Puerto Rico Catholics support archbishop

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Catholics in Puerto Rico were rallying Wednesday around an archbishop who is apparently under pressure from the Vatican to resign for allegedly covering up for sexually abusive priests and other misdeeds.

Archbishop Roberto Gonzalez Nieves has not confirmed that he is being asked to step down as leader of the Catholic church in the U.S. island territory. However, he has asked parishioners to pray for him.

"I beg of you, please, do not send letters to the Holy See with expressions of solidarity. There is only one thing to do in situations like these: Pray," he wrote in a May 3 letter that was read to churchgoers last Sunday. "I know the last two weeks have been intense and painful for all of us for reasons you already know."

A rally of support scheduled for Wednesday evening coincided with Gonzalez's 14th anniversary at the Puerto Rican archdiocese. He had previously studied and worked in New York, Texas, Maryland and Massachusetts. The 62-year-old was born in New Jersey but moved to Puerto Rico at a young age.

Gonzalez reached out to supporters after local radio station Noti Uno recently published a letter that he allegedly wrote to Cardinal Marc Ouellet, head of the Vatican's powerful office for bishops. The six-page letter dated Feb. 20 shows Gonzales defending himself against accusations including that he protected priests accused of sexual abuse and meddled in local politics.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Wednesday the Holy See had no comment on the letter, the publication of which he called an "indiscretion."

The matter is significant because the Vatican has long been criticized by victims of sexually abusive priests for having failed to punish bishops who covered up for their abusive priests, moving them from parish to parish rather than reporting them to police.

Even more significant would be forcible removal of a bishop who refuses to resign on his own.

Retired Pope Benedict XVI on a handful of occasions forcibly removed bishops who resisted the Vatican's suggestions that they retire early. But none were believed to have been removed for having covered up for abusive priests.

At 62, Gonzalez is 13 years below the normal retirement age for bishops.

Gonzalez issued a brief statement following Noti Uno's report.

"Any communication or alleged communication between this servant and the Holy See that involves an internal and confidential matter, I'll only deal with the Holy See on it," he said. "I also invite you to pray, so the truth that can set us free be known in this matter."

In the Feb. 20 letter, Gonzalez allegedly wrote that he would not step down and that he was profoundly offended and hurt by the gravity of the accusations, requesting evidence to back them up. He noted that the accusations were made verbally during a Dec. 15 meeting with Monsignor Lorenzo Baldisseri, secretary of the Congregation for Bishops.

"It caused me great dismay, first, because they were false and distorted, and second, because it seemed that my guilt was prejudged," he said. "In fact, it's not clear if these accusations are final and if so, what investigation prompted them."

Gonzalez stated that in October 2011 he was the target of an apostolic visitation, a Vatican-mandated investigation that is still ongoing. Gonzalez did not explain the reason behind the visit, except to say he was temporarily prohibited from making religious appointments, and that he was warned he might not be notified about possible future visits.

Such apostolic visitations occur worldwide with some frequency for issues ranging from alleged sex abuse to financial irregularities.

Supporters of Gonzalez, including several nonprofit religious organizations on the island, say he is the target of a political campaign to oust him.

"We condemn the evil leak of confidential information, and even more, the anonymity that his accusers have maintained," said officials with the Puerto Rican Catholic Alliance for Life and Homeland.

Eduardo Rivero, president of Radio Isla, a local news station, condemned those who have rushed to judge Gonzalez. He also accused other local media of unfairly attacking him.

"I'm well aware of the risks of commenting on a religious matter as president of this medium," he said in a statement. "But ... I cannot remain silent ... You can be sure Radio Isla will always be on the side of those who are good for Puerto Rico."

Gonzalez noted that he was asked not to talk about the situation, but that he has reached out to several bishops and cardinals he considers friends so he can defend himself. He wrote that one of them is Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, where Gonzalez worked for 12 years before eventually moving to Puerto Rico.

He said he had also discussed the matter with three other U.S. cardinals, among them Cardinal Bernard Law, who resigned in disgrace as archbishop of Boston in 2002, when the clerical sex abuse scandal exploded in the U.S. Rather than being punished for covering up for the pedophiles on his staff, however, Law was given the plum job as archpriest of one of the Vatican's major basilicas in Rome.

Gonzalez said he also was told that after resigning, he should seek another position within the church.

"Given that the accusations are so serious, that if they were true, how is it possible for me to occupy another position?" he wrote.

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Associated Press writer Nicole Winfield contributed from Rome.

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More Haitians using Puerto Rico as migrant route

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Haitians have fled their troubled country for years, attempting to reach the U.S. or other Caribbean islands by heading north across the open sea or trekking across the island of Hispaniola to scratch out a living in the Dominican Republic.

But a newly popular route has caught officials in the Caribbean by surprise, one that is taking migrants to a piece of the U.S. much closer to home.

Hundreds of Haitian migrants have made their way to Puerto Rico in recent months. They've found that if they can make it to the U.S. territory without getting arrested, they can fly on to U.S. cities such as Miami, Boston or New York without having to show a passport, although some kind of identification, such as a driver's license, is needed.

Immigration authorities checking travelers before they leave Puerto Rico for the U.S. mainland sometimes find them carrying fake driver's licenses or other identification, but counterfeit documents are not always detected.

"As soon as you're in Puerto Rico, it's like you're in the United States," said Lolo Sterne, coordinator for Haiti's Office of Migration.

There are no official statistics on how many Haitians have successfully made their way illegally to Puerto Rico, or how many have traveled on to the U.S. mainland. But the trend worries officials in the U.S. and the Dominican Republic, with both countries reporting a jump in arrests of Puerto Rico-bound Haitians.

Migrants reportedly are paying smugglers $1,000-$1,500 for a trip to Puerto Rico, located less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of the island of Hispaniola, which is shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti. At the same time, Dominican officials have detained more than 400 Haitians bound for Puerto Rico in the past four months, compared with just a handful annually in previous years, said Victor Pilier, the Dominican Republic's director of naval intelligence.

"It's an excessive amount," said Pilier, who oversaw the capture of 78 Haitians headed to Puerto Rico in late April before sending them back home. "It's unusual."

U.S. officials in the past six months captured 352 Haitian migrants who were bound for Puerto Rico or were found on or near the island. Coast Guard statistics show that between October 2010 and September 2011, only 13 such migrants were found, and at most five Puerto Rico-bound Haitians were arrested in the two years before that.

"We're seeing another route they're trying to exploit," said Coast Guard Capt. Drew Pearson, who is based in Puerto Rico. "We hadn't seen these numbers of Haitians in my tenure here."

The odds of reaching the U.S. mainland directly from Haiti have dropped as the U.S. Coast Guard beefs up patrols by Hamilton class cutters, or what Haitian migrants simply refer to as "Amilton." Along with trying to sail directly to the U.S. mainland, Haitians in the past attempted to get to the United States through long-established smuggling networks on islands including the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos.

"Miami is no longer easy to reach and that's why Haitians are looking for other places," said Walky Severian, a boat builder in western Haiti who himself has taken three voyages, including one in 2008 that ended up in Cuba because of stormy weather before he was deported.

Pilier, the Dominican naval officer, said migrant smuggling to the U.S. territory has also become common because Dominican authorities have a harder time patrolling the nation's southeast coast, which is closer to Puerto Rico and where many smugglers have started launching from.

"We have a stronger presence in the north," he said. "The east is more vulnerable."

On top of that, a thriving underground economy in Puerto Rico that has long offered employment to Dominicans is now attracting Haitians.

For Haitians hoping to get to the U.S. mainland, the island of 3.7 million people has a black market that supplies fake passports, driver's licenses and stolen Social Security numbers. In addition, the island's governor in early March endorsed a proposal to allow immigrants living illegally in the U.S. territory to apply for a provisional driver's license. Pilier said that proposal has in fact drawn many migrants to Puerto Rico.

In March, U.S. federal officials rescued 71 Haitian migrants stranded on a cluster of islands just west of Puerto Rico, dehydrated and with bruises and scratches. The rescue came a week after 67 migrants from Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic were found in the same cluster of islands, including a Haitian woman who died.

On the black-sand beach in the fishing village of Leogane west of the Haitian capital, groups of men build wooden migrant boats, sawing and hacking away with machetes and picks. The 30-foot-long boats, whose frames resemble the rib cage of a small dinosaur, are purchased by smugglers for around $12,000 and then taken to northern Haiti to find passengers. One boat builder said he has four or five regular customers who buy the crafts.

Many Haitian farmers lost their crops during last year's hurricane season, causing food supplies to drop and prices to rise in a country of 10 million people that is still recovering from a devastating 2010 earthquake.

The number of Haitians who don't have enough to eat to maintain a healthy diet has grown from 1.9 million at the end of 2009 to 6.7 million today, said Myrta Kaulard, the country's director for the United Nations' World Food Program.

"Migration is a very important coping mechanism," she said.

Nasere Severian, a 48-year-old boat builder, himself took three unsuccessful trips to Miami in the 1990s when political instability in Haiti drove out-migration to a peak of 37,618 in 1992, according to U.S. Coast Guard data.

"Sometimes we build two or three boats a year," Severian said. "At the same time we can go a year without getting a customer."

Then Severian offered this: "If it were easier to reach Miami I would try to go there every day — even if that means I die."

In another major migration trend, Brazil also has become an increasingly common destination for Haitians since the 2010 quake. The South American nation initially opened its doors to Haitians seeking asylum, then later said it would issue 1,200 visas annually to allow them to work there for a five-year period. More than 4,000 Haitians have moved to Brazil, both legally and illegally, since the disaster.

Etienne Brutus, a 26-year-old unemployed father of three, was among the 78 Haitian migrants caught leaving the Dominican Republic last month, en route to Puerto Rico.

He spoke in Spanish to The Associated Press by telephone while sitting on a bus full of migrants traveling from the Dominican Republic's southeast coast to the capital of Santo Domingo for processing before being driven back to Haiti. Dominican authorities provided an AP reporter with the cell number of a naval officer, who then passed the phone to Brutus. But the signal was weak, making it impossible to obtain more than a few details about his situation.

Brutus said that when he approached smugglers about leaving Haiti, they told him they weren't traveling north, and that their only destination was east to Puerto Rico. He agreed to make the trip, and crossed into the Dominican Republic for the sea voyage.

"I don't have work, I don't have a room, I'm hungry," he said of his life in Haiti. "If I can get to Puerto Rico, amen. If I can get a room, a job and papers, I'm leaving."

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AP writers Danica Coto reported from San Juan, and Trenton Daniel reported from Port-au-Prince and Leogane, Haiti.

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Puerto Rico slowly warms to more gay rights

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The advance of gay rights across the United States is spreading into Puerto Rico, making the island a relatively gay-friendly outpost in a Caribbean region where sodomy laws and harassment of gays are still common.

The governing Popular Democratic Party is pushing a bill through the legislature that would outlaw discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation, a step taken by about half of U.S. states. Another bill would extend a domestic violence law to gay couples.

Soon after taking office in January, Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla signed an order extending health insurance coverage to the live-in partners of workers in his executive branch of government, regardless of gender.

And a popular former conservative governor, Pedro Rossello, surprised supporters and foes when he stated last month that he unequivocally supports gay marriage.

"We're in a period where it's important to talk about human rights," said Rossello, who 14 years ago signed a law as governor to prohibit the recognition of same-sex marriages held abroad.

"This is extraordinary," said Pedro Julio Serrano, a Puerto Rican gay activist. "We've reached a point of no return in Puerto Rico ... Equality is inevitable."

"The issues that we're discussing publicly now would have been unthinkable a couple decades ago," said Osvaldo Burgos, spokesman for the Broad Committee for the Search for Equality, which represents more than a dozen local human rights organizations.

Gay rights activists also say they are encouraged that the island's Justice Department is prosecuting its first hate crime case for the killing of a hairstylist who was set on fire.

The momentum has not all been one way, however. The island's Supreme Court last week narrowly upheld a law that bars same-sex couples from adopting children. Despite a string of legalizations in the U.S. over the past decade, adoptions by same-sex couples remain banned in many U.S. states as well.

And many Puerto Ricans remain uncomfortable with the changes. Church groups in February rallied an estimated 200,000 people against a move to include gay couples under domestic violence laws.

The spokesman for that march, Cesar Vazquez, said the state should not meddle with marriage and the family, and a prominent Puerto Rican pastor, Wanda Rolon, said children should not be taught at a young age that different types of families can exist, a proposal that Garcia's administration is considering.

"That is very dangerous," she said. "It's going to raise some doubts that can bring about confusion."

"What we need to protect in these times is the strengthening of marriage, the strengthening of families," Rolon said. "We will be a healthier society."

Resistance to rights for gays was even stronger in the 1970s, when gay activists protested the island's sodomy law, only to see legislators increase the penalty to 10 years in prison from three.

Many gays and lesbians lived in fear. A serial killer in the 1980s, nicknamed "The Angel of Bachelors," was linked to the killings of 27 gay men.

Public opinion remained largely unchanged until the early 2000s, when legislators passed a hate crime law and abolished the sodomy law. Another watershed moment occurred in November 2009, when police found the decapitated and partially burned body of 19-year-old college student Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, known for his work with organizations advocating HIV prevention and gay rights.

Soon after, popular Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin announced he was gay, saying he couldn't remain silent amid such hate, and legislators began considering gay rights bills. Last year, Puerto Rican featherweight boxer Orlando Cruz apparently became the first professional boxer to come out as openly homosexual while still competing.

"Puerto Rico at last recognized that homophobia was a social evil that had to be fought," said Serrano, spokesman for the U.S.-based National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "After that, things began to change quickly."

Many other islands in the Caribbean remain deeply hostile to homosexuality.

Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana and Grenada still uphold sodomy laws, and many gay people live in fear of exposure and violence. Those fears are not unjustified: Masked gunmen broke into a vacation cottage in St. Lucia in March 2011 and beat three gay U.S. tourists. Two of five suspects were arrested. A year earlier in Jamaica, police found the body of a 26-year-old gay rights activist who had been stabbed to death.

Last year, authorities in Dominica hauled a gay couple off a cruise ship and charged them with indecent exposure. Angry protesters have met gay cruise ships in Jamaica.

Meanwhile, a large gay cruise arrived in Puerto Rico recently and caused not even a ripple in the media.

"(Puerto Rico) has long had a reputation for being one of the friendliest places in the Caribbean," said LoAnn Halden, spokeswoman of the Florida-based International Gay & Lesbian Travel Association.

The court ruling on gay marriage already has caused some backlash in favor of further gay rights.

"What they did was barbaric," said Eduardo Bhatia, president of the island's Senate and member of the governor's party, saying that children of gay couples should have equal rights.

Carmen Milagros Velez, a medical sciences professor at the University of Puerto Rico and the mother of the 12-year-old girl at the center of the adoption case, said the Supreme Court should reconsider its decision.

"We are a family like any other, with the same challenges, probably even more challenges because we have fewer rights," she said.

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Puerto Rico airport privatization deal lifts off

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Puerto Rico's governor on Tuesday approved turning over the operations of Puerto Rico's largest airport to a private company as part of an estimated $2.6 billion deal that began under his predecessor and has been fiercely protested.

Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla said that while he would have managed things differently, the U.S. territory's government already had committed to the deal.

"Puerto Rico gave its word and we must be firm and transparent in honoring it," he said in an announcement hours before the deal would have expired, with dozens of protesters gathered outside Garcia's office pledging civil disobedience in upcoming weeks.

Garcia had faced pressure from unions and legislators from his own party who have criticized the proposed 40-year contract with Aerostar Airport Holdings, saying it will lead to lost jobs, reduced wages and potentially higher costs for passengers.

Garcia, however, said the deal needed to be signed because the island's Port Authority has to pay a $600 million debt Wednesday and a $340 million debt in June.

"Right now, the Port Authority has zero dollars to invest in this airport," he said. "As everyone who has visited the airport knows, its infrastructure has to be improved greatly and quickly."

It is the second U.S. airport to sign a deal under the Federal Aviation Administration's pilot privatization program, which was approved in 1996 and aims to allow states or local governments to tap into private funds.

The FAA informed Puerto Rico's government late Monday that it had approved the lease deal "subject to certain conditions," Port Authority Director Victor Suarez said.

Among the requirements is that the Port Authority cannot use airport revenue from other regional airports to compensate Aerostar. It also must submit an annual performance report on its regional airports as well as a transition plan on the 35th year of the agreement.

The FAA said the Port Authority has collected nearly $26 million in passenger facility charges, but the money has not been used for projects that were approved to use those funds. The FAA added that it is unclear whether the unaccounted funds were used for allowable airport purposes, and said that under the deal the Port Authority must submit an audit of that account.

Aerostar is a joint venture of Highstar Capital and Grupo Aeroportuario del Sureste, which operates Mexican airports at Cancun and eight other locations in southeastern Mexico.

Under the deal, Aerostar would make an initial payment to Puerto Rico's government of $615 million, through $350 million in investment-grade bonds and $265 million in equity. It would make additional payments of $2.5 million annually for the next five years. It would then pay 5 percent of airport revenues for 25 years and 10 percent for the remaining decade of the contract.

Port Authority union employees and their allies protested the deal for months, fearing the loss of stable government jobs. But Garcia said they should support it.

"If this deal wouldn't have gone through, it's important for you to know that there would be no money to pay your salary," he said. "There would be no money to honor your retirement."

Aerostar has pledged to retain an undetermined number of current employees, the FAA said in its decision.

Aerostar has said it plans to invest $250 million in the next four years on improvements including centralizing check-ins and adding 35,000 square feet (3,250 square meters) of retail area. It plans to spend a total of $1.4 billion on capital improvements over the next 40 years and set aside $6 million in an escrow account to reward airlines that increase their service in the first three years of the agreement.

Port Authority spokesman Juan Rivera said the island's airport gets about 8.5 million passengers a year and is served by 20 airlines that make more than 150 flights daily. The government has struggled to boost passenger traffic, expand and modernize the airport and make improvements to terminals and taxi ways and runways.

The Port Authority is nearly $1 billion in debt, and officials have said they would use the new revenue to renovate the island's regional airports and its cruise ship piers.

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