Biography
Oscar Lopez Rivera is a Puerto Rican Independista and political prisoner serving 70 years for seditious conspiracy. He is the only remaining Independista remaining behind bars, the other eleven were granted clemency by President Clinton. The National Boricua Human Rights Network is actively working for his release at his upcoming parole hearing in January 2011. Join the campaign to free Oscar at http://boricuahumanrights.org
Oscar López Rivera was born in San Sebastián, Puerto Rico on January 6, 1943. His family moved to the U.S. when he was nine years old. At the age of 14, he moved to Chicago to live with a sister. At age 18 he was drafted into the army and served in Viet Nam and awarded the Bronze Star. When he returned to Illinois from the war in 1967, he found that drugs, unemployment, housing, health care and education in the Puerto Rican community had reached dire levels and set to work in community organizations to improve the quality of life for his people.
He was a well-respected community activist and an independence leader for many years prior to his arrest. Oscar worked in the creation of both the Puerto Rican High School and the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. He was also involved in the struggle for bilingual education in public schools students, staff, and faculty. He worked on ending discrimination in public utilities like Illinois Bell,
Cancel Miranda High School, now known as the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School and the Juan Antonio Corretjer Puerto Rican Cultural Center. He was a community organizer for the Northwest Community Organization (NCO), ASSPA, ASPIRA and the 1st Congregational Church of Chicago. He helped to found FREE, a half-way house for convicted drug addicts, and ALAS, an educational program for Latino prisoners at Stateville Prison in Illinois. Legal Case
In 1975, Oscar was forced underground, along with other comrades. The FBI claimed that he was one of the leaders of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), a Puerto Rican nationalist clandestine group that fought for the independence of Puerto Rico. Oscar has neither confirmed nor denied his involvement in FALN and out of principle has refused to denounce armed struggle as a legitimate means to gaining independence.
On May 29, 1981 Oscar was captured in Chicago after five years underground. Oscar was found guilty on five counts involving seditious conspiracy, armed robbery, weapons violations and interstate transportation of stolen property. He was sentenced to 55 years in prison.
At the time of their arrest Lopez Rivera and the others declared themselves to be combatants in an anti-colonial war against the United States to liberate Puerto Rico from U.S. domination and invoked prisoner of war status. They argued that the U.S. courts did not have jurisdiction to try them as criminals and petitioned for their cases to be handed over to an international court that would determine their status. The U.S. Government, however, did not recognize their request.
The sentences received by Lopez Rivera and the other Nationalists were judged to be “out of proportion to the nationalists’ offenses.” Statistics showed their sentences were almost 20 times greater than sentences for similar offenses by the American population at large.
For many years, numerous national and international organizations criticized Lopez Rivera’ incarceration categorizing it as political imprisonment. His disproportionate sentence, the targeting of him and others by the FBI beforehand, the nebulous charges of conspiracy, the political nature of the charges made against Oscar, and the intentional isolation and long-term confinement he has endured all make it clear that Oscar Lopez Rivera is not simply a prisoner, but a political prisoner.
From the moment Oscar was sentenced, he has spent his time in long-term solitary confinement in high security prisons far away from his family and support network. Amnesty International and the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Administration of Justice both criticized the conditions. The conditions were found to be in violation of the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. A federal judge also addressed his concerns in the case of Baraldine vs. Meese.
In 1988, he was convicted of conspiracy to escape along with Jaime Delgado (a veteran independence leader), Dora Garcia (a prominent community activist), and Kojo Bomani Sababu (a New Afrikan Prisoner of War). He was given another 15 years for the attempted escape.
From 1986 to 1999 Oscar was held in the most maximum security prisons in the federal prison system, first in Marion and then the Administrative Maximum Unit at Florence, CO.
In Marion he refused to work for the federal prison industry, UNICOR, because the work involved producing coaxial cables for the military. He also helped launch a successful phone campaign from supporters to get guards at Florence to stop nightly rounds that were intentionally waking prisoners every 30 minutes, preventing them from sleeping through the night. Oscar López Rivera is a Puerto Rican independence leader, decorated U.S. Army Vietnam War veteran (Bronze Star), and one of the longest-held political prisoners in U.S. history. He was a leader of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN), the clandestine organization that conducted bombings of U.S. military, government, and corporate sites between 1974 and 1983 in support of Puerto Rican independence. He was arrested on May 29, 1981 in Glenview, Illinois, and convicted in 1981 of seditious conspiracy. He was sentenced to 55 years in federal prison; an additional 15 years was added in 1988 in connection with an alleged plot to escape from federal prison alongside Black Liberation Army member Kojo Bomani Sababu (Grailing Brown).
In 1999 President Clinton offered him clemency on the condition that he renounce violence; he refused as long as 11 of his FALN co-defendants remained imprisoned. Those 11 accepted Clintons clemency. He continued to serve. After 35 years in federal prison, on January 17, 2017 — three days before leaving office — President Obama commuted his sentence. He was released on May 17, 2017 to widespread celebration in Puerto Rico and a heros welcome at the Puerto Rican Day parade in New York City.
The 2004 El Alfabeto Patriótico credits López Rivera with the book’s illustrations. His sister Mercedes Navarro’s biography describes childhood migration at twelve and reunion with his mother and siblings three years later; this differs from migration ages in the existing account and is preserved as her reported chronology without overwriting birth or migration fields. She describes more than ten years of visits separated by glass and telephone, and a delayed hernia operation ultimately obtained after a public letters-and-calls campaign. These are attributed contemporary prison-condition details, not a new custody episode or a measured total prison term. The seventy years is imposed punishment, and the 2004 continuing-custody statement does not override later release evidence. Source: https://prcc-chgo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Patriotic-Alphabet-2004-web.pdf#page=38
Libertad’s November 1986 issue reports confinement at Chicago Metropolitan Correctional Center after transfer from Marion. The National Committee described restricted calls and visits, interference with mail, shackling during internal movement and videotaped strip searches after visits, and said attorney-client confidentiality was not assured. These are attributed contemporary defense-committee allegations. The transfer is undated and supplies no new admission or discharge endpoint; a December 8 trial date was prospective.
The individual sentencing clauses in the presidential clemency record, corroborated by the Justice Department advisory, establish the original federal sentencing date as 1981-08-11. This corrects the differing legacy sentencing entry for the identified prosecution. Sentencing is not treated as prison admission. The 1999 commutation was conditional; its date, proposed release schedules and rounded years served do not establish actual physical discharge or an exact custody total. Existing admission and release fields are not copied or changed from this source.
Original presidential record, PDF pages 33, 34; Justice Department, August 11, 1999 advisory.
The July 1986 Libertad reports Oscar López Rivera placed in solitary confinement on May 25, 1986 and subsequently held at Marion.
The Senate-subcommittee article references his Chicago trial and Alfredo Mendez’s testimony. This corroborates the defense campaign surrounding the prosecution without supplying a new judicial outcome, imposed term or physical release.
Tip of the Iceberg, December 1981 (surviving twelve-page scan), PDF page 4.
The September 21, 2019 Grito de Lares march report identifies López Rivera as keynote speaker among former political prisoners. This is post-release activity, not a new custody episode.
