PAGE 13 VOL. 2, NO. 1 ZEITGEIST any medical attention to be administered to him for 18 hours (14). The report would later state that “We (the Inspector General’s office) found that the senior FBI officials who ordered the delayed entry believed that the concerns about agent safety outweighed Ojeda’s need for medical attention (14).” Ojeda was an important part of the independence movement post-Jayuya. In 1967, he founded and was the head of the Armed Revolutionary Independence Movement. He had a big role in organizing and had already been living in hiding for 15 years (15). There was a cry throughout the entire island, with even the pro-commonwealth Governor of the time, Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, searing the FBI and vowing to complete his own investigation on the matter. However, not much changed. As observed earlier, support for independence only rose 2.95 percent between 1998 and 2012 (12). The government, both that of the mainland and the Governor, persecuted the Nationalist movement enough that Puerto Ricans lost the option of independence, and turned to statehood as a way to improve their conditions. However, this is most likely a dead end. Becoming the 51st state will require federal action, with the act being passed by both houses and signed by the president. No recent president has made a push for statehood, and each of the two major political party platforms either doesn’t mention statehood or has made no effort to advance legislation pertaining to it (16)(17). The chance that independence had to be a popular option in the determination of Puerto Rico’s future was taken away by the actions of the US government, the FBI, and the Insular government in the twentieth century.
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