Subject: PR Govt. 'sorry' for illegal police espionage vs. independentistas
Puerto Rican subjects of police spying wary of compensation offer
CHRIS HAWLEY, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, December 15, 1999
(12-15) 12:38 PST SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- When the Puerto Rican police department released more than 135,000 secret dossiers on suspected independence supporters in 1989, it laid bare a landscape of deception in this U.S. territory.
Shocked islanders found that friends and co-workers had been spying on them in part of a vast effort to quash anti-U.S. sentiments. Students found themselves unaccountably linked to terrorists. Businessmen and women found evidence that they had been denied jobs and scholarships.
On Tuesday, after 10 years of legal battles, the government apologized and offered $5.7 million to compensate them.
Many say that's not enough.
"You can't heal people's lives so easily," said Felix Colon Morera, 47, who was stunned when he saw the 1,000-page file on his militant activities during his college days.
Inside were photos, descriptions of the inside of his house, interviews with neighbors and employers, careful notes from rallies he had attended and comments linking him to a terrorist group of which he says he had never heard. The last and most chilling item, filed in 1983, was a picture of his newly wed wife.
"It made you feel like ... something in a government laboratory," Colon said. The surveillance was declared unconstitutional and the files released to their subjects in 1989.
On Tuesday, Gov. Pedro Rossello offered "a solemn and sincere apology ... for the concoction and maintenance of these files."
In an attempt to settle lawsuits by thousands of victims, he offered to pay $6,000 to each plaintiff with more than 30 pages in their files. Others with more than 30 pages who had expressed interest in suing but have not yet filed claims would receive $3,000.
The announcement comes amid a surge in nationalistic sentiment fostered by a battle with the U.S. Navy over a bombing range on an outlying Puerto Rican island. President Clinton's recent release of 11 pro-independence militants jailed for seditious conspiracy has also reopened debate on Puerto Rico's relationship with the United States, which won the island from Spain in 1898.
Police began collecting information on suspected independence activists after the government passed a 1948 law making it illegal to show the Puerto Rican flag, sing nationalist songs or hold independence rallies.
It was part of government efforts to rein in radicals as it negotiated its current commonwealth arrangement with Washington. Later, FBI-trained agents expanded the program to track suspected communists and terrorists.
The operation was exposed during investigations into an undercover agent's role in a the police killing of two young independence supporters in 1978.
"An extraordinary amount of effort went into following people and maintaining these files, and the damage they caused was enormous," said civil rights lawyer Judith Berkan, whose own dossier contains hundreds of pages.
Former psychologist Carmen Rios Rivera trembled with anger when she read one typewritten 1972 entry from her dossier: "Several patients of the psychiatric hospital escaped and the person above was identified as an employee of this institution with separatist tendencies." Another entry has her boss giving undercover agents permission to watch her.
"These kinds of implications are shameless," Rios said. She blames the dossier for a string of missed promotions and denied transfers that prompted her to quit psychology.
Thousands of unclaimed files -- as well as lists of undercover agents, informants and the people who read the dossiers -- remain sealed in a building in central San Juan.
Many activists say the surveillance hobbled the independence movement, which has won less than 5 percent of votes in recent referendums.
"The dossiers linked being pro-independence with being a criminal," said Javier Colon, 43, who wrote a book about the dossiers, including surveillance of him that began when he was 15. "You get the feeling that there will always be people who mean well but have an agenda against you, and that fear stays with you for the rest of your life."
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