It was enjoyable to read New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito’s livid charge that the defection of sponsors from the Big Apple’s forthcoming Puerto Rican Day Parade – in response to her announcement that the parade would be honoring terrorist murderer Oscar López Rivera – had been “orchestrated” by those “ultra right-wing” types who want Puerto Rico to be a state, not a separate country. (Lopez’s cause, as we’ve previously noted, was and is Puerto Rican independence, Castro style.) Never mind that, as the New York Post pointed out, that “ultra right-wing” fringe of statehood supporters consists of about 70 percent of the island’s population. (Coincidentally, voters in Puerto Rico will have their next chance to vote on their island’s status on June 11, the same day their cousins in New York are marching down Fifth Avenue.) Mark-Viverito continued to insist that López is a “freedom fighter” and former “prisoner of war” and maintained her refusal to say anything sympathetic for those killed and wounded in acts of FALN terrorism.

Unsurprisingly, Mayor Bill de Blasio – the kind of far-left politician who is reflexively sympathetic to terrorists like López – still plans to march with the murderer.

Yet as Caroll Alvarado wrote in the Post, also on May 27, many Puerto Ricans in New York have decided to give the mayor the bird and join Jet Blue, Goya, and Univision in boycotting the parade. “I’m as Puerto Rican as it gets, but I can’t support the parade this year,” Angi Silva told Alvarado. “We should be focusing on helping our island, not honoring a criminal.” Jaida Selvenajnole agreed, noting that López “went to jail for a reason.” And Zoraida Vega, calling López a “criminal,” said: “He was in jail for 35 years. Why are we honoring him?…The mayor shouldn’t be going. It doesn’t look right.”

For Mark-Viverito aide Luis Miranda – who happens to be the father of Broadway darling Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton) – these critics of López are nothing but a bunch of “Trump/right-winger Latinos.” The New York Times,  in a May 29 story about the controversy, managed to find Nuyoricans (Puerto Ricans living in New York) on both sides of the issue.

Among those in the pro-López camp was Smokey Escobar, age 62, who provided this cryptic comment: “Why not? He earned it, in his way.” Then there was Ricardo Gabriel, whom the paper identified as a 36-year-old “doctoral candidate writing about Puerto Rican activists at the City University of New York.” Gabriel was described as seeing “a silver lining” in the decision of all those corporate sponsors to back out: “The parade has been dominated by corporate sponsors, and I felt like it wasn’t authentic anymore,” he said. “But now, with Goya and others pulling out, I think this is a step in the right direction.” In other words, better a murderer than a corporation. Terrorism may be bad, but capitalism is worse. (Apparently all those years of grad school have really paid off for Mr. Gabriel.) The Times also ran a picture of Puerto Rican artist Osvaldo Budet “hanging a banner in support of Oscar López Rivera at El Puente community center in Brooklyn,” an institution that (to judge by its website) has close and complicated ties to the New York City Board of Education, among other municipal agencies. We wondered how much New York taxpayer money goes every year to this organization that stands with a man who was responsible for the cold-blooded murder of New York taxpayers.