Former Puerto Rican political prisoner Luis Rosa Perez writes to Palestinian hunger strikers

My Palestinian Family

The cancer of colonialism affects every aspect of human development. It hinders economic and social growth; and causes despair and a host of psychological and physiological conditions with the aim of destroying the peoples enslaved by this system. Its aim is genocide and the deformation of a national identity and culture.

The Nation of Palestine has long endured occupation by one of the most sophisticated and treacherous colonial powers in world history. The government of Israel has, since 1948, become the apartheid system of the Middle East. Implementing systemic racist and genocidal policies, which deny the Palestinian people their inalienable right to self-determination, Israel is responsible for the displacement of two-thirds of the Palestinian nation and the deaths and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands.

I was fortunate enough in my youth to learn and fall in love with the history, culture, and resistance of the Palestinian people. It was through this understanding and appreciation that I gain a greater appreciation and understanding of my own people’s, the nation of Puerto Rico’s, struggle against U.S. colonialism.

Today, I stand in complete solidarity with my sisters and brothers in Palestine. We face a common enemy, Zionism and those behind the fascist state of Israel, the government of the United States of America.

Our victory – the heroic freeing of Oscar López Rivera after spending 36 years in US gulags – comes at a moment when Puerto Rico is in the death grip of the Fiscal Supervision Board, better known to the people of Puerto Rico as the “Board of Plunder.”  Its students are heroically resisting the devastating attacks on the foundation of Puerto Rican civil society, the public university system, and the migration of its most valuable resource – the human resource – continues unabated, making the gentrification of the island more and more of an everyday reality.  Oscar’s imminent freedom on May 17 holds the promise for all Puerto Ricans to continue to work together as we did for his freedom – to make the dream of the decolonization of Puerto Rico and its people closer to reality.

As an anticolonial fighter and former political prisoner, I stood side by side, every day, for the nearly 20 years I and my comrades spent in U.S. prisons, with the hundreds of men, women, and children in the dungeons of Israeli prisons. In addition, I stand today with those who move through the shadows on nightly missions, who give their love, their sweat and blood, for this beautiful cause of freedom.

I thank you for your resistance and your ability to live. You have served as an inspiration to many peoples in struggle.  Your ability to love and grow while facing such hatred and destruction nurtures the flames of resistance throughout the world.

The nation of Puerto Rico will continue to struggle against U.S. colonialism and all of its vestiges. Our victories will be our strongest acts of solidarity, just as the victories of Palestinians will nourish our struggle. Thank you for your resistance. We march at your side.

Luis Rosa Perez, Liberated Puerto Rican Prisoner of War

May 8, 2017