news
Millions across the United States are gathering to celebrate a world-historic event: the birth of a settler colony which stands today as a mighty global empire. From its inception, this fledgling colony emerged onto the world stage as a prison house of nations: genocidal conquest and the dispossession of the continent’s original peoples secured the land base necessary for a new society to be erected atop the ashes of the old. This process of permanent war to repress the capacity of indigenous nations to reclaim their historic territory and national sovereignty remains a foundational pillar of U.S. dominance in the 21st century. Before long, the United States of America surpassed the empires of Europe to become the world’s preeminent military-industrial superpower, enabled not by the superiority of its values and principles, but by a global campaign of pillage, piracy, and plunder financed by the fruits of enslaved African labor harvested over the course of nearly three centuries.
Newark, New Jersey, is home to more than 30,000 Puerto Ricans who live alongside Black, Portuguese, Haitian, Brazilian, and other Latin American communities. Puerto Ricans arrived in Newark in the 1950s, and today Newark remains home to many immigrants who have been similarly displaced by colonization. In Newark, these communities have struggled together for decades, fighting against city systems that have often failed us. In the face of antiblackness and police violence, Newark has stood together and radically transformed the city. That unity is called on yet again, at a critical moment of performative governance, the growing threat of gentrification, […]
The Diaspora Pa’lante Collective denounces in the strongest terms the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on the Islamic Republic of Iran, battling yet another attempt by imperialism to sow chaos and instability toward the collapse of the Iranian state. Such an outcome would eliminate a key pillar of the regional resistance to Zionist expansionism, and return the nation to a position of obedience and compliance within the U.S.-led international system. Far from securing the liberation of a people, its capture by means of imperialist subversion would constitute a resounding defeat for the Iranian masses and all anti-imperialist forces across the world. From […]
The Diaspora Pa’lante Collective unequivocally condemns U.S. airstrikes on the sovereign territory of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and upholds the right of the Venezuelan people to resist imperialist aggression. In the early hours of January 3, the government of the United States initiated attacks on the capital city of Caracas, as well as the states of Miranda, Aragua, and La Guaira, culminating in the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores. This unprovoked attack is an escalation of the months-long campaign of targeted airstrikes launched from the shores of our occupied archipelago across the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, which have claimed at least 115 lives. The actions of the United States must be repudiated and resisted by all progressive forces across the world, with a special duty belonging to those residing within the aggressor nation to defend the national sovereignty and […]
On Christmas Eve, 2025, the Office of Permits Management published the Environmental Compliance Determination for the proposed Esencia megaproject, giving the green light to corporations and state investors to seize and destroy more than 2,000 acres of land, disregarding the will of the people. The approval had been on hold as a result of various reports compiled by residents of Cabo Rojo and other municipalities across Puerto Rico revealing the severe and lasting impact this project would have on land, water, and life. Residents like Pedro Cardona Roig, better known as El Urbanista, stated that the findings do not adequately […]
By Isabel Guzzardo If the legacy of slavery shapes every facet of contemporary Caribbean society, tourism is one aspect where it is especially stark; tourism forms part of a racialized capitalist structure that maintains working-class Caribbean people serving foreigners, through the low-wage exploitation of their labor, both sexual and otherwise. In Puerto Rico, the violence of a visitor economy is being felt in new, devastating ways. In 2019, Laws 20 and 22 were consolidated as Act 60, called the Puerto Rico Incentive Codes. This policy lures foreigners to settle in Puerto Rico by offering 100% tax exemption on capital gains, […]
By Brianna Alvarado Ramos For more than two years, the United States government has used the armed forces of its Zionist settler colony, “Israel,” to carry out a brutal genocide in Palestine. As protests erupted across the world to visibly resist the ongoing genocide, Puerto Rico answered the call. As a colony since 1493, we understand the reality of having no control over your land and daily life. We have been held by the unrelenting grip of US colonial rule for more than 127 years. Forced displacement, sterilization, bombings, arrests, and assassinations are some of the overlapping features of colonial […]
This article is lightly edited from its original format, “In the Line of Fire: Occupied Puerto Rico and the U.S. War on Venezuela,” published by the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective in The Pen is My Machete, Vol. 1, Issue 3. In recent weeks, Puerto Rico has once again become a forward operating base for imperialist war games in the Caribbean. Off the southern coast, U.S. Navy sailors and Marines practice amphibious landings while a fleet of F-35 fighter jets, P-8 maritime surveillance aircraft, and MQ-9 reaper drones are deployed to one or more U.S. military installations occupying more than 78,000 acres […]