Biography
Erasmo Velázquez, also known as Erasmo Velázquez y Olmedo, was a Puerto Rican Nationalist from Caguas and secretary of the party’s municipal organization there. He was one of the defendants prosecuted with Pedro Albizu Campos for seditious conspiracy in 1936. After conviction, he was sentenced to four years in federal prison and was among the Nationalists transferred to the Atlanta penitentiary in 1937. He later operated a furniture business in Caguas.
Page 1 prints a photograph of Erasmo Velasquez, Clemente Soto Velez and Julio H. Velasquez behind bars at San Juan, explicitly identifying them left to right. The caption calls them three of eight Puerto Rican Nationalists convicted in federal court on conspiracy-to-overthrow accusations and says they were lodged there before transfer to mainland federal prisons. It describes their demand for independence from U.S. rule. This provides a contemporaneous jail photograph and location corroboration; the prospective transfer is not treated as a completed transfer date. Existing portraits and the independently documented later Atlanta history are preserved. Source: https://dailyiowan.lib.uiowa.edu/DI/1936/di1936-08-07.pdf
Gerald Meyer’s 2010 Centro Journal study places this defendant among the eight Nationalists sentenced in the 1936 federal conspiracy prosecution. It reports the first jury deadlock on July 14, 1936, October denial of appeal bail and appellate affirmance on February 12, 1937, followed by transfer from San Juan municipal jail to Atlanta. It describes English-only correspondence and restricted family visits in the exile imprisonment. These collective procedural and conditions details do not establish a new arrest, individual gate-release date or completed sentence duration. Source: https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/377/37722223004.pdf#page=9
The chronology credited to Benjamín Torres and Rosa Meneses Albizu names this defendant among the eight Nationalists tried in 1936. It identifies Robert Cooper as presiding judge and A. Cecil Snyder, Marcelino Romaní, Jorge Ortiz Toro, James E. Ruffin and Amos W. W. Woodcock as prosecutors. It distinguishes a first jury that could not agree from a second trial that returned a guilty verdict. The chronology also records the eight prisoners’ transfer to the Atlanta penitentiary on June 7, 1937; that is a transfer within the already recorded imprisonment, not a new first-admission date. Its collective six-to-ten-year sentence wording does not override this individual’s separately documented four-year sentence.
The Daily Iowan, August 7, 1936; relevant page stated in the accompanying profile note.
The Cuban committee’s April 12, 1939 manifesto individually lists him as actually confined at Atlanta. This is contemporary prison-location evidence, not an admission date, a completed sentence or a new arrest. The pamphlet was published in December 1939 and reprints documents of several different dates.
