The politics and passions of Chicago’s Puerto Rican community on the Northwest Side played out in a raucous hearing Wednesday held by a state panel examining possible misuse of poverty funds at Clemente High School.
Tension during a special Illinois House committee’s first hearing peaked when a witness, describing himself as a former member of a pro-Puerto Rican independence movement, testified that movement leaders took control of the Clemente High School local school council in the early 1990s.
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Then, he contended, acting on orders from that political group, the school council used state poverty money in an elaborate invoicing scheme to bankroll the political cause and reward sympathetic community groups and community residents.
Rafael Marrero’s testimony, given with two bodyguards near him and 150 audience members listening, capped an extraordinary day in which legislators injected some politics of their own about whether the state funds for the poorest schoolchildren need major restrictions or even reductions.
Marrero’s comments were quickly disputed by some community leaders and politicians.
In an odd twist, more than 20 students from the Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican Alternative High School took the morning off to attend the hearings. One teacher from the non-profit school described the students’ presence at the Thompson Center as an “educational field trip.”
Also observing were 21 armed state troopers, who lined the state building’s auditorium and removed 10 protesters who interrupted Marrero’s testimony.
Earlier in the day, Jose Rodriguez, who was principal at Clemente from April 1990 to March 1991 and is now the Chicago School Reform Board of Trustees’ Region 2 director, gave his perspective on politics at the school. He said that Jose Lopez, director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, “informed me that he encouraged the LSC to vote for me (for principal).”
But Rodriguez said he later quit partly because he wanted to use the state poverty funds for classroom expenses and the school council wanted to use them “to finance community organizations.”
In one instance, the school council spent the poverty funds, called state Chapter 1 money, to support a legal clinic for students who supposedly had been arrested unjustly, Rodriguez said.
Marrero worked at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center from 1989 to 1994 as a teacher’s assistant and then in a teaching job in the Albizu Campos Alternative High School at the center.
In an interview, Lopez said that he never had a close relationship with Marrero, calling him a “master of deceit.”
“This was an orchestrated kangaroo court,” Lopez said, after Marrero concluded his testimony.
He also denied influencing the selection of Rodriguez as principal and manipulating the school council.
Marrero’s statements to the committee alleged an arrangement between the Clemente school council and people sympathetic to the FALN, a political movement seeking the independence of the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. FALN, which comes from the Spanish translation of Armed Forces of National Liberation, has been dormant in recent years.
Thirteen FALN members, including 10 Chicagoans, who advocated armed violence to make Puerto Rico independent, have been serving sentences since the early 1980s for convictions ranging from seditious conspiracy to armed robbery.
Marrero claimed another group, the MLN, controlled the Clemente school council with people who were members or sympathizers of the group, and directed the school council to spend the discretionary state poverty money to bring activists, musicians and performers to Chicago. Marrero identified the MLN, or the Movement of National Liberation, as an adjunct to the FALN–a claim that others dispute.
The visitors performed for students at Clemente and later performed outside of the school at fundraising dinners for the political movement, Marrero told the committee.
The committee’s records identified 38 performers and consultants allegedly hired with the state poverty funds for a total of about $66,000, including $800 to Marrero.
Under an invoicing scheme, Marrero told the committee, the school council and the MLN used an organization called Centro Cultural Cimarron to bill the school for the performers’ visits, usually for less than $5,000, the maximum amount for which a school council can award a contract without an audit by the Chicago school board.
And he claimed that the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, at 1671 N. Claremont Ave., was the “umbrella organization” for the MLN’s activities and groups like Cimarron. He named Lopez, the center’s director, as the “first secretary” of the MLN.
Seated front and center in the spectators’ gallery, Lopez occasionally shook his head in disbelief at Marrero’s testimony.
Later, in interviews, Lopez vehemently denied Marrero’s portrayal of him, saying he no longer was involved with the MLN, which he described as a small, non-violent group supporting Puerto Rican independence. Lopez, who is no relation to the committee’s chairman, state Rep. Edgar Lopez (D-Chicago), disputed that his cultural center was involved with MLN activities and the Clemente school council.
“The fact that the MLN tried to infiltrate the council is a lie. It’s a lie!” Jose Lopez said. “The MLN is a group in support of the independence of Puerto Rico. I am not a member of the MLN, but I believe in Puerto Rico’s independence.”
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The Clemente controversy is playing out as Congress debates whether to allow Puerto Ricans to vote on whether to remain a commonwealth, gain statehood or become an independent country. Rep. Edgar Lopez has supported statehood–a stance now shared by Marrero.
In unrelated proceedings, Marrero has emerged as a central figure in the federal prosecution of Jose Solis, a professor in Puerto Rico who formerly taught at DePaul University and who is charged in a 1992 bombing. A federal affidavit has named Marrero as “a co-conspirator” in the bombing, but he has not been charged.
Also, a $5 million civil lawsuit has been filed by Marrero against Banco Popular, a Puerto Rican bank in Chicago. Marrero alleged he was fired because his employer received complaints that Marrero was cooperating with the FBI in the Solis case.