Earlier this week a delegation from the American Civil Liberties Union, which included interestingly enough, actress Rosie Perez and baseball player Carlos Delgado, as well as the head of the ACLU, Anthony Romero, Angelo Falcon of the National Institute for Latino Policy, and Juan Cartegena of LatinoJustice PRLDEF, concluded that the civil rights violations against students and labor activists by the government was worse than originally imagined.

From El Nuevo Dia :

“The necessity of maintaining the university open and assuring access to students cannot justify the excessive use of force we saw in the videos,” pointed out the director of the ACLU, Anthony Romero, who also recognized that students violated laws and damaged state property.

“When the government unleashes the power of the police on students who were meeting peacefully in a public place, that is anti-American, contrary to Puerto Rican values, unconstitutional, and against the law,” he said.

The ACLU proposes to release a report on its findings in September, and will follow up on some agreements reached with the police in relation to the implementation of a use of force policy. In fact, the ACLU will collaborate with police trainings on civil rights. If there is no clear response from the government, the organization is not rejecting initiating litigation in federal court.

What is really interesting, beyond th obvious need for justice for the students and activists whose rights were violated, and demands consideration is how members of the delegation look at themselves and are portrayed as “outsiders”. If I am not mistaken, all are Puerto Rican or of Puerto Rican decent. In this video from El Nuevo Dia, Anthony Romero cites Puerto Rican Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi’s calling Congressman Gutierrez an outsider as a push to the creation of the delegation. In the video, which is in Spanish, you can note that Romero calls himself an American not a Puerto Rican or variation and that Romero makes it clear that he is not interested in Puerto Rican politics.

There seems to be a strong effort on the part of many calling out the police abuses on the island to stay away from the issue of status, as if the uncontrolled violence unleashed upon students and activists and the ignoring of said violence by most of the U.S. media has nothing to do with Puerto Rico’s colonial status. As I have written many times, had the incidents that occurred at the University of Puerto Rico occurred on the campus of any U.S. State School, the response and reaction would have been much different.