REPORT EXPOSES NAVY TERRORISM AGAINST PUERTO RICANS

[Guaili-Cayniabon]

[i]
The Puerto Rican daily El Nuevo Día has obtained a copy of a sworn declaration by FBI special agent Richard Stephen Hahn charging that a Navy officer was responsible for at least one terrorist act in 1980 against opponents of the Navy presence on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. According to Hahn’s declaration, made on January 25, 1980, Lt. Alex Joseph Delazerda, the public relations officer for Vieques at the Navy’s nearby Roosevelt Roads base, provided the explosives used in a bombing of Puerto Rico Bar Association offices in Miramar on January 7 that year. Hahn says Delazerda also planned to bomb Vieques Air Link, the Vieques Fishers Association headquarters and a Legal Services office.

The fishers have been longtime leaders in the movement against the Navy, while the Bar Association and Legal Services had provided attorneys for protesters. Delazerda told Hahn that Vieques Air Link was a “Cuban Air Taxi Service,” a “Ho Chi Minh Trail” that brought “infiltrators” to Vieques.

In March, a Vieques couple charged that Delazerda--who was arrested in 1980 for illegal possession of firearms—had also planned to assassinate the then-mayor of Vieques. El Nuevo Día says that Hahn’s declaration is “circulating” through the U.S. Congress and is being “studied by various Congress members.”