Tonight: COINTELPRO 101 in San Juan, PR

COINTELPRO (for Counter-Intelligence Program) is an acronym that has come to represent not only the formal FBI program of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, but also the entire repressive apparatus of and collusion between government agencies, local, state, and federal, to destroy movements for Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous self-determination and liberation, and to divide and disrupt progressive movements in general. The film combines rare historical footage with interviews of activists who were targets of that repression.

Scheduled Time: Thu, Nov 15 – 6:00pm – 7:45pm Building/Room: Puerto Rico Convention Center, 204

Emphasis will be placed on the resistance of the Puerto Rican independence movement to US colonialism, appropriate given the location of the ASA meeting in San Juan in light of the conference theme of “Dimensions of Empire and Resistance: Past, Present, and Future.”

Panelists will include:

— Lucy Rodriguez, who is a lifelong Independentista and a former Puerto Rican political prisoner.

— Akinyele Umoja, who is an Associate Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Georgia State University and discusses Cointelpro and the Black Liberation Movement.

— Claude Marks, is the director of the Freedom Archives, and former political prisoner.

The panel discussion will urge serious integration of this history into critical scholarship and raise the possibility of creating a movement to demand accountability and restitution, as well as considering the ways that counter-insurgency strategies and methods have continued and intensified. The struggle to free US Political Prisoners is also central to dismantling the US system of mass imprisonment.

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