The hijacking of the Puerto Rican Day Parade began when New York’s radical leftist Attorney General purged its board of directors. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had promised during his campaign that Al Sharpton would have “an annex in Albany for the first time in the history of this state.”
When Schneiderman announced the results of his investigation, standing by his side was City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito. Mark-Viverito had called for the Schneiderman “investigation” and its results predictably gave her and her radical allies control over the parade.
Her handpicked board took over and Melissa Mark-Viverito became one of its grand marshalls, along with her close ally, Red Bill de Blasio.
Melissa Mark-Viverito is a class warrior who owns $1.5 million in land back in Puerto Rico. She is a top public official in one of the biggest cities in the United States and also a Puerto Rican separatist who refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
The retooled Puerto Rican Day Parade honored FALN terrorist leader Oscar Lopez Rivera and alcoholic separatist poet Julia de Burgos who served as a top official in the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party before dying of cirrhosis of the liver
The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party was responsible for numerous acts of violence including the attempted assassination of President Truman and an armed attack on Congress. (The surviving perpetrators of both attacks were pardoned by Jimmy Carter.) The latter terrorist attack had been carried out in the name of “our apostle of independence, Don Pedro Albizu y Campos.”
Campos returned the favor by calling the terrorist attack on Congress an act of “sublime heroism”.
PRNP leader Pedro Albizu Campos served on the National Committee of the International Labor Defense which had been set up as part of the Comintern’s International Red Aid network and Communist literature had been found in the apartment of one of the terrorists.