Isolina Rondon saw it happen. She testified that she watched police officers fire on the crowd and heard one officer scream, "not to let them escape alive." Her testimony was ignored. No charges were filed. On October 24, 1935, at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras, police officers confronted supporters of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and opened fire, killing four people. The Rio Piedras massacre was not an isolated event. It was the opening act of a cycle of political violence between the Nationalist movement and the U.S.-appointed colonial government that would claim lives for years afterward.
The roots of the massacre lay in the fraught politics of 1930s Puerto Rico. In 1931, U.S.-appointed Governor Theodore Roosevelt Jr. had named Dr. Carlos E. Chardon as chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico, the first Puerto Rican to hold the position. Chardon initiated the Reconstruction of Puerto Rico Project, known as Plan Chardon, based on the ideas of Senator Luis Munoz Marin and aligned with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Pedro Albizu Campos, president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, opposed what he saw as deepening U.S. control over the island's institutions. On October 23, 1935, pro-Chardon students began collecting signatures for a petition to declare Albizu Campos "Student Enemy Number One." Pro-Nationalist students responded with a counter-protest, denouncing Chardon and the Liberal Party as agents of the United States. The confrontation at the university the following day would be settled not by argument but by gunfire.
The details of what happened on October 24 are straightforward and damning. Police officers confronted Nationalist Party supporters on the university campus and opened fire. Four men were killed: Eduardo Rodriguez Vega, Jose Santiago Barea, and Pedro Quinones, all Nationalist supporters, along with Juan Munoz Jimenez, a bystander with no connection to the Nationalist Party who happened to be in the wrong place. Dionisio Pearson, a young Nationalist, was wounded and later charged with murder for his participation in the unrest. One police officer was also wounded. Eyewitness Isolina Rondon's account of deliberate, targeted shooting was never investigated. The police version of events prevailed without challenge, and the officers who fired on unarmed civilians faced no consequences.
At the time of the massacre, the top-ranking police official on the island was Colonel Elisha Francis Riggs, a former U.S. Army officer appointed Chief of Police in 1933 by U.S.-appointed Governor Blanton Winship. Riggs was deeply unpopular for his repression of the organized labor movement among sugar cane workers and his crackdown on the Nationalist independence movement. The Nationalist Party held Riggs responsible for the Rio Piedras killings. On February 23, 1936, Nationalists Hiram Rosado and Elias Beauchamp assassinated Riggs as he returned from Mass at San Juan's Cathedral. The two men were arrested and taken to police headquarters, where they were killed, either by summary execution or while allegedly attempting to escape. Before his death, Beauchamp posed for a news photographer, giving a military salute.
The assassination of Riggs gave the colonial government the justification it sought for a broader crackdown. Pedro Albizu Campos, Juan Antonio Corretjer, Clemente Soto Velez, and other Nationalist leaders were arrested and imprisoned. Senator Luis Munoz Marin, asked by administrator Ernest Gruening to publicly condemn the Riggs assassination, refused unless he was also permitted to condemn the police for executing Rosado and Beauchamp without trial. The cycle that began at Rio Piedras continued: the 1937 Ponce massacre, in which police killed unarmed Nationalists marching in a peaceful demonstration, and the Nationalist revolts of the 1950s, including an armed assault on La Fortaleza itself. The four men killed at Rio Piedras on October 24, 1935 were not the last to die in this struggle, but they were among the first, and the impunity with which they were killed set the pattern for what followed.
The Rio Piedras massacre occurred at the University of Puerto Rico campus at 18.40N, 66.05W, in the southern part of the San Juan metropolitan area. The UPR campus, with its distinctive clock tower and green quadrangles, is identifiable from the air as a large institutional complex south of the Hato Rey financial district. Nearest airport is Luis Munoz Marin International (TJSJ/SJU), approximately 5 nautical miles to the east. Fernando Luis Ribas Dominicci Airport (TJIG) on Isla Grande is about 4 nautical miles to the northwest.