Puerto Rican Socialist Party - The 1980s

The 1980s

Nevertheless, the activity of the party lessened in the following years. In 1980, 5,224 votes were accounted for the PSP governor candidacy of Lausell Hernández, or 0.3 per cent of the total, while PIP votes accounted for 5.4 per cent. But PSP Senate candidate Mari Brás took more than 50,000 votes, and Gallisá, running again for the local House, obtained around 90,000. As with the 1976 PSP electoral participation, some claimed the 1980 votes were too few, while others argued the electoral experiences had to be seen as part of a long-run process of building a mass workers' party and that the overwhelming US propaganda, ideological control and political repression had to be taken into account.

In 1982 a new rift took place between the traditional nationalist-oriented leadership, led by Mari Brás and Gallisá, and a group of militants who claimed the leadership was not taking seriously the tasks of building a working class party and implementing the 1978 program. The debate was sparked by the resignation of Wilfredo Mattos Cintrón, member of the Political Commission, secretary of political education, and a leading figure in the drafting of the 1978 program as well as previous programs and theses. A fraction of the party denounced the leadership for concealing from the base a plan to give up the strategy of building a workers' party. Some of its members were journalist Héctor Meléndez Lugo, organizer Wilfredo López Montañez, and San Juan party secretary Marta E. Fernández. The group was defeated by a large majority loyal to Mari Brás and Gallisá and with rather nationalistic leanings. A part of the opposition fraction left the party that same year.

In their turn, Mari Brás and Gallisá did not deny they were giving up the creation of a workers' party. They said the priority should be to create a wide and pluralist national liberation movement, which they did not clearly define. The opposition group claimed that a working class party did not contradict a wide anticolonial front of alliances, and, in fact, the latter would be more probable if a workers' party existed and influenced the relation of forces on the island.

The 1982 split manifested a latent conflict between nationalism and socialism. Similar tensions had surfaced during the MPI stage, in a disagreement in 1970 between Mari Brás and another leader of the organization, Marxist journalist and novelist César Andreu Iglesias. In the 1970s Mattos Cintrón had written that within the PSP coexisted a "radicalized nationalist petite bourgeois" wing along with the socialist tendency, although for a previous phase this coexistence played a positive role.

Mattos Cintrón and the 1982 opposition argued that the absence of a strong left-wing in the island would weaken the cause for independence and other attempts of sovereignty for Puerto Rico. The national struggle, they said, grew only in close relation with the popular and working classes.