Francisco Kiko Martinez
Biography
Francisco Eugenio "Kiko" Martínez (born November 26, 1946 in Alamosa, Colorado) was a Chicano-movement attorney from southern Colorado who became one of the era's most relentlessly prosecuted "political targets." The son of a migrant-working family, he graduated from Alamosa High School (1964) and Adams State College (1968), joined Rodolfo "Corky" González's Crusade for Justice in 1966, and earned his law degree from the University of Minnesota in 1971. Admitted to the bar after publicly refusing to answer a Colorado bar-exam question he condemned as demeaning to Native Americans — protesting alongside American Indian Movement activists outside the Colorado Supreme Court — he built a practice for those who could not afford one: Chicano students, migrant farmworkers, and prison inmates. He organized the Latin American Development Society inside the Colorado penitentiary, challenged the abuse of Chicano prisoners, and in 1972 worked through MALDEF and the La Raza Legal Association on the Ricardo Falcón murder case — activism that drew intensifying law-enforcement and reported COINTELPRO scrutiny.
Martínez's persecution unfolded amid Denver's early-1970s "bomb hysteria" aimed at the Crusade for Justice — a period in which his own 25-year-old brother, Reyes Martínez, was among the six Chicano activists killed in the May 1974 "Los Seis de Boulder" car bombings. He was arrested in Scottsbluff, Nebraska on January 15, 1973 for an alleged Molotov cocktail (acquitted after the search was ruled unconstitutional), then indicted in Denver in October 1973 for allegedly mailing three package bombs — to Black policewoman Carol Hogue, a school board member, and a motorcycle shop — charges his supporters and later court findings treated as a frame-up. His law license was suspended and a reward posted; fearing he would be shot "on sight," he exiled himself to Mexico for seven years. He was captured re-entering at Nogales, Arizona on September 3, 1980 under the alias José Reynoso Díaz, and — after U.S. District Judge Fred M. Winner set a $1 million bond, later cut to $400,000 — was released that October when his family and friends pledged sixteen homes.
His first federal trial (Pueblo, January 1981) collapsed into a mistrial after it emerged that Judge Winner had secretly arranged with the FBI to install a hidden courtroom camera and had met privately with prosecutors — a scandal dubbed "Winnergate." Winner recused himself; the Hogue charge and all Colorado state charges were dismissed in 1981, a federal appeals panel found he had acted improperly, Martínez was acquitted of another bombing count in November 1982, and the last federal charge was dismissed on August 15, 1983. Weeks later the FBI re-arrested him over the 1980 border alias; in 1986 he was ordered to serve 90 days for it, but the Ninth Circuit overturned that conviction in 1988 — leaving him cleared of every charge after a fifteen-year ordeal. He resumed practicing law, and later reflected that it had been "a heck of a good education about the legal process and about political repression in America."
A January–February 1981 Torch report states that Martinez was arrested while crossing from Mexico on September 3, 1980, initially held on $1 million bail, and released in October after the bail amount was reduced following protests.
