Ponce massacre | |
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Outbreak of the Ponce Massacre | |
Location | Ponce, Puerto Rico |
Coordinates | 18°00′33.7″N 66°36′49.0″W / 18.009361°N 66.613611°W |
Date | 21 March 1937[1] 3:15 pm[2] (EST) |
Target | Supporters of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party |
Attack type | Massacre |
Weapons | Thompson submachine guns, tear gas bombs, machine guns, rifles, pistols[3] |
Deaths | 17 civilians and two police officers (from friendly fire) |
Injured | over 200 civilians wounded[4] |
Perpetrators | Governor Blanton Winship via the Puerto Rico Insular Police[5] |
Part of a series on the |
Puerto Rican Nationalist Party |
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The Ponce massacre was an event that took place on Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937, in Ponce, Puerto Rico, when a peaceful civilian march turned into a police shooting in which 17 civilians and two policemen were killed,[6] and more than 200 civilians wounded. None of the civilians were armed and most of the dead were reportedly shot in their backs.[7] The march had been organized by the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party to commemorate the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico by the governing Spanish National Assembly in 1873,[8] and to protest the U.S. government's imprisonment of the Party's leader, Pedro Albizu Campos, on sedition charges.[9]
An investigation led by the United States Commission on Civil Rights put the blame for the massacre squarely on the U.S.-appointed governor of Puerto Rico, Blanton Winship.[10][11] Further criticism by members of the U.S. Congress led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to remove Winship as governor in 1939.[12]
Governor Winship was never prosecuted for the massacre and no one under his chain of command – including the police who took part in the event, and admitted to the mass shooting – was prosecuted or reprimanded.[13]
The Ponce massacre remains the largest massacre in US imperial history in Puerto Rico.[11] It has been the source of many articles, books, paintings, films, and theatrical works.
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