The Nation : Rally Seeks Puerto Rico Independence

Thousands of pro-independence demonstrators waving Puerto Rican flags and chanting “Yankee go home” marched through San Juan during congressional hearings on the island’s political relationship with the United States. Organizers said 80,000 people took part in the march and rally. “This is an outcry of the people against colonialism in Puerto Rico,” Independence Party leader Ruben Berrios Martinez told the crowd. Sens. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), James A. McClure (R-Ida.) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) are listening to pro-independence, pro-statehood and pro-autonomy commonwealth testimony on the three options to be put before voters in a 1991 plebiscite. Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island 1,000 miles south of Miami, has been a commonwealth since 1952.