Ideal Targe

"Ideal Target"

Thirty-five years ago the late Samuel Gompers picked a young Spanish-born Puerto Rican, Santiago Iglesias, to organize Puerto Rico for the American Federation of Labor. Today Santiago Iglesias at 64 is the Samuel Gompers of his island and the father of eleven children, eight of them girls named Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Justice, Peace, Light, Victory, America. Since 1933 Father Iglesias has been Puerto Rico's Resident Commissioner (member of Congress without a vote) in Washington. Last week at Mayaguez on the western shore of Puerto Rico the venerable Iglesias made a speech in his campaign for re-election as Resident Commissioner.

In the crowd below Commissioner Iglesias was one Domingo Santiago Crespo, 25, a sergeant in the "Cadets of the Republic," militant auxiliary of the Puerto Rican Nationalists. As he listened to Commissioner Iglesias urging the need for preserving "loving American institutions," Sergeant Crespo thought of his two colleagues who, last February, out of love for Puerto Rican independence, assassinated Colonel E. Francis Riggs, insular Chief of Police, and were shot dead themselves not long after being taken to the police station (TIME, March 2 et seq.). Sergeant Crespo also thought of his Leader, Pedro Albizu y Campos, now in jail for sedition, and his blood boiled.

With a dramatic gesture Commissioner Iglesias raised his arm, cried: "Keep intact the union with the United States!" At the same moment Sergeant Crespo drew a revolver and angrily fired--one, two, three, four, five times. Commissioner Iglesias reeled, sank to the platform. The crowd surged forward on Sergeant Crespo, but police saved him. In a Mayaguez hospital, whither he had been rushed, Santiago Iglesias' aged flesh was probed. Doctors found only one bullet hole, a flesh wound made by a slug that had struck his gesturing right arm. Sitting up, satisfied that the attempt on his life had been no more successful than two previous attempts made in the last 35 years. Oldster Iglesias boasted: "I am never armed. So I am an ideal target for assassins."

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