War against all Puerto Ricans shows depravity of American colonialism and occupation

Ramon Ramos
   Puerto Rico was in some major debt crisis and for a better understanding why this beautiful island has always been marred by extreme poverty the book called "War Against all Puerto Ricans" is an excellent reading that few even care to look into the history. Author Nelson Denis looks through the history of American involvement of this island through the eyes and story of Pedro Campos. Albizu Campos was a national leader who died under mysterious circumstances by those forces that profited from total control of the islands sugar-based industry. The upsetting fact that none of these owners of the sugar conglomerate were North Americans and not island natives shows pretty much how the island was controlled in a more brutal barbaric way that the Spanish ruled following the war of 1898.This book recounts various massacres and rebel factions on the island whose dream of independence and a country free of oppression and forced poverty by outsiders would not be fulfilled.

The American bankers devalued the peso and installed property taxes on landowners doing their best to get rid of the poor peasants who at least had the dignity of owning the land they lived under. displacing the Puerto Ricans from land ownership was one of the first acts these neo-liberal economic assholes installed after seizing the island and keeping it under American control and a permanent base. The book details the torture, spying, and surveillance  of the islands residents in the fifties and sixties doing their best to emulate French atrocities and barbarity elsewhere in Algeria at the same time. This book looks at how the treatment of Puerto Rican nationalists eventually created a desperate plot by the nationalists to assassinate Harry Truman in Washington and how it nearly succeeded. This is a shameful look at American policy on one of our tiny neighbors who we should of been protecting and trying to improve conditions of instead of using it as a slave-wage profit based Sugar cane selling factory where rights of the workers were trampled and stomped on by big agribusiness. The highlight of the book was the lone shootout of the Salon Boricua where Vidal Santiago fought off forty national guardsmen for hours in a descriptive battle and this truly was a revolutionary time for Puerto Rico whose people resisted as best they could the Yankee empire that had kept so many around the world in poverty for the benefit of a few ultra-wealthy elites. A great look and book on perhaps the second biggest tragedy outside the Philippines of our war against Spain and the consequences for people once under Soanish rule