Scholars and activists have long argued that Puerto Rico functions as a colonial laboratory for the United States. Instances of unethical medical and scientific experimentation in Puerto Rico—including testing of the birth control pill and use of Agent Orange—provide perhaps the clearest examples of the oppressive dimensions of U.S. colonial rule in Puerto Rico and its deleterious effects on the land and its people. Such examples also point to a seemingly unidirectional power relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico, marked by U.S. coercion and force over the island.

Yet colonialism is seldom so neat and simple. This understanding of colonial relations, in its attempt to highlight an often hidden history of abuse by the U.S., tends to let local elites and policymakers off the hook. In fact, elites on the island play a central role in facilitating U.S. rule in Puerto Rico and often use compliance with U.S. demands as a tool for consolidating their own political power. Moreover, Puerto Rico has played an active role in shaping U.S. policy. In other words, policy and power may flow from the metropolis to the colony, but that is hardly their only direction of travel.

The history of policing in Puerto Rico over the 20^th century goes beyond the image of the island as exclusively a laboratory or policy testing-ground for the United States. This history highlights not only the impact of colonial rule on Puerto Ricans but also how elites and policymakers strategically utilized the island’s colonial relationship with the U.S. to reinforce and extend local hierarchies within Puerto Rican society. Often, policing was their most important tool for doing so.

Far from passive agents of colonialism, Puerto Rican political elites and law enforcement officials have long collaborated with U.S. officials to deepen repressive mechanisms both on the island and in the mainland U.S. This collaboration has had devastating consequences for Puerto Ricans on the island and the diaspora. This dynamic is apparent in the history of punitive measures on the island over the past century, from the enforcement of the La Ley de La Mordaza (Gag Law) in the 1940s to joint intelligence operations with the FBI during the Cold War. It continues today through Puerto Rico’s hard-fisted approach to crime and implementation of the War on Drugs. Examining these policing measures helps us to understand how local elites have bolstered their own power through repressive measures locally while ingratiating themselves further with a U.S. power structure that has ultimate authority over the island. These examples complicate our understanding of the dense circulations of power within Puerto Rico and between Puerto Rico and the United States.

A Borrowed Framework for Repression

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Puerto Rico’s Law 53, known as La Mordaza, was used to target independence advocates as the Puerto Rican government implemented the island’s new “commonwealth” status, establishing the ties between the political agenda of elite Puerto Ricans and U.S. authorities. Key to this new relationship were the new policing measures on the island. In May 1948, Puerto Rico’s legislature approved La Mordaza, which made it a felony to advocate the overthrow of the insular government. Actions such as displaying the Puerto Rican flag, singing Puerto Rico’s national anthem “La Borinqueña,” writing about independence from U.S. rule, or engaging in any public displays or assemblies that advocated independence were criminalized under the law. La Mordaza was adapted from parts of the U.S. Alien Registration Act of 1940, or the Smith Act, a wartime measure to prevent domestic acts of sabotage and subversion through targeting communist and anarchist organizers, and remained in effect until 1957. The Smith Act provided Puerto Rico’s first democratically elected governor Luis Muñoz Marín and the Popular Democratic Party (PPD) with a blueprint for quelling dissidence as they set to strengthen their own power and forge a new political status for Puerto Rico. La Mordaza helped lay the groundwork for the PPD to reform Puerto Rico’s status, against the will of pro-independence advocates on the island.

After the passage of La Mordaza, U.S. Congress enacted legislation in 1950 that allowed Puerto Rico to draft its own constitution to reform its political status. Muñoz Marín immediately got to work. Recognizing the barriers to both statehood and independence, specifically the U.S. Congress’ opposition to both, he advocated for Puerto Rico to enter a “compact” with the U.S. that would expand Puerto Rico’s capacity for self-governance without abandoning U.S. claims to the territory.

The proposed constitution identified Puerto Rico as an Estado Libre Asociado (Free Associated State), or commonwealth of the United States, which gave Puerto Rico greater autonomy over local affairs, but maintained Washington’s ultimate authority over the territory. Political elites supported this move because it allowed the U.S. to show the world that Puerto Rico had been “decolonized” according to the will of the people. Quelling visible public support for Puerto Rican independence via La Mordaza allowed the PPD to make the claim that Puerto Ricans were not interested in full independence but rather preferred greater local governance within the context of continued incorporation.

Independence advocates from the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party saw the status reform as little more than colonialism by another name. Nationalist Party leader Pedro Albizu Campos denounced the proposed constitution and vowed to continue fighting for Puerto Rico’s independence. On October 30, 1950, the Nationalist Party mounted a series of coordinated attacks across the island in repudiation of the proposed constitution. The best known incident of the uprising occurred two days later when Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola attacked the Blair House in Washington, D.C., and attempted to assassinate President Harry Truman. In retaliation, the U.S. and Puerto Rican officials ordered aerial bombardments of the towns of Jayuya and Utuado, where pro-independence rebels were active. (Scholar Nelson A. Denis explores the Nationalist uprising in more detail in his 2015 book, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony.) The uprising was pacified through the combined efforts of the local police, Puerto Rican National Guard, and the FBI, with all fighting coming to an end by November 2.

In the wake of the Nationalist uprising, the local government strategically used La Mordaza to eradicate the threat posed by the Nationalists and other pro-independence groups to the newly emerging commonwealth arrangement. Following the Nationalists’ armed rebellion, Governor Muñoz Marín ordered all members of the Party arrested. Using a “security index” created by the FBI and local law enforcement during the 1930s, police arrested approximately a thousand citizens over the course of two days, including many who were unaffiliated with the Nationalist Party, according to researcher Joel A. Blanco-Rivera.

Historian Ivonne Acosta Lespier argues that Puerto Rico’s ratification of the commonwealth arrangement took place in a context of undeclared martial law and mass detention of pro-independence sympathizers in local jails. These arrests served both to intimidate and prevent pro-independence advocates from voting against the proposed constitution during the referendum, she writes. The law thus provided a mechanism guaranteeing a decisive win for the new constitutional status. The Commonwealth Constitution went into effect on July 25, 1952, the anniversary of the landing of U.S. troops in Puerto Rico in 1898.

Although U.S. security institutions like the FBI supported Puerto Rico’s implementation of La Mordaza as part of the hemispheric fight against communism, it was the PPD party leadership who strategically used the law to hinder pro-independence organizing and build electoral support for the new commonwealth arrangement. La Mordaza is an important example of how Puerto Rican elites imported and adapted repressive policies and practices from the United States in order to consolidate their own political power—though under colonial constraints.

Cold War Intelligence Cooperation and Exchange

The Commonwealth government continued to collaborate with U.S. law enforcement agencies in order to suppress challenges to U.S. political and economic interests and projects on the island. In 1987, a former agent of the Puerto Rico Police Department’s (PRPD) Intelligence Division mentioned in a radio interview that the police were actively subverting activist groups on the island. The officer told listeners that the police maintained a list of supposed “subversives” to assist with this purpose. This revelation set into motion a series of investigations that would culminate in the discovery of 16,793 dossiers and 151,541 reference cards on individuals and groups associated with the island’s radical social movements. The information had been collected over the course of nearly five decades, according to research by Blanco-Rivera. When these carpetas, or files, came to light, local law enforcement had targeted approximately 75,000 Puerto Ricans, often with no justification beyond presumed political affiliation or beliefs, as Blanco-Rivera finds.

The creation of carpetas on political dissidents has a long history in Puerto Rico. Local police have created and maintained files on pro-independence and left-leaning citizens dating as far back as the earliest days of U.S. colonization. However, carpeteo, or politicized policing and surveillance, intensified during the 1960s as PRPD collaborated with the FBI’s counterintelligence program, known as COINTELPRO. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI’s covert and often illegal counterintelligence efforts aimed to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities” of political and social movements in the United States, sociologist David Cunningham writes. In addition to surveillance, FBI agents infiltrated social movements and used paid informants to incite conflict or facilitate wrongdoing with the goal of undermining activists.

Due to the transnational reach of the Puerto Rican independence movement and the formation of alliances between radical groups on the island and the mainland, the FBI carried out counterintelligence activities on the island in close collaboration with local law enforcement. In their study of COINTELPRO in Puerto Rico, Carmen Gautier Mayoral and Teresa Blanco Stahl note that counterintelligence work on the island had three central goals: First, it aimed to foment division within the broader pro-independence movement and within each specific group or organization. It also sought to prevent the formation of alliances between the various pro-independence groups or political parties. Finally, it looked to prevent solidarity between Puerto Rican independentistas and radical groups in the United States, especially Communist and Black Power groups.

During the height of COINTELPRO’s operations in Puerto Rico, citizens were subjected to carpeteo at the hands of both local and federal authorities. The PRPD was prolific in creating files on suspected subversives. But the FBI created an estimated 1.8 million pages of data on Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora, according to research by Ramón Bosque-Pérez. The FBI both received information from and supplied information to the PRPD’s Intelligence Division, and evidence suggests that the FBI helped to train PRPD officers in counterintelligence and surveillance tactics to use against activists on the island.

The histories of carpeteo and COINTELPRO on the island are tightly woven together, bound by an imperative to maintain U.S. hegemony on the island and neutralize threats to local political stability. However, the carpetas both precede and exceed COINTELPRO’s counterintelligence activities in Puerto Rico. COINTELPRO activities in Puerto Rico, in some ways, became possible because of the networks of undercover agents, infiltrators, saboteurs, and paid informants that the PRPD, and the Insular Police before them, had carefully cultivated for decades. The PRPD and FBI entered a mutually beneficial and reciprocal relationship during the COINTELPRO era as the FBI gained access to the PRPD’s existing intelligence data and networks. In return, the PRPD gained access to not only to information gathered by the FBI but also to their more “modern” techniques and technologies of surveillance.

Bosque-Pérez writes in his book, Puerto Rico Under Colonial Rule: Political Persecution and the Quest for Human Rights, that the PRPD’s collaboration with the FBI as well as with local police departments in cities like New York and Chicago resulted in a “subversive diaspora” of Puerto Rican activists subjected to political repression and harassment wherever they went. There is evidence that when Puerto Ricans migrated to the states, the PRPD shared their intelligence information with local and federal agencies on the mainland, creating a continuum of repression that stretched beyond the boundaries of the U.S. and Puerto Rico. For instance, even before the inauguration of COINTELPRO, a report compiled on suspected Nationalists residing in the U.S. in the wake of a 1954 shooting at the U.S. Capitol building referenced individuals’ carpeta numbers assigned by the PRPD.

The carpetas also played an important role in consolidating the power of local political elites in Puerto Rico. Those labeled “subversive” by the local authorities and those with an open carpeta found their political rights suppressed through temporary incarceration, as occurred under La Mordaza, or were denied government employment and benefits. Surveillance, harassment, and informal blacklisting of political dissidents forced many Puerto Ricans into the diaspora in hopes of escaping persecution on the island—only to find it in U.S. barrios. The repressive force placed on dissidents functioned as a safety valve that stabilized the commonwealth arrangement during the mid-twentieth century by forcing them to migrate and intimidating those who remained into silence.

Further, as Puerto Rico’s pro-statehood party, the New Progressive Party (PNP), rose to political prominence in the late 1960s and 1970s, carpeteo expanded, aiming to neutralize those who opposed further integrating Puerto Rico into the U.S. as the 51^st state. After the dismantling of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, carpeteo took on a renewed vigor and violent edge in Puerto Rico under PNP governor Carlos Romero Barceló. Echoing “law and order” discourses that painted leftists as “terrorists” in the U.S. and internationally, Romero Barceló gave the local police power and permission to harass leftists associated with pro-independence and union organizing. The PRPD’s Intelligence Division not only intensified its surveillance and counterintelligence activities during the 1970s, but also started to organize kidnapping and extortion operations that targeted the political Left. Many activists believe the PRPD either directly or indirectly participated in a number of political assassinations and murders during this period.

Despite ongoing state secrecy, details of some of these events have become available in large part due to an exhaustive investigation by journalist Manuel Suarez. The most prominent case was the entrapment and murder of two young pro-independence activists in 1978. On July 25 of that year, Carlos Enrique Soto Arriví and Arnaldo Darío Rosado Torres participated in a plan to blow up a communication tower located at the top of Cerro Maravilla, outside of the southern city of Ponce. Alejandro González Malave, an undercover police officer recruited by the PRPD to infiltrate the independence movement years earlier, largely conceptualized a plan to entrap Soto Arriví and Darío Rosado. When Soto Arriví and Darío Rosado arrived at Cerro Maravilla, a group of police officers ambushed and executed them. Subsequent inquiries implicated both local and federal authorities in the cover-up. The investigation into the murders at Cerro Maravilla nearly a decade later exposed the full extent of carpeteo in Puerto Rico. The political assassination of Soto Arriví and Darío Rosado grew out of the repressive atmosphere fostered by carpeteo and the unrestricted permission Romero Barceló gave the PRPD to teach independentistas a “hard lesson,” Suarez writes.

The PRPD collaborated with the FBI before, during, and after COINTELPRO, but the federal surveillance program gave local authorities permission to ramp up their fight against radical social movements on the island. The two police agencies worked alongside each other and used each other’s strategies and technologies in order to achieve their goals. But the PRPD were not simply FBI lackeys. Instead, at the behest of local political elites they were waging their own war against dissidents, just as invested in maintaining local power relations as they were in preserving colonial order.

Puerto Rico as a Drug War Model

Analyzing the development of the war on drugs in Puerto Rico demonstrates the ongoing complexity of the asymmetric power exchange between the U.S. and Puerto Rican political elites through policing. During the 1990s, Puerto Rico played a surprising role in shaping debates about drug policy that impacted people in low-income neighborhoods in U.S. cities.

In 1993, Governor Pedro Rosselló instituted a policy of mano dura (iron fist) against crime, which explicitly targeted low-income urban areas in response to a spike in violent crime associated with the island’s informal drug economy. As a central component of mano dura, Rosselló deployed the police and National Guard to raid and occupy public housing complexes and lowincome neighborhoods under the auspices of rescuing residents from drug and gang-related violence. Rosselló and his administration presented mano dura as a winning strategy for fighting the drug wars that could be successfully implemented throughout U.S., as well as Latin America and the Caribbean. As international drug trafficking supplanted communism to become public enemy number one, Rosselló and technocrats within his administration touted mano dura’s large-scale activation of the Puerto Rican National Guard to participate in local drug-enforcement efforts as a creative and necessary repurposing of military technology and personnel.

U.S. officials looked to Puerto Rico to justify an increasingly harsh and militarized approach to law enforcement at a moment when many low-income people and people of color were already witnessing what journalist Radley Balko has called “the rise of the warrior cop” in their communities. City and state officials on the mainland watched the deployment of the National Guard to combat crime and drugs in Puerto Rico’s public housing with great interest, as it received coverage in important national news outlets. Scores of public officials from the U.S. and Latin America visited Puerto Rico or hosted members of the Rosselló administration to learn more about how Puerto Rico was “modernizing” policing in urban areas.

Trade liberalization in the 1990s caused the unique political and economic relationship between Puerto Rico and the U.S. to gradually lose significance. Puerto Rican government officials sought out ways to reassert the importance of Puerto Rico within a newly emerging global order and facilitate its continued incorporation within the U.S. nation-state. Developing “innovative” policies and practices regarding security, policing, and public housing emerged as a way to demonstrate Puerto Rico’s usefulness to the United States in the post-Cold War period.

Though few mainland cities actually saw the deployment of National Guard troops as a vital component of anti-drug policing, as it was in Puerto Rico, U.S. policymakers celebrated the Rosselló administration’s “daring innovations” in policing at a moment when policing was becoming increasingly militarized throughout the U.S. In many ways, mano dura became part of the policy lexicon of “best practices” for policing low income communities and communities of color in the U.S. and Latin America. Mano dura and similar punitive policies justified and drew upon one another in various policy circles, providing a rationale that made increasing police pressure in already overpoliced communities seem completely reasonable and necessary.

Punitive Policy Transfer and the Debt Crisis

The history of policing in Puerto Rico points to a complex itinerary of policy exchange and influence between island and mainland. Although constrained by Puerto Rico’s colonial status, Puerto Rican elites have exerted a degree of control in shaping punitive policy on the island that has increased repressive mechanisms in order to consolidate local relations of power and privilege. Elites from the island’s two main political parties have strategically deepened the reach of systems of surveillance, policing, incarceration, and extrajudicial violence in the everyday lives of Puerto Ricans in order to further advance their agenda for the incorporation of Puerto Rico within the United States.

The history of repressive policing in Puerto Rico provides crucial lessons and reminders as the island’s debt crisis deepens. The seeming inability of the Puerto Rican government to appropriately respond to the debt crisis points to a weakened and ineffective colonial state. However, it is at this very moment when we should be most attuned to expansion of repressive measures by Puerto Rican political elites and the work they do to shore up local power relations and further local political agendas.

For instance, in May 2017 the Puerto Rican legislature passed a series of amendments to its penal code that greatly restricted the rights of protesters, right as protests against the newly imposed fiscal control board were ramping up. The new amendments specifically targeted protests taking place throughout the University of Puerto Rico system by making it a crime to impede services or access at educational institutions, create protest art on public spaces, or hide one’s face during “the commission of a crime,” such as an unsanctioned protest.

Additionally, demonstrating the repressive reach of Puerto Rican elites, members of the pro-statehood party on the island, including Governor Ricardo Rosselló, participated in a very public smear campaign against Oscar López Rivera, the Puerto Rican independence activist and political prisoner who was recently pardoned by President Barack Obama and released from prison. In time for this year’s Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City, pro-statehood politicians joined with a range of mainland conservatives to denounce López Rivera as a terrorist and prevent his participation in the parade, although many pro-statehood politicians previously supported his release. Their about-face served to stoke, or at the very least create an appearance of, hostility toward the Puerto Rican independence movement in the lead up the island’s controversial plebiscite in June 2017. As the debt crisis worsens, we must not let the power of the U.S. federal government blind us to the power that the local government continues to wield in the everyday lives of Puerto Ricans on the island and the diaspora.