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AELLA Statement in Support of Student Strike at University of Puerto Rico

AELLA Statement in Support of Student Strike at University of Puerto Rico

We, the Association of Latino and Latin American Students (AELLA) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, express our complete solidarity with the students currently on strike at the Río Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR).

We understand that the diversity of opinions within the student body over the recent 33% tuition hike unilaterally imposed by the administration has become polarized between those who support the strike in protest of the hike and those who are against it. However, we place responsibility for the continuing strike and the ensuing polarization squarely on the shoulders of UPR President Antonio García Padilla and destabilizing agents, including General Student Council (CGE) President Nina Valedón, who have spread misinformation and sabotaged the CGE’s democratically approved decision to go on strike.

To that effect, the April 26 assembly of the CGE, convened by Valedón outside UPR grounds and in the presence of administrators and faculty, in an unprecedented violation of CGE procedural norms, as well as the fundamental principle of university autonomy, was illegitimate. We consider the measures taken by the United Committee Against the Hike (CUCA) to prevent it from taking place to be fully justified.

AELLA hereby reaffirms its support of the CUCA’s demands on President García Padilla to repeal or declare a moratorium on Certification 70, which enacted the hike, and establish a genuinely democratic process in consultation with students, faculty, and staff, for addressing the UPR’s decades-old fiscal crisis. There is an alternative proposal on the table for a need-based sliding-scale tuition, which has historically been the demand of the Puerto Rican student movement.

We emphatically call on President García Padilla not to cede to groups manipulated by outside interests by announcing the reopening of classes, which would provoke a confrontation between students and the state riot squad of a magnitude not seen since 1981 strike. We also condemn the irresponsible attitude assumed by some sectors, including certain sectors of the press, of attributing acts of violence exclusively to members of the CUCA without previous investigation. Whatever happens henceforth will be the responsibility of President García Padilla, Governor Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, and Police Superintendant Pedro Toledo.