Three years ago, Puerto Rico experienced its own Watergate when televised hearings by the Puerto Rican Senate revealed an elaborate cover-up by island and U.S. officials of the 1978 deaths of two young dissidents atop Cerro Maravilla, a mountain outside Ponce. In this well-crafted account, Nelson, a freelance journalist, shows how the statements of Puerto Rico's pro-statehood administrationsthat ``terrorists'' Carlos Soto and Arnaldo Rosado were killed by police acting in self-defensewas rubber-stamped by the U.S. Justice Department but gradually crumbled as Puerto Rican reporters and the later hearings produced evidence that the victims, active in the independence movement, were murdered. Nelson views the complex scandal against the turbulent history of relations between the U.S. and Puerto Rico, where the ``halfway'' status of commonwealth has sparked political violence for three decades. Photos not seen by PW. (April 23)
Library Journal
In 1978 two young men were ambushed and killed by Puerto Rican police as they attempted to sabotage radio trans mitters atop a mountain called Cerro Maravilla. Police claimed a shoot-out and closed the case, but an investiga tion carried out by civil rights workers and journalists, of whome Nelson was one, exploded into a major scandal and cover-up involving the governor and even the U.S. Department of Justice. How witnesses were coerced into lying under oath is described against a fasci nating back-drop of political violence related Puerto Rico's ambiguous sta tusneither a state, nor an indepen dent entity, nor autonomous with a commonwealth. As exciting as a detec tive story, this book belongs in general, as well as Latin American, collec tions. Louise Leonard, Univ. of Flori da Lib., Gainesville