Biography
Chicano/Mexicano organizer with the MLN (Movimiento de Liberación Nacional Mexicano) jailed for civil contempt for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the FALN and Puerto Rican independence movement. His imprisonment helped link the Chicano-Mexicano and Puerto Rican liberation movements in the early 1980s. Documented in PFOC Breakthrough magazine.
1980s criminal-contempt imprisonment
Libertad reports that Romero presented himself to the federal court in Denver on April 10, 1984 to begin his prison sentence and was released from Safford on June 13, 1986. The court identifies his sentencing date as June 7, 1983. These records replace the unsupported September 12, 1984 arrest date and civil-contempt label; his earlier 1977 civil-contempt confinement was a separate episode.
Sources: Guerra v. Meese, note 8; Libertad, July 1986, page 5.
The Witness, March 1978, page 19, identifies Ricardo Romero of Alamosa, Colorado, as one of three Chicago grand-jury resisters who had actually been released. It attributes his release to a Grumbles motion. The article reports that the three had been moved from the Chicago Metropolitan Correctional Center to unnamed county jails before their freedom. It supplies neither Romero’s exact release day nor a completed duration. This earlier civil-contempt episode is separate from the 1983 criminal-contempt sentence and 1984–1986 imprisonment.
A March 4, 1983 contemporary report identified Charles Sifton as the judge in the Brooklyn federal criminal-contempt trial in which the five grand jury resisters were convicted on February 16, 1983.
The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee’s November 1984 account names Ricardo Romero among five grand-jury resisters arrested in 1982 and reports that their separate criminal-contempt prison terms began in April 1984. The arrest and the later sentence service are different events. Its prison directory identifies the institution where each resister was then held.
Stop the Grand Jury!, John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, November 1984, PDF page 15; Stop the Grand Jury!, John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, November 1984, PDF page 16.
The Spring/Summer 1986 Write Through the Walls directory individually lists Ricardo Romero under historical prisoner number 16208-053, with correspondence directed to PO Box 1000, Safford, Arizona. The original name, individual number and political-prisoner group context match this existing profile. This is dated historical correspondence information, not a present mailing instruction or an independently established admission, transfer, release or completed custody duration.
Libertad names this imprisoned resister in a May 10, 1985 habeas challenge to parole treatment.
