment to the anti-imperialist struggle and do so because the structural problems of our economy, and the difficulties our nation faces daily, such as the infamous neoliberal privatization of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, are a direct consequence of our capitalist-colonial status. Puerto Rico is not only a strategic military outpost in the Caribbean but also a commercial and industrial monopoly enclave that continues to yield returns to the capitalists while forcing our nation to endure underdevelopment in the 21st.
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Movimiento Socialista de Trabajadoras y Trabajadores de Puerto Rico (MST) or Workers' Socialist Movement is a Puerto Rican socialist organization founded on the principles of militant working-class struggle and internationalism.