Biography
Filiberto Ojeda Ríos was a Cuban-trained Puerto Rican Communist and the founder and lifelong leader of the Ejército Popular Boricua-Macheteros, the clandestine armed wing of the Puerto Rican independence movement that emerged in the late 1970s. He was the principal organizer of the September 12, 1983 Wells Fargo armored-car expropriation in West Hartford, Connecticut, which netted $7,017,151 — the second-largest cash robbery in U.S. history at the time. He was arrested in the August 30, 1985 mass FBI raid in Puerto Rico (more than 200 agents involved) but jumped bond in 1990 and lived underground in Puerto Rico for the next fifteen years.
On September 23, 2005 — the anniversary of the 1868 Grito de Lares — more than 100 FBI agents surrounded his rural home in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico. He was shot once in the upper torso during the standoff and was left to bleed to death over many hours after the agents withdrew. The Justice Departments later admission that no medical attention was provided after the shot was widely condemned across the Puerto Rican political spectrum, and his death is regarded by the Puerto Rican left as an extrajudicial killing.
