page_title: Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico
section_title: Nationalist Revolts of 1950
hierarchical_section_title: Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico / Nationalist Revolts of 1950
caption_attribution_description: English: Miranda Diaz, one of casualties of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party Revolts of the 1950s.
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 first battle of the Nationalist uprisings occurred in the early hours of October 29, in barrio Macaná of Peñuelas. The police surrounded the house of the mother of Melitón Muñiz, the president of the Peñuelas Nationalist Party, that he was using as a distribution center for weapons for the Nationalist Revolt. Without warning, the police fired on the Nationalists and a firefight ensued, resulting in the death of two Nationalists and wounding of six police officers.
  In the Jayuya Uprising, led by Nationalist leader Blanca Canales, a police station and post office were burned.  The town was held by the Nationalists for three days.
  The Utuado Uprising culminated in the Utuado Massacre by the local police, in which five Nationalists were executed.
  The San Juan Nationalist revolt was a Nationalist attempt to enter the Governor's mansion, La Fortaleza, in order to attack then-governor Luis Muñoz Marín. The hour-long shootout resulted in the death of four Nationalists: Domingo Hiraldo Resto, Carlos Hiraldo Resto, Manuel Torres Medina and Raimundo Díaz Pacheco. Three guards were also seriously wounded.
  Various other shootouts took place throughout island – including those at Mayagüez, Naranjito, Arecibo, and Ponce, where Antonio Alicea, Jose Miguel Alicea, Francisco Campos (Albizu Campos's nephew), Osvaldo Perez Martinez and Ramon Pedrosa Rivera were arrested and accused of the murder of police corporal Aurelio Miranda during the revolt. Raul de Jesus was accused of violating the Insular Firearms Law.
  On October 31, police officers and National Guardsmen surrounded Salón Boricua, a barbershop in Santurce. Believing that a group of Nationalists were inside the shop, they opened fire. The only person in the shop was Campos barber Vidal Santiago Díaz. Santiago Díaz, who fought alone against the attackers for three hours, received five wounds, including one in the head. The battle was transmitted "live" via the radio airwaves to the public in general.
  On November 1, 1950, Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who was staying at the Blair House in Washington, D.C.
  Truman supported development of a constitution for Puerto Rico and the 1952 status referendum on it; 82% of the voters approved the constitution. The US Congress also approved the constitution.
  On March 1, 1954, Lolita Lebrón together with fellow Nationalists Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irvin Flores and Andrés Figueroa Cordero attacked the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.  The group opened fire with automatic pistols. Some 30 shots were fired (mostly by Cancel, according to his account), wounding five lawmakers. One of the congressmen, Representative Alvin Bentley from Michigan, was seriously wounded. Upon her arrest, Lebrón yelled "I did not come to kill anyone, I came to die for Puerto Rico!"
  On November 18, 1955, a non-violent splinter group of nationalists calling themselves La Quinta Columna (The 5th Column) broke away from the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party due to not supporting the ideas and thoughts of Albizu Campos, as to a Puerto Rico relationship with Spain as its Mother country and their nationalistic love for Puerto Rico as their Motherland. The other reason for the splinter group was due to the violence that took place in the 1950s. This splinter group would later become known in 1968 as El Movimiento Indio Taino de Boriken (The Taino Indian Movement of Puerto Rico) which was primarily made up of the children of the Puerto Rican Nationalists whom would come to establish the indigenous grassroots civil rights movement in Puerto Rico.
caption: Hipólito Miranda Díaz, killed in the Arecibo incident
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