text: 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. Under Albizu Campos's leadership during the years of the Great Depression, the party became the largest independence movement in Puerto Rico.
  In the mid-1930s, there were disappointing electoral results and strong repression by the territorial police authorities. The party staged some protests that developed into celebrated incidents because of police overreaction: The October 1935 Rio Piedras and the Ponce massacres. In these, government forces fired on unarmed civilians. 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. Albizu Campos began to advocate direct, violent revolution.
  Nationalist Party during 1930–1950
  Nationalist Party partisans were involved in a variety of dramatic and violent confrontations between 1930 and 1950:
  In the 1930s, the party founded the official youth organization Cadetes de la República, headed by Raimundo Díaz Pacheco, and the Hijas de la Libertad (Daughters of Freedom), the women's branch of the Cadetes and in which Julia de Burgos served as secretary general.