Counter-insurgency goes to university: the militarisation of policing in the Puerto Rico student strikes

Abstract

This article presents a case study of the recent student strike at the University of Puerto Rico (held between 2010 and 2011) and the militarisation of the campus that followed. The strike has been a significant site of resistance to the imposition of neo-liberal structural adjustment in Puerto Rico (PR). The response to the strike by the Government of Puerto Rico and the university administration has been characterised by a range of highly repressive techniques of state violence, delivered under the guise of ‘counter-insurgency’. In other words, the ‘war on terror’ has been brought to the campus. Rather than this presenting an isolated case, more generally, counter-insurgency doctrine and practice has been central to the defence of neo-liberal structural adjustment in PR. There is an enduring tendency in counter-insurgency and counterterrorism strategies to depoliticise conflicts and deal with them in highly technicist/managerial terms. Yet, rather than representing a depoliticised struggle, the student strike has its origins in a deeply contested politics, and its outcome will shape the politics of future colonial-neo-liberal conflicts in PR.

Keywords:

• neo-liberalism
• counterterrorism
• counter-insurgency
• depoliticisation
• Puerto Rico
• state terrorism

Notes

1. The acronym UPR throughout the text refers to the University of Puerto Rico. The ‘UPR system’ is composed of 11 campuses. The main campus and the one that we will refer to throughout this article is the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras (UPRRP, also known as the IUPI). UPRRP has been traditionally one of the most important centres of political and student movements during the Puerto Rican colonial conflict.

2. Act No. 7, passed on 9 March 2009, was titled ‘Special Act Declaring the State of Fiscal Emergency and Establishing an Integral Plan of Fiscal Stabilization for Saving the Credit of Puerto Rico’. Full text available online at: http://www.oslpr.org/download/es/2009/0007c1326.pdf.

3. University of Puerto Rico v. Laborde et al. CT-2010-008. Full text available at: http://www.ramajudicial.pr/ts/2010/2010TSPR225.pdf.

4. This decision reverses the opinion of a series of US Supreme Court (USSC) landmark cases on student freedom of speech, Tinker v. Des Moines (393 US 503, 1969), see http://www.aclu.org/free-speech/tinker-v-des-moines-393-us-503-1969: ‘On February 24, 1969 the Court ruled 7-2 that students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate’. At the same time, UPR students have traditionally exercised the strike as a strategy to move or produce some changes in the UPR administration policy since the foundation of the UPR in 1903 (Navarro Rivera 2000).

5. Full text of Law No. 3, 4 February 2011. Available online: http://www.oslpr.org/2009-2012/leyes/pdf/ley-3-04-Feb-2011.pdf.

6. For commentary on this policy, see http://senado.uprrp.edu/Comites/PoliticaNoConfr/Pag-PolNoConfr.htm.

7. As, for example, in the case of the student Víctor Balaguer in December 2010. For more details, see http://pr.indymedia.org/news/2010/12/46595.php.

8. Such practices were applied from 1930 until the late 1980s by PR's police and were stopped after a long court case. The practice of carpeteo has started again with the creation of files with photos and videos of protestors in every single mobilisation that occurs in PR. This is now done routinely with no clear rules governing the procedure and with no open acknowledgement of the intentions or purposes of those practices (Serrano 2010).