Seriously gente, you need to be over at post pomo nuyorican homo for updates on the University of Puerto Rico student strikes. Marisol has connections and testimonios from students and people who are living this reality right now. The latest post Marisol has is about police brutality towards student protesters.

Marisol writes:

Members of the police department have gotten into quite of bit of hot water since screen grabs of their facebook pages and status updates have started to surface in the media.  The officers have been boasting about beating students or complaining about the lack of opportunities to brutalize students.

Some examples:

Alexander Luina: “Por fin puedo dar un macanazo en esta bendita huelga, despues de 12 dias.”  (“Finally, after 12 days I can use my baton in this damn strike.”)

The Puerto Rican representative in Havana, Edwin González, emphasized the need for all nations of the world to support the students to keep the University of Puerto Rico as a legacy for all the people and eliminate any possibility of privatizing or by a private public alliance.

International support for the UPR students is rising in spite of the lack of media coverage. Students have received letters in support from students and professors from the City University of New York (CUNY), University of California Berkeley, and universities in Spain and Canada. More recently, Puerto Rican professors at such U.S. universities as Yale, University of California Los Angeles, Rutgers, and Duke signed a letter emphasizing the importance of public education, university autonomy, and demanded the demilitarization of the Rio Piedras campus, the beginning of negotiations, and the protection of civil rights.

“Not since Puerto Rico rallied to chase the United States Navy out of Vieques a decade ago have so many different social sectors rallied around a single cause. Experts say a university with a history of often-leftist political struggles that sometimes ended in violence has, for the first time, launched an island-wide walkout that underscores discontent felt throughout Puerto Rico,” reported Miami Herald writer Frances Robles in a recent article. “As more people here lose their jobs, experts say the UPR strike stands as a symbol of a society fed up with messy politics.”