page_title: Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico
section_title: Founding of the Nationalist Party
hierarchical_section_title: Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico / Founding of the Nationalist Party
caption_attribution_description: English: Pedro Albizu Campos raising his hat to a crowd.
context_page_description: The Puerto Rico Nationalist Party is a Puerto Rican political party which was founded on September 17, 1922, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Its primary goal was to work for Puerto Rico's independence. The Party's selection in 1930 of Pedro Albizu Campos as its president brought a radical change to the organization and its tactics.
  In the 1930s, intimidation, repression and persecution of Party members by the government, then headed by a U.S. president-appointed governor, led to the assassination of two government officials, the attempted assassination of a federal judge in Puerto Rico, and the Rio Piedras and Ponce massacres. Under the leadership of Albizu Campos, the party abandoned the electoral process in favor of direct armed conflict as means to gain independence from the United States.
  By the late 1940s, a more US-friendly party, the Partido Popular Democrático, had gained an overwhelming number of seats in the legislature and, in 1948, it passed Ley de la Mordaza, which attempted to suppress the Nationalist Party and similar opposition. The Puerto Rican police arrested many Nationalist Party members under this law, some of whom were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
context_section_description: The origins of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party date to 1917, when a group of Union Party members in Ponce, dissatisfied with the attitude of the Union Party of Puerto Rico towards the "granting" of U.S. citizenship, formed the "Asociación Nacionalista de Ponce" (Ponce Nationalist Association). Among its founders were Dr. Guillermo Salazar, Rafael Matos Bernier, J. A. Gonzalez, and Julio Cesar Fernandez. These men also founded the newspaper El Nacionalista.
  The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party was formed as a direct response to the American colonial government. In 1919, José Coll y Cuchí, a member of the Union Party of Puerto Rico, felt that the Union Party was not doing enough for the cause of Puerto Rican independence. Coll y Cuchí and some followers left to form the Nationalist Association of Puerto Rico in San Juan. Under Coll y Cuchí's presidency, the party convinced the Puerto Rican Legislative Assembly to approve an Act that would permit the transfer of the remains of the Puerto Rican patriot, Ramón Emeterio Betances, from Paris, France, to Puerto Rico. 
  The Legislative Assembly appointed Alfonso Lastra Charriez as its emissary since he had French heritage and spoke the language fluently. Betances' remains arrived in San Juan on August 5, 1920. A funeral caravan organized by the Nationalist Association transferred the remains from San Juan to the town of Cabo Rojo, where his ashes were interred by his monument.
  By the 1920s, two other pro-independence organizations had formed on the Island: the Nationalist Youth and the Independence Association of Puerto Rico. The Independence Association was founded by José S. Alegría, Eugenio Font Suárez and Leopoldo Figueroa in 1920. On September 17, 1922, these three political organizations joined forces and formed the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Coll y Cuchi was elected president and José S. Alegría (father of Ricardo Alegría) vice-president.
  In 1924, Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos joined the party and was named vice-president. Alegría was named Nationalist Party president in 1928 and held that position until 1930. By 1930, disagreements between Coll y Cuchi and Albizu Campos as to how the party should be run, led the former and his followers to leave and return to the Union Party. Albizu Campos did not like what he considered to be Coll y Cuchí's attitude of fraternal solidarity with the enemy. On May 11, 1930, Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos was elected president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party.
  The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party maintained that, as a matter of international law, the Treaty of Paris following the Spanish–American War could not have empowered the Spanish to "give" to the US what was no longer theirs. Under Albizu Campos's leadership during the years of the Great Depression, the party became the largest independence movement in Puerto Rico.
  In the mid-1930s, there were disappointing electoral results and strong repression by the territorial police authorities. The party staged some protests that developed into celebrated incidents because of police overreaction: The October 1935 Rio Piedras and the Ponce massacres. In these, government forces fired on unarmed civilians. After the Río Piedras massacre, in December 1935, Albizu Campos announced that the Nationalist Party would withdraw from electoral participation while the United States kept control. Campos began to advocate direct, violent revolution.
caption: Don Pedro Albizu Campos
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