How Our Revolution Burned Our Own People
Puerto Rican revolutionary counts the damage of armed struggle, ICE raids, and “Zombie Island” drugs—and hands the mic to Gen X, Y, and Z Boricuas to build something new.
In collaboration with Anonymous Media Group and The Dirty Dozen Dispatch, we continue our Seeds of Fire series with a special report exposing how poverty, disaster, and digital systems are exploited in Puerto Rico.
This is not just an old man’s confession. It is a report to, and for, the generations that inherited the wreckage. Gen X, Y, and Z Boricuas did not grow up in an abstract “colony.” They grew up watching raids on neighbors, watching their parents juggle three hustles, watching fentanyl and xylazine turn whole blocks into something that mainland media now jokes about as “zombie islands.”
I was one of the people who helped build the myth that armed struggle and hard-line party politics would save us. In the 1970s, as a cadre in the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, close to the PIP, and orbiting underground formations like FALN, I believed we were the sharp edge of history. We studied theory, we marched, we organized, and we told ourselves that any sacrifice was justified because “the people” would be free.
What I did not see clearly then was who was paying the price. It was not the leaders giving speeches in New York or San Juan, or the intellectuals writing manifestos. It was the single mother whose son got caught between informants and hot-headed young militants. It was the worker black-listed for attending the wrong meeting. It was the cousin who disappeared into prison while the rest of us argued over lines in a document. Those scars never went away; they just moved into the next generation.
I am writing this now because I have to count that damage honestly. I cannot ask younger Boricuas to trust my investigations today if I hide the role I played yesterday. Seeds of Fire, for me, is not just a franchise name; it is a reminder that the same fire that warms can also burn your own people if you are not careful whose house you set alight.
Truth to Power: Why Our Generations Are Anti-ICE
You do not have to lecture Gen X, Y, or Z Puerto Ricans about ICE. They have watched friends and relatives taken from homes in the middle of the night. They have seen “papers, please” moments in airports that are technically part of the United States. They have lived their entire lives inside a legal gray zone where you carry a blue passport but your homeland is treated as a disposable asset.
When they say they are Anti-ICE, they are not repeating a party slogan. They are talking about the time a tio vanished into a detention center, the time a cousin was pressured into signing something he did not understand, the way raids rip through mixed-status families and leave everyone looking over their shoulder. They are also talking about a long memory: the same government that lectures them about “law and order” has used those laws to police their bodies and their borders while ignoring the laws that should have protected their homes, their wages, and their water.
We stay in our lane. Our lane is truth, evidence, and lived experience. I am not asking anyone to sign up for an ideology; I am asking them to look at the pattern. Who gets searched. Who gets caged. Who gets second chances. Who gets written off as disposable. That pattern is what makes an entire generation Anti-ICE, whether they use that exact phrase or not.
🔒 The rest of this Special Report walks through the receipts, naming the contracts, agencies, and patterns we found — and how you can use that information to protect your family and your barrio. This section is for paid supporters who keep The Vault Investigates and TruthDrop independent.
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