The Progressive. Vol. 56: no. 10 (Oct 1992). Copyright Progressive Incorporated

On July 25, 1978, atop Cerro Maravilla, which means Marvelous Mountain in Spanish and lies forty-five miles
southwest of San Juan, two young men seeking independence for Puerto Rico were murdered by members of
Puerto Rico's Police Intelligence Division. Dead after two volleys of shots were Arnaldo Dario Rosada,
twenty-four, and Carlos Enrique Soto Arrivi, eighteen. They had planned to blow up the television tower of
WRIK on Cerro Maravilla as part of the anticolonialist, pro-independence protest of their tiny splinter group,
the Armed Revolutionary Movement.

Rosado and Soto had been led into the police trap by an informer, Alejandro Gonzalez Malave, whom policemen
mistakenly wounded in their first round of firing. The two independentistas were unhurt and immediately
surrendered. They were handcuffed, beaten, and then executed.

It has taken fourteen years, but today no one doubts that then-Governor Carlos Romero Barcelo, the Puerto
Rico Commonwealth's Justice Department, and the U.S. Justice Department's FBI did everything in their power
to cover up the cold-blooded killings.

Samuel Dash, who was chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Watergate and in recent years has been a
consultant to the Puerto Rico Senate Committee investigating the killings on Cerro Maravilla, says the 1978
attack was "the culmination of a plan by Romero Barcelo's police department and the San Juan office of the FBI
to fabricate a wave of terrorism to frighten the people of Puerto Rico and turn them against the independence
movement. The killings of Soto and Rosado permitted the government to claim that the wave of terrorism had
been crushed."

Dash adds, "The evidence is clear these killings were planned and premeditated by a higher authority." On
receiving news of the deaths, Romero Barcelo praised the "heroic action" of the police.

The cover story--that the two independentistas ignored a police order to surrender and that the police shot them
dead in self-defense--unraveled almost immediately. A cab driver named Julio Ortiz Molina told how the police
undercover agent, Gonzales Malave, accompanied by Soto and Rosado, hailed his cab and forced him to drive at
gunpoint to Cerro Maravilla, where the police awaited the independentistas.

When the shooting began, the driver took refuge under his dashboard. The police dragged Ortiz Molina out, and
he saw the independentistas being beaten. The driver was taken from the scene to another nearby tower and,
while under guard, he heard a second volley of gunfire.

Only days later, the cabbie's story became public. Labor unions, the bar association, and The San Juan Star
demanded that Romero Barcelo name a special prosecutor to investigate the killings. The Governor refused, but
ordered his Justice Department's Special Investigations Bureau to look into the matter. The division's chief,
Angel Figueroa Vivas, and the chief of the Justice Department's Criminal Investigations Division, Pedro Colton,
headed the inquiry. Their report, released a month later, cleared the police but satisfied no one but Romero
Barcelo.

Inconsistency after inconsistency piled up, and on April 30, 1979, the U.S. Justice Department said it would
carry out a full civil-rights investigation.

Unknown then--and not known for many years--was the fact that the FBI's Puerto Rico office was fighting
hard to squelch any inquiry by the U.S. Justice Department.

FBI documents made available under the Freedom of Information Act show that the FBI's San Juan bureau sent
almost daily reports to Washington urging headquarters to disregard the "nebulous" comments of Ortiz Molina
and to ignore media reports criticizing the "pro-statehood" government of Romero Barcelo. A memo from the
FBI's J.C. Lawn to Washington called for an inquiry "limited to the submission of newspaper articles and the
obtaining of a report of the (Puerto Rican) Special Investigations Bureau." (Lawn eventually left the FBI to head
up the Drug Enforcement Administration.)

The FBI opposition continued until Assistant Attorney General Drew Days III, chief of the U.S. Civil Rights
Division and now a Yale law professor, said his division would investigate.

Bernardo (Matt) Perez, in charge of the FBI's San Juan office, finally visited police headquarters to select a
policeman to help coordinate the inquiry. Police Superintendent Desiderio Cartagena suggested the FBI recruit
Intelligence Division Lieutenant Colonel Angel Perez Casillas--who'd been in charge of the Cerro Maravilla
operation. And that's what the FBI did, thus putting one of the prime suspects in charge of the investigation.

In the latter part of 1979, there were two other important developments in the Cerro Maravilla case. First, the
families of the two murdered independentistas filed lawsuits against the governor and the Puerto Rican
Commonwealth, seeking damages and giving their lawyers the opportunity to look into the killings. Second,
Romero Barcelo switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party and began making repeated trips to
President Jimmy Carter's White House, supposedly to lobby for the Commonwealth's rights to any minerals that
might be found within ten nautical miles of Puerto Rico's shoreline.

The island has its own political parties: Romero Barcelo's pro-statehood New Progressive Party (NPP), current
Governor Rafael Hernandez Colon's Popular Democratic Party (PDP), which seeks to maintain a kind of
autonomy within the U.S. system, and the small Popular Independence Party, which gets about 5 per cent of the
vote and seeks total independence from the United States.

The national parties have organizations on the island to assure Puerto Rican representation at their
conventions--and Romero Barcelo, by moving into the Puerto Rican Democratic Party's leadership, suddenly
acquired clout at the Carter White House, which was worried about Senator Edward Kennedy's challenge to
Carter for the 1980 Democratic Presidential nomination.

On December 5, 1979, when Romero Barcelo visited Washington to talk about offshore mineral rights, he also
mentioned he might support either Carter or Kennedy for the Democratic nomination. That same day, he visited
Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti and, among other topics, discussed the Cerro Maravilla case. Soon
afterward, the Governor announced his support for Carter against Kennedy in the March 1980 Democratic
primary in Puerto Rico.

In the primary, Romero Barcelo's faction won twenty-one convention votes for Carter while the faction behind
Kennedy got twenty convention votes.

Two weeks later, the Federal prosecutor announced he was ending the Cerro Maravilla investigation without
indictments. He upheld the one-volley version of the killings and said investigators found no evidence to
substantiate cab driver Ortiz Molina's contention that the two independentistas had been beaten. The Federal
authorities, like the Commonwealth investigators before them, kept quiet about the photos they had showing the
savage beating Rosado received. He had been kicked in the face and a shotgun butt had been rammed into his
mouth.

The FBI had the photos but didn't make them public until June 15, 1983, when they were shown at the start of
the Puerto Rican Senate Judiciary Committee hearings that began uncovering the truth about Cerro Maravilla.

The end of the Federal investigation in the spring of 1980 really ended nothing.

Two reporters at The San Juan Star, Manny Suarez and Tomas Stella, kept digging. In July 1980, they reported
that a policeman on guard duty near the shooting scene had told a Puerto Rican grand jury that he'd heard two
volleys of shots--and that the cab driver had told him he'd seen the police beating the independentistas.

The officer also said that Figueroa and Colton had pressured him into telling the investigators that he'd heard
only one volley of shots. Soon Special Arrests Squad Chief Julio C. Andrades was threatening to tell what really
happened at Cerro Maravilla, assisting the lawyers pushing the lawsuits of the two independentistas' families.

That brought Assistant Attorney General Days back into the case. He ordered a second investigation, which
plodded along wearily as Carter won renomination and was defeated by Ronald Reagan for the Presidency.
Romero Barcelo nosed out Hernandez Colon by 3,000 votes for reelection to the Puerto Rican governorship.

Days before Reagan was inaugurated in early 1981, the second Federal investigation ended without indictments.

It took another two-and-a-half years, largely under the prod of reporters Suarez and Stella, for the Puerto Rican
Senate Committee to start bringing all the facts into the open in hearings that extended into 1984, a year when
Hernandez Colon soundly thrashed Romero Barcelo in the gubernatorial election. Finally, in 1985, Hernandez
Colon created a special independent prosecutor's office, with a yearly budget of $1.1 million.

Slowly, in both Commonwealth and Federal courts, participants in the mountain-top murders and subsequent
coverup were brought to justice. Among the results:

* In March 1985, ten Puerto Rican policemen were found guilty on forty-five of fifty-three Federal perjury
charges. Individual sentences ranged from six to thirty years in Federal prison.

* In September 1985, first-degree murder charges were filed in Commonwealth court against six Puerto Rican
Intelligence Division policemen. These charges eventually were reduced to second-degree murder and perjury,
and all were convicted and sentenced to six to ten years in prison, though they were already serving
ten-to-thirty-year Federal sentences.

* On April 29, 1986, Gonzalez Malave, the police informer who had set up the two young independentistas, was
shot and killed while visiting his parents in the Bayamon suburb of San Juan. There had been indications he was
ready to talk. Recent testimony suggests he was murdered by independentistas.

* On October 17, 1986, Colton, Figueroa, and three other Commonwealth Justice Department lawyers who had
worked under Romero Barcelo were charged with taking part in "a pre-arranged conspiracy" to keep the Cerro
Maravilla facts under wraps. Colton and Figueroa were disbarred, one lawyer was suspended "indefinitely"
from the bar, one was suspended for five years, and one for three years.

* On February 27, 1987, the families of the two murdered independentistas settled their lawsuits against the
Puerto Rican Commonwealth. Each family received $575,000.

* On January 12, 1988, former Police Lieutenant Colonel Angel Perez Casillas and police intelligence agent
Rafael Moreno, both already serving Federal perjury sentences, were brought to trial in Commonwealth court
for first-degree murder. At their trial, there was testimony that Perez Casillas had told his cops the
independentistas "could not come down alive" from Cerro Maravilla and that Moreno had fired a .357 magnum
point-blank at one of the defenseless, handcuffed independentistas. On March 18, 1988, Perez Casillas was
acquitted by a 9-to-3 vote of both deaths, while Moreno was unanimously acquitted of one death and convicted,
9-to-3, of second-degree murder in the death of the independentista whom he shot with his .357 magnum.
(Puerto Rican Commonwealth law permits 9-to-3 votes for acquittal or conviction.)

* On March 23, 1988, reporter Manny Suarez's story topping all else in The San Juan Star began, "A juror who
played a key role in finding Police Lieutenant Colonel Angel Perez Casillas innocent of the Cerro Maravilla
murders is related by marriage to former Governor Carlos Romero Barcelo." The following September, Perez
Casillas was acquitted of seven perjury counts in Commonwealth court, again by a 9-to-3 vote, and Moreno
was acquitted of four perjury counts and found guilty of one, adding six more years to his various convictions
for a total of fifty-nine years in prison.

Never questioned in the 1980s was former Governor Romero Barcelo, who in September 1985 seemed to be
fading into political obscurity by resigning his NPP presidency in favor of San Juan Mayor Baltasar Corrada del
Rio.

But Romero Barcelo's obscurity was only temporary. In late 1986, when a Bayamon seat in the Puerto Rican
Senate opened up, Romero Barcelo went after it and won. As soon as he was sworn in, he demanded a seat on
the committee investigating Cerro Maravilla. That was refused.

In the 1988 gubernatorial election, Hernandez Colon badly beat the NPP's Corrada del Rio, and in early 1989
Corrada del Rio unexpectedly resigned as NPP president, once again opening the door to Romero Barcelo, who
was by then looking for a political comeback. But islandwide polls showed Romero Barcelo still hadn't regained
much NPP popularity, and in mid-1991 he gave up party control to Dr. Pedro Rossello, who became NPP
president and by early 1992 the party's choice for governor.

Meantime, the PDP-dominated Senate Judiciary Committee and its chief investigator, Edgardo Perez Viera, once
again dug into the morass of the Cerro Maravilla case, going public with hearings on most of Puerto Rico's
television and radio stations just as the Senate investigators had done eight years earlier. Slowly they encircled
Romero Barcelo with evidence showing he had participated in the coverup of the mountaintop murders. The
hearings lasted until May 1992 and had phenomenal ratings--more than half of Puerto Ricans with TV sets
turned on, watched, and listened.

But no "smoking gun" was produced.

Instead, Puerto Ricans heard Drew Days testify that the San Juan FBI office "employed one stratagem after
another to avoid doing a full investigation" of Cerro Maravilla. He conceded the San Juan FBI office's
day-to-day relationship with Puerto Rico's police was too close, but said he never did anything but complain
verbally to the FBI's Washington headquarters. He said he didn't go to Attorney General Civiletti about the San
Juan FBI's "totally unprofessional, inappropriate" behavior because he "was not interested in having a battle"
with the San Juan office.

"The (U.S.) Justice Department did not really show much glory" in dealing with the Cerro Maravilla case, said
Days, adding that "certainly an apology (to Puerto Rico) is justified with respect to the way the Federal
Government handled its investigation."

Days even suggested that some FBI agents in San Juan may have falsified official documents to cover up the
Cerro Maravilla killings and stop the Federal inquiry.

But there was still no "smoking gun," and when Rossello, the NPP gubernatorial candidate, sought to put his
own choice for resident commissioner--Puerto Rico's representative in the U.S. Congress--on the NPP slate,
Romero Barcelo headed him off.

Today Romero Barcelo is the NPP candidate for the Washington job, helping to bind his pro-statehood party to
his defense. Many on the island believe Romero Barcelo has at least a fifty-fifty chance of winning the resident
commissionership--which allows the occupant to participate in U.S. House proceedings but not on the House
floor.

The hearings and reruns of much of the testimony kept Puerto Ricans glued to the television sets well into the
summer, as if they were watching that most popular of Latin American entertainments, a novela--in English,
soap opera.

Chief investigator Perez Viera drew testimony from some of Romero Barcelo's top aides about "obstructing"
Cerro Maravilla inquiries when Romero Barcelo was Governor. More fingers were pointed at the FBI and
Puerto Rico's Justice Department. But Perez Viera insists the Senate won't file charges against anyone on the
basis of evidence presented at the latest hearings. Instead, he says, the task of prosecution will be up to Special
Independent Prosecutor Alejandro Salgado Rivera, who has said there's sufficient evidence for perjury and
coverup charges against several persons he declines to identify.

The question, obviously, is whether one of those "several persons" is Romero Barcelo.

And much depends on the outcome of November's election, because both Rossello and Romero Barcelo say that
if the NPP wins in November, there won't be any prosecutions at all. Both say the special prosecutor's office
will be dismantled if the pro-statehood party wins--and they even talk of investigating the Cerro Maravilla
investigators.

Romero Barcelo finally did testify before the Puerto Rican Senate Committee, denying he ever expected
"anything to happen" at Cerro Maravilla and defending himself this way:

"Afterwards, after one has all the details and knows it was not self-defense, the perspective is different.... In the
heat of the moment decisions are taken and later you say, hey, what they should have done was this and that.
That's very easy.... That the police commit a murder is a very serious matter, even more serious than if a
private citizen did it, because the police are supposed to protect society. However, there's a principle that an evil
does not justify another evil. That murders were committed does not justify using the government's power to
persecute, to falsely accuse, to besmirch reputations...to prolong an investigation and bring it forth only when
there's an election coming."

The whole affair, he added, is a "black mark" against Puerto Rico politics.

Samuel Dash disagrees. "The evidence shows that Romero Barcelo intervened in both the Federal and (Puerto
Rico) Senate investigations," Dash says. "He succeeded with the Federal investigation. Although he tried
everything, according to the evidence, to paralyze the Senate investigation, he failed, and the Senate at last
revealed the truth of the murders to the people.... They have not been fooled. They cannot believe that former
Governor Carlos Romero Barcelo is a victim or a martyr of Cerro Maravilla, but, on the contrary, they must
know now what his real role in this tragedy was."

The vote in November will offer the Puerto Ricans' judgment--more than fourteen years after the mountaintop
murders.

William Steif, a frequent contributor to The Progressive, wrote about Cerro Maravilla in the April 1984 issue.

'A KIND OF QUEBEC'

Last year, the Puerto Rican legislature enacted and the governor signed a law saying that "only Spanish" was the
island's official language, though roughly 40 per cent of the 3.5 million Puerto Ricans speak some English.

There's an ambivalence in Puerto Rico that exists nowhere else in Latin America. It is the ambivalence created
by U.S. citizenship, U.S. access, the U.S. economy. On an island half the size of New Jersey, per capita yearly
income is about $6,000, at least six times higher than in the neighboring, Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic.
The U.S. consumer ideology is evident everywhere on the island, and millions of Puerto Ricans live on the U.S.
mainland and come and go to the island at will.

Simultaneously, there's pride in the Hispanic culture, assertiveness against what's often seen as U.S.
colonialism--and constant worry over an unemployment rate that at last count was about 17 per cent of the
work force, low for Latin America but very high by U.S. standards.

"We are a kind of Quebec within the U.S.," says one Puerto Rican, referring to Canada's internal struggle.

This ambivalence is particularly pertinent in the case of the 1978 murders atop Cerro Maravilla. It was the
doggedness of Puerto Rico's only English-language newspaper, the 35,000-circulation San Juan Star, and
particularly of reporter Manny Suarez, which kept the case alive while three much larger Spanish-language
dailies would have let it die a natural death. Suarez even wrote a book, Requiem on Cerro Maravilla, published
in 1987, that detailed the police killings and subsequent coverup. It sold around 10,000 copies, half in English,
half in Spanish.

Suarez, a New York-born and educated Puerto Rican who'd joined The San Juan Star's staff in 1960, dug and
dug for thirteen years, dredging up more and more facts about the murders and coverup. His reward, in
mid-September 1991, was to be pulled off the Cerro Maravilla case because, according to editor Andrew
Viglucci, he was "too close" to it. Suarez, now sixty-one, filed an age-discrimination lawsuit against his
newspaper, and he was supported by most local members of his unit of the American Newspaper Guild. The
management met with him and reached a kind of compromise, but that fell through and Suarez reinstituted his
suit. A second meeting in mid-1992 got Suarez to withdraw his suit once more on the pledge that he'd be a
"senior writer" on the newspaper. "We'll see if that works," Suarez says.

Meantime, The San Juan Star's management, worried about the English-language newspaper's viability in a
journalistic arena dominated by the conservative El Nuevo Dia and El Vocero--a third Spanish-language paper, El
Mundo has died--is turning more conservative. The new publisher and president is Adolfo Comas Bacardi, a
member of the rich Bacardi Rum family, and the newspaper is becoming an apologist for former Governor
Carlos Romero Barcelo's pro-statehood New Progressive Party, which on the U.S. mainland would correlate
with the right wing of the Republican Party.

"Investigative reporting" is out, "fairness and objectivity" are in. That leaves Manny Suarez out on a limb.

But it's also a sign of the Puerto Rican ambivalence, because in Latin America newspapers or other media,
generally lined up with the powers that be, do little or no investigative reporting. Those that do are bombed or
their editors and reporters wind up dead. The pitch is to make money and preserve the status quo.