Biography
Elías Samuel Castro Ramos was a Puerto Rican public-school teacher, labor unionist, and independence activist arrested on August 30, 1985 during the mass FBI raids targeting Los Macheteros in connection with the 1983 Wells Fargo expropriation in West Hartford, Connecticut. He was held without bail in federal preventive detention until December 18, 1986 while the Hartford prosecution proceeded.
Named group photograph
The full photograph is captioned by the Latin American Studies archive as Elias Castro Ramos, Hilton Fernandez Diamante and Ivonne Melendez. It is a group image, not an isolated portrait. All three subjects and the original 1000 by 574 pixels are retained; no face-based identification, new crop or reconstruction is used. A separate contemporary interview in The Insurgent identifies Castro-Ramos by name and documents the same independence-case context, but its different photograph is not treated as the same image. The archive's broad bail-release heading does not establish an exact photograph or discharge date. Photographer, original publication date and reuse license for this group image remain unknown. Date review remains open because secondary accounts disagree with the stored release endpoint.
Sources: Latin American Studies, named bail-release photo gallery; original group image; The Insurgent, volume 3 number 2, Fall 1987, page 11, named interview and separate captioned image. Original full page visually inspected.
The Militant reports that all charges against Castro Ramos were dropped at the January 13, 1992 hearing before Judge T. F. Gilroy Daly.
