The resolution of the High Legislative Body of Puerto Rico, submitted by its president, Thomas Rivera Schatz, recognizes that both assassinations occurred at a time when US intelligence agencies, in particular the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), were actively monitoring the Puerto Rican independence movement.
The document also admits that other sectors who questioned the policies of the US Government on this Caribbean island, which has been under US colonial rule since 1898, were persecuted.
Mari Pesquera, son of the prominent socialist leader Juan Mari Brás (1927-2010), was assassinated at the age of 23, apparently by elements of the extreme right in 1976, a time when counterrevolutionaries of Cuban origin and members of the Puerto Rican police were very active against sectors of the Puerto Rican left.
Muñiz Varela, 26 years old, was ambushed on April 28, 1979, when he was going to his mother’s home in the neighboring municipality of Guaynabo, by members of a terrorist commando from Miami and Puerto Rico, who cut his life short with bullets because he was promoting the reunification with their relatives in Puerto Rico with families who had left Cuba after the triumph of the Revolution.
The Puerto Rican Senate’s Resolution seeks to clarify both political crimes and do justice in cases that have been surrounded by controversy and uncertainty due to the possible intervention of US intelligence agencies, in violation of their own norms.
“Access to information to end impunity in these two cases is fundamental to knowing the truth and discovering those responsible, doing justice to the victims and their families, by ending the uncertainty and mistrust that still permeates these investigations,” Rivera Schatz, of the annexationist New Progressive Party (PNP), said.
The demand was made at a time when at the US Congress, Congresswomen Nydia Velázquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both from New York, have requested the declassification of this information to end decades of impunity.
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