Shots at the university

It began as a routine, if tense, campus security decision, and ended in gunfire that rearranged Puerto Rican politics for the rest of the decade.

On October 23, 1935, officials of the University of Puerto Rico's Río Piedras campus, anticipating possible disturbances, asked Governor Blanton Winship for armed police on campus. The U.S.-appointed police chief, Colonel Elisha Francis "E. Francis" Riggs, commanded the operation.

The next day, October 24, police stopped a car driven by Ramón S. Pagán, secretary of the Nationalist Party, carrying fellow nationalists Pedro Quiñones and Eduardo Rodríguez. None of them was armed. As officers escorted the vehicle toward the police station, they surrounded the car and opened fire.

The shooting killed Pagán, Quiñones, and Rodríguez, along with a passerby, José Santiago Barea, who was simply approaching the car when the shots began. A police officer was wounded in the exchange. Four members and sympathizers of the Nationalist Party died in total, an event that came to be known as the Río Piedras massacre.

Retaliation came four months later. On February 23, 1936, nationalists Hiram Rosado and Elías Beauchamp shot and killed Colonel Riggs in San Juan, holding him directly responsible for the campus shooting. Both men were then killed by police while in custody at San Juan headquarters, before either reached trial.

Nationalist Party president Pedro Albizu Campos publicly called Rosado and Beauchamp heroes, and was arrested and tried for instigating the murder. A first jury of seven Puerto Ricans and two Americans failed to convict him; the judge then empaneled a second jury of ten Americans and two Puerto Ricans, which found him guilty. On July 31, 1936, Albizu Campos and several other nationalists, including Juan Antonio Corretjer and Clemente Soto Vélez, were convicted in connection with Riggs's murder and sentenced to six to ten years in a federal prison on the mainland.

Sources: Masacre de Río Piedras; Historia de Puerto Rico. Freeze 2026-08-22.