Under the leadership of Albizu Campos, the party abandoned the electoral process in favor of direct armed conflict as means to gain independence from the United States.

The Puerto Rican police arrested many Nationalist Party members under this law, some of whom were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

The last major armed event by the Nationalists occurred in 1954 at the US House of Representatives when four party members shot and wounded five Congressmen.

[3] After four hundred years of colonial domination under the Spanish Empire, Puerto Rico finally received its sovereignty in 1898 through a Carta de Autonomía (Charter of Autonomy).

[google.com] When the war ended, U.S. President McKinley appointed Charles Herbert Allen as the first civilian governor of Puerto Rico.

He ignored the appropriation requests of the Puerto Rican House of Delegates, refused to make any municipal, agricultural or small business loans, built roads at double the costs of preceding administrations, and left 85% of the school-age population without schools.

His administration re-directed tax revenues to no-bid contracts for U.S. businessmen, railroad subsidies for U.S.-owned sugar plantations, and high salaries for U.S. bureaucrats in the island government.

By 1930 the United Fruit Company owned over one million acres of land in Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico and Cuba.

Coll y Cuchí and some followers left to form the Nationalist Association of Puerto Rico in San Juan.

The Legislative Assembly appointed Alfonso Lastra Charriez as its emissary since he had French heritage and spoke the language fluently.

A funeral caravan organized by the Nationalist Association transferred the remains from San Juan to the town of Cabo Rojo, where his ashes were interred by his monument.

The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party maintained that, as a matter of international law, the Treaty of Paris following the Spanish–American War could not have empowered the Spanish to "give" to the US what was no longer theirs.

[7] Under Albizu Campos's leadership during the years of the Great Depression, the party became the largest independence movement in Puerto Rico.

The party staged some protests that developed into celebrated incidents because of police overreaction: The October 1935 Rio Piedras[13] and the Ponce massacres.

[14][15] After the Río Piedras massacre, in December 1935, Albizu Campos announced that the Nationalist Party would withdraw from electoral participation while the United States kept control.

[citation needed] Nationalist Party partisans were involved in a variety of dramatic and violent confrontations between 1930 and 1950: The point I am to make is that the Governor [Winship] himself through his military approach to things has helped keep Puerto Rico in an unnecessary state of turmoil.

[29] Soon afterward, two Nationalist partisans, among them Raimundo Díaz Pacheco, attempted to assassinate Robert Cooper, judge of the Federal Court in Puerto Rico.

[34] In the Jayuya Uprising, led by Nationalist leader Blanca Canales, a police station and post office were burned.

Various other shootouts took place throughout island – including those at Mayagüez, Naranjito, Arecibo, and Ponce, where Antonio Alicea, Jose Miguel Alicea, Francisco Campos (Albizu Campos's nephew), Osvaldo Perez Martinez and Ramon Pedrosa Rivera were arrested and accused of the murder of police corporal Aurelio Miranda during the revolt.

On March 1, 1954, Lolita Lebrón together with fellow Nationalists Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irvin Flores and Andrés Figueroa Cordero attacked the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.

[citation needed] In 2006 and in representation of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, Jose Castillo spoke before the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization and said that the Nationalist Party "had appeared in the past to denounce colonialism in Puerto Rico and hoped the Special Committee would show its commitment to the island's struggle for self-determination, so that it could join the United Nations in its own right ...

Vieques peace activists must be freed immediately, and the FBI's electronic surveillance and continued harassment of independence fighters must be stopped.