1969 Curaçao uprising
A protest rally during the strike turned violent, leading to widespread looting and destruction of buildings and vehicles in the central business district of Curaçao's capital, Willemstad.
It was followed by a renewal in Curaçaoan literature, much of which dealt with local social issues and sparked discussions about Curaçao's national identity.
This led to a segmentation of white, Protestant Curaçaoan society into landskinderen—those whose families had been in Curaçao for generations, and makamba, immigrants from Europe who had closer ties to the Netherlands.
[12] Although this system had its proponents, who pointed to the fact that managing its own foreign relations and national defense would be too costly for a small country like the Netherlands Antilles, many Antilleans saw it as a continuation of the area's subaltern colonial status.
[14] A government scholarship program allowed some Afro-Curaçaoans to attain social mobility but the racial hierarchy from the colonial era remained largely intact and blacks continued to face discrimination and were disproportionately affected by poverty.
[15] Although 90% of Curaçao's population was of African descent, the spoils of the economic prosperity that began in the 1920s benefited whites and recent immigrants much more than black native Curaçaoans.
For one, Antillean Werkspoor employees received lower wages than workers from the Netherlands or other Caribbean islands as the latter were compensated for working away from home.
On 29 May, as a moderate labor figure was about to announce a compromise and postpone a strike, Nita took that man's notes and read a declaration of his own.
While the CFW emphasized that this was merely an economic dispute, Papa Godett, the dock workers' leader and Vitó activist, advocated a political struggle in his speech to the strikers.
[37] Among the slogans the crowd chanted were "Pan y rekonosimiento" ('Bread and recognition'), "Ta kos di kapitalista, kibra nan numa" ('These are possessions of capitalists, just destroy them'), and "Tira piedra.
Once it became aware, the police moved to stop the rioting and called for assistance from the local volunteer militia and from Dutch troops stationed in Curaçao.
The police, with only sixty officers at the scene, were unable to halt the march and ended up enveloped by the demonstration, with car drivers attempting to hit them.
[45] Many of the buildings in this part of Willemstad were old and therefore vulnerable to fire while the compact nature of the central business district further hampered firefighting efforts.
[48] Workers broke into a radio station, forcing it to broadcast this demand; they argued that failed economic and social policies had led to the grievances and the uprising.
The riots led to 322 arrests, including the leaders Papa Godett and Amador Nita of the dock workers' union, and Stanley Brown, the editor of Vitó.
On 2 June all parties in the Parliament of the Netherlands Antilles, pressured by the Chamber of Commerce that feared further strikes and violence,[59] agreed to dissolve that body.
[63] While Peter Verton as well as William Averette Anderson and Russell Rowe Dynes characterize the events as a revolt, historian Gert Oostindie considers this term too broad.
[65] The uprising's leaders, Godett, Nita, and Brown, formed a new political party, the 30 May Labor and Liberation Front (Frente Obrero Liberashon 30 Di Mei, FOL), in June 1969.
The FOL campaigned on the populist, anti-colonial, and anti-Dutch messages voiced during the uprising, espousing black pride and a positive Antillean identity.
[67] In December, Ernesto Petronia of the Democratic Party became the Netherlands Antilles' first black Prime Minister and FOL formed part of the coalition government.
[69] On 1 June 1969, in The Hague, the seat of the Dutch government, between 300 and 500 people, including some Antillean students, marched in support of the uprising in Curaçao and clashed with police.
It insisted that national sovereignty would only be an option once it had "attained a reasonable level of economic development", as its Prime Minister Juancho Evertsz put it in 1975.
As a result of unions' involvement in Trinta di Mei and the December strikes, Curaçaoans had considerably more favorable views of labor leaders than of politicians, as a poll in August 1971 found.
In the following years, unions built their power and gained considerable wage increases for their members, forcing even the notoriously anti-union Texas Instruments to negotiate with them.
Although there has been no corresponding change in the island's business elite, upward social mobility increased considerably for well-educated Afro-Curaçaoans and led to improved conditions for the black middle class.
Vitó, the magazine that had played a large part in the build-up to the uprising, had long called for Papiamentu becoming Curaçao's official language once it became independent of the Netherlands.
[85] Days before the uprising, Stanley Bonofacio premiered Kondená na morto ("Sentenced to death"), a play about the justice system in the Netherlands Antilles.
Prior to Trinta di Mei, one's place in society was determined largely by race; afterward these hierarchies and classifications were put into question.
This led to debates about whether Afro-Curaçaoans were the only true Curaçaoans and to what extent Sephardic Jews and the Dutch, who had been present throughout Curaçao's colonial period, and more recent immigrants belonged.
More recently, civic values, rights of participation, and a common political knowledge are said to have become important issues in determining national identity.
