PAGE 11 VOL. 2, NO. 1 ZEITGEIST the front page of El Mundo. However, every paper reported these photos as staged. “In the pages of El Mundo, a doctor from a local hospital, José A. Gándara, testified that many of the wounded he’d seen had been shot in the back (4).” Florete magazine ran a political cartoon of the event with the caption: “Now we can say that they fired at us from the rooftops (7).” In the US, however, the most powerful publications recycled the government’s whitewashed version of events. The New York Times wrote that 68 Nationalists were arrested in a “Nationalist riot (8).” Fourteen NYT articles in 1937 were run that described the events, and eleven of them described the massacre as a “riot (4).” The Washington Post, in one article, described it as a “lamentable affair (9).” The clear difference in coverage of the Ponce Massacre shows just how different the intentions were between the local and mainland peoples. After the release of Campos from his first prison term, the US-influenced Puerto Rican government worked even harder to neuter the Nationalist’s reach and message. Campos was released in 1947: the Gag Law was signed by the US-appointed governor Jesús T. Piñero in June of 1948. The law basically made being a Nationalist illegal. It “made it a felony to own or display a Puerto Rican flag (even in one’s home); to speak in favor of Puerto Rican independence; to print, publish, sell, or exhibit any material that might undermine the insular government; and to organize any society, group, or assembly of people with a similar intent (4).” Thousands were arrested, and fines of up to ten thousand dollars, (equivalent to $113,000 in 2021) were handed out. For example, a poet and Nationalist supporter named Francisco Matos Paoli was imprisoned for ten years, simply for writing four Nationalist speeches and owning a Puerto Rican flag (10). The law was repealed in 1957, giving life to the theory that the law was explicitly written to obstruct the Nationalists from gaining any traction. This was a targeted action by the government to take out the Nationalists, and the answers to this action were fierce. The culmination of this conflict exploded in the uprisings of 1950, where the extent to which the US put down the Nationalists reached its highest point. Both the passage of the Gag Law and the proposed new commonwealth was extremely unpopular with the Nationalists. The Gag Law was passed on June 10, 1948; Campos gave a speech to thousands of Nationalist supporters on June 21, 1948. Supporters were gathered all around him, just in case the authorities tried to arrest him (10). In this speech, he expressed how the Law violated the First Amendment and the need for real action. In secret, Campos planned an armed revolution to bring attention to the Puerto Ricans’ plight. Gaining the attention of the international community was to become a common theme at the end of the Nationalist movement, as Campos and others believed that bodies like the United Nations would be partial to their struggle (4). The revolution was originally planned to take place in 1952 when the new status was to become a reality. However, news Protesters marching for independence in 1998. Image courtesy of WNYC Studios.
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