SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, January 24th 2011 (NCM) - In an effort to isolate the up to now unstoppable student uprising, the National police admit using "professional" torture techniques as they arrest strikers while voices loyal to the Government promote the idea that State is invincible and that rights such as the presumption of innocence are nothing more than the paternalistic influence of the left.

In this way, the conflict at the University of Puerto Rico, which started with the opposition to an increase in tuition, has become a battle to determine the future of democracy in this nation in the Caribbean northeast, equidistant between Guantanamo and Caracas.

The over one hundred arrests this past week do not seem to have frightened the students, who this past weekend carried out trainings with new volunteers for peaceful civil disobedience as they increase their contact with diverse political, social and religious sectors in order to broaden their base of support. They have achieved spectacular breakthroughs in getting through the information blackout, such as the protests in New York and the disruption of a presentation by the Governor, Luis Fortuño, at the University of Valladolid Law School in Spain.

Occasionally, the unequal battle has grotesque scenes, such as when the anti riot police , known as the "shock force" with the horses of the mounted unit, who's riders in armor cannot always control, or the displays of brute force when arresting the civil disobedient who sit at the entrance of the UPR Rio Piedras campus. These latest incidents led reporters to question Colonel Leovigildo Vasquez, operations commander who explained that the members of these units carry themselves "professionally” because they have received trainings in which they learn "pressure points to weaken the body by means of "pain" felt by the young people being arrested.

In addition, after the arrests, those detained are transported to precincts located in areas close to illicit drug spots where gang leaders let their displeasure about these operations altering the ambiance for their illicit business be known.

The explanation about police professionalism given by Colonel Vasquez and the transporting of those detained to precincts with potentially hostile environment coincide with the descriptions in article 303 of the Penal Code, which describes the crime of torture as "to cause intentionally grave pain or suffering, be it physical or mental, to a person which the accused has under their custody and control"

But such grotesque reality shades pale in light of statements made  by the former president of the UPR and a voice of the conservative sectors of the autonomist opposition, Jose Saldana, who bypassed the origins of the presumption of innocence in western constitutions that date back  to the canon law reform of the  XII and XIII century. Diaz Saldana opted to denounce an "ideological pro Independence liberal leftist tendency" tolerated in the UPR by the then autonomist highest leader Luis Munoz Marin, who has left as inheritance the "paternalism" that influences the judgeship ”that overwhelmingly shows a predisposition to grant the benefit of the doubt to the accused.

Such statements do not seem to impact the spirit of sectors of the teaching staff which prefer the restriction of civil liberties to the danger gains of leftists groups and the student body preference for "participative democracy" which they utilize systematically to make decisions. This attitude contrasts sharply with that of professors that oppose the government’s decision of prohibiting the acceptance of new students for careers in Hispanic studies.

At the same time, the role that the labor movement will ultimately play is still to be seen, many of whose leaders supported new tax hikes in the past and were unable to forge a lasting resistance during the massive layoffs ordered by Fortuño, as well as what will some sectors of the left which negotiated space amongst the autonomists and even the pro statehood in power do.

It is a contradictory landscape and even amongst statehooders a wide breach has been created which has gained the unusual support of a candidacy of a medical doctor who proposes to resolve the conflict at the university by negotiating with the students and establishing free education at the state university to challenge Fortuño. At the same time pro administration legislators continue contact with student lobbyist in search of some formula that will bring to an end the conflict once and for all and reestablish the government contribution to the UPR the diminishment of which caused the fiscal deficit and has allowed to push the agenda of those who would rather have a smaller, more indebted and more expensive university.

Amongst autonomists something similar is taking place and Caguas powerful Mayor, William Miranda Torres, warned that the time has come for Government to make an "honorable departure" from its policy of eliminating the right to education at the university level making it a privileged, something he maintains is very wrong. The Mayor of the Valley of Turabo was accompanied by religious leaders who proclaimed that the students were a "gift from God", that they are opening up for Puerto Rico the "path of patience and hope" and that Christ ran with the students as they were being chased and beaten by the Shock Force.

Facing such complex picture, one of the nation's most prominent clinical psychologists, Jorge Nogales, sent a letter to the First Lady, Luce Vela, asking her to convince her husband that the "ideological battles that divide us should not be waged over the bodies of our young university students".  Nogales asked the Government to come up with a simple, pragmatic measure like in the seventies when violence was deactivated by simply pulling from the main campus the Reserve Officers Training Corp of the Army.