Ponce massacre
1937 CE.
Shown on the map at 18.009°, -66.614°.
The Ponce massacre took place on Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937, in Ponce, Puerto Rico, when a peaceful civilian march turned into a police shooting in which 17 civilians, one policeman and one National Guardsman were killed, and more than 200 civilians wounded. None of the civilians were armed and most of the dead were reportedly shot in their backs. The march had been organized by the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party to commemorate the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico by the governing Spanish National Assembly in 1873, and to protest the U.S. government's imprisonment of the Party's leader, Pedro Albizu Campos, on sedition charges. An investigation led by the American Civil Liberties Union put the blame for the massacre squarely on the U.S.-appointed governor of Puerto Rico, Blanton Winship. Further criticism by members of the U.S. Congress led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to remove Winship as governor in 1939. Governor Winship was never prosecuted for the massacre and no one under his chain of command – including the police who took part in the event, and admitted to the mass shooting – were prosecuted or reprimanded. The Ponce massacre remains the largest massacre in U.S.
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