[8][9] The party was founded on 27 October 1946,[1] by Gilberto Concepción de Gracia (1909–1968), his colleague Fernando Milán Suárez and Antonio J.

The instructions were given under the domestic surveillance program known as COINTELPRO, which aimed at aggressively monitoring antiwar, leftist and other groups in the United States and disrupting them.

In the case of Puerto Rican independence groups, J. Edgar Hoover's 1961 memo refers to 'our efforts to disrupt their activities and compromise their effectiveness.

"I expect that this will alter somewhat the analysis of why independence hasn't made it,' said Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, director of the center at Hunter.

Freeh gave the first public acknowledgment of the federal government's Puerto Rican surveillance and offered a mea culpa.

[18][19] During the 1972 elections, the PIP showed the largest growth in its history while running a democratic socialist, pro-worker, pro-poor campaign.

In May 2009, the party submitted more than 100,000 signed petitions to the Puerto Rico's elections commission and regained legal status.

The government of Cuba also supports it, as well as the ex-president of Panama, Martín Torrijos, and a wide group of world-recognized writers and artists.

[32][33] On 26 January 2007, the Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez joined other figures such as Mario Benedetti, Ernesto Sábato, Thiago de Mello, Eduardo Galeano, Carlos Monsiváis, Pablo Armando Fernández, Jorge Enrique Adoum, Pablo Milanés, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Mayra Montero and Ana Lydia Vega, in supporting independence for Puerto Rico and joining the Latin American and Caribbean Congress in Solidarity with Puerto Rico's Independence, which approved a resolution favoring the island's right to assert its independence, as ratified unanimously by political parties hailing from 22 countries in November 2006.

[34] The Puerto Rican Independence Party has a overseas wing in the USA called Diáspora PIP, it is based in New York, Miami, Chicago, New Jersey, San Francisco, Portland, Connecticut and Seattle.

As reported in numerous media, the PIP's leadership and active members participated in anti-war protests and mobilization to resist the Iraq War and oppose the U.S. government's efforts to encourage Puerto Ricans to enlist in the U.S. Armed Forces.

The Washington Post wrote in August 2007 that "on this island with a long tradition of military service, pro-independence advocates are tapping the territory's growing anti-Iraq war sentiment to revitalize their cause.

As a result, 57 percent of Puerto Rico's 10th-, 11th- and 12th-graders, or their parents, have signed forms over the past year withholding contact information from the Pentagon.

It was written three years earlier, in 2004, but it still noted that "some groups like the Puerto Rico Bar Association and the Independence Party have registered strong protests against the deployments.

In an attempt to draw attention to Puerto Ricans' lack of elected representatives, even the usually pro-U.S. statehood party has raised concerns about the disproportionate body count suffered by islanders.

This is why the PNP and PPD believed the tax increase would exacerbate the problems[38][39] United States citizens residing in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico do not hold the right to vote in U.S. presidential elections.

The remaining political organization, the Popular Democratic Party, is less active in its opposition of this case of disfranchisement but has officially stated that it favors fixing the remaining "deficits of democracy" that the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations have publicly recognized in writing through Presidential Task Force Reports.