ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the criminalization of anti-colonial struggle in Puerto Rico (henceforth PR) by the United States of North America (henceforth USA), and its security agencies. Broadly, I intend to show that many of the legal and political strategies and the state terrorism implemented in the current ‘war on terror’ have their foundation in the strategies of colonization and legitimation of colonialism in PR. In that sense it is important to understand that an approach to the colonial conflict between PR and the USA must necessarily take into consideration colonialism’s various and multiple forms. As a starting point, this approach should recognize that colonialism represents a complex structure where different narratives, scales of power, legitimacy and violence are expressed and manifested in terms of material, spatial and territorial (geopolitical) entities, as well as in epistemological and existential (biopolitical) forms. This chapter explores the significance of the concept of the state of exception for understanding colonial ‘counter-terrorism’. The state of exception has been traditionally understood as the suspension of the rule of law and certain constitutional guarantees by the sovereign, which has the effect of normalizing an ‘emergency situation’ (Agamben 2005). When we analyse this phenomenon in the context of colonialism, the state of exception begins to look rather different. On a more political level, which not only refers to the liberal-legal analysis of the suspension of the rule of law, but involves the creation of identities and sub-identities, we can see the legitimation of colonial violence, the overlap or superposition of law on politics and the criminalization of those who oppose the colonial regime. In that sense Agamben’s extensive and otherwise persuasive analysis of the state of exception does not really account for all the contexts in which this concept can be applied, notably contexts where a liberal juridical perspective on rights does not apply. A telling example is the colonial situation with its spaces and subjects that are very different from Western liberal-democratic orders. The colonized cannot stand up for their rights
as they have never been holders of rights according to the dynamics of colonialism. This relationship between colonialism and the state of exception has received little attention in the literature. However, two authors have begun to develop, from different perspectives, an analysis of these forms of control and domination. Their accounts illustrate, to some extent, the relationship between colonialism and the state of exception. On the one hand, Santos (2007) suggests that colonies always exist in a paradigm of appropriation/violence. This paradigm implies that the spaces, epistemologies and ways of life in the colonies are rendered invisible, and that colonial ideologies overlap. The organization of the appropriation of the human, natural and cultural resources of colonized peoples, and the exercise of power manifested through multiple and diverse forms of violence, lead the author to argue that colonies live under a permanent or ‘normalized’ state of exception (Santos 2007). Thereby, a state of exception should not be understood as merely a legal-political strategy, as I try to show above, but also involves the configuration of the subject and colonized identities as well as the power exercised over them. On the other hand Venator (2006) argues that the state of exception imposed in PR by the USA is not solely related to the liberal-legal interpretation given in the work of Agamben (2005), but can be used to explain the power strategies used by the USA in the process of colonization and legitimation of colonial violence. From this perspective, then, a ‘state of exception’ refers not only to the elimination of the rule of law and certain legal guarantees, but can also be understood as a foundation of colonialism. There is a long academic tradition that deals with colonialism and its violence, through the lens of different experiences and concrete cases. First, the writings of Fanon (1999), then postcolonial theories (Bhabha 1994; Spivak 1999) and now the current studies on ‘decoloniality or the decolonial turn’ (Grosfoguel 2003, 2007; Mignolo 2005; Quijano 2000) have described features of colonialism such as its relations of violence, racism, discrimination and human rights violations. Likewise, when I speak of repression, state violence and the criminalization of Puerto Rican independence movements, there are a considerable number of authors who have previously tackled the issue. Those include Acosta (1998) and her analysis of the Gag Law; Bosques and Colón (1997) and their research on the violation of freedoms and civil and political rights by the police of PR and its programme/practices of creating secret files and lists of ‘subversive people’. There is also their analysis of the political persecution carried out by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its programme COINTELPRO; Nieves Falcón’s (2002, 2009) analytical account of political repression during the first century of US colonialism in PR; and Paralitici’s (2004) research on the Puerto Rican independence actors jailed over a century of colonial history of US hegemony.
