Rapper Narrates Mounting Puerto Rico Crisis

Drawing on influences as disparate as Mercedes Sosa and Eminem, René Pérez Joglar, the MC of Puerto Rican alternative hiphop band Calle 13, has suddenly emerged as a central figure in that colonial island-nation's increasingly contentious political scene. Using the unlikely setting of MTV Latin America's award show, held in Las Vegas Mandalay Bay Hotel last Thursday, Pérez made a series of statements that crystallized several tendencies of the new Latin American Left with prop black-and-white T-shirts, and most stridently, with remarks directed at Puerto Rico's current rightist governor, Luis Fortuño.

"Latin America is not complete without Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rico is not free," Pérez said during an interlude before introducing two presenters at the awards show. "Today, October 15, the Puerto Rican people marched against unemployment, because the governor laid them off and the governor of Puerto Rico is a son of a whore..."

Pérez was referring to a massive General Strike held last Thursday to protest the latest round of layoffs of government workers enacted by the governor in late September, one that eliminated about 17,000 jobs (4,000 were laid off in June), ostensibly to balance the budget. With an official unemployment rate of 15.8%, and an economy that depends on high government employment, these layoffs have struck a deep chord of resentment in Puerto Rican society.

The week after the announcement, during a press conference about the development of an eastern port near an area abandoned by the departure of a US Military base at Roosevelt Roads, the governor had to duck an egg thrown at him by a 44-year-old unemployed resident of a nearby town. The "huevaso" or "egg-blow" became a major news story that embodied the frustration of many islanders.

The same week, it was announced that several books, such as Luis Rafael González's "El Entierro de Corijo" (The Burial of Cortijo) and Carlos Fuentes's "Aura" were banned from public school libraries because they contained "inappropriate language" for grammar and high school students. This action, which spurred a protest in New York last week by local poets and artists, appears to be a manifestation of a Republican platform that has been let loose on Puerto Rico because of the election of Fortuño, a board member of the Republican National Hispanic Association, which includes party figures such as "macaca" slurrer and ex-Virginia governor George Allen, Senators Orrin Hatch and John Ensign, RNC chairman Michael Steele, Juan Carlos Benítez, K-Street lobbyist tied to the Abramoff scandal, and the insidious Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform.

As a result of René Pérez' verbal attack, Calle 13's upcoming Halloween show, scheduled to take place in the Choliseo, the Madison Square Garden of Puerto Rico, has been cancelled by Republican mayor Jorge Santini. Pérez, who also wore t-shirts lauding Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and criticizing Colombian president Álvaro Uribe for allowing US military bases in his country. The Colombian government has also issued statements stating their "indignance" about Pérez's "slanderous" statements and future Calle 13 concerts in Colombia are in doubt.

Predictably, Pérez's Republican victims (the party they belong to, the Progressive National Party, bases its platform on a desire for U.S. statehood, and is currently more strongly affiliated with the U.S. Republican party than in the past) have resorted to denouncing Pérez's vulgarity. They read his "son of a whore" comment as a literal attack on Puerto Rican women, ignoring the fact that Pérez's biggest supporter is his mother, whom he lionizes in the recent documentary "Sín Mapa," a kind of neo-Marxist travelogue of Latin American in which Pérez tries (unsuccessfully) to shed himself of material success. They do this of course, to disguise the obscenity of a balance the budget economic policy that causes massive unemployment during a world-wide economic crisis.

Pérez's almost unprecedented pose as a pop star intent on slinging his "poetry of filth" in the hopes of some kind of Rabelaisian stirring of Latin America's severely exploited underclass is symbolic of something very deep stirring in the Puerto Rican soul. The island was rocked again over the weekend when a drug shootout in the small town of Toa Baja killed 8 people and injured 20. While there is new talk in Congress over once again foisting a dubious plebiscite on the island to "decide" its fate as a "nation," there may be a more tectonic shift in store for the would-be 51st state, one perhaps presaged by Pérez's lyrics from the song "Cabe-C-O"

There are no rules here

No oaths here

No government

No colonels

No sergeants

Add a hot pepper to your anger

This movement won't be cancelled

This is for your legs to rebel

This is for your ears to fly

This is for time to freeze over