Biography
Rosa Cortez Collazo was a Puerto Rican independence activist and wife of Oscar Collazo, one of the two Puerto Rican Nationalist Party members who attempted to assassinate President Harry S. Truman at Blair House on November 1, 1950. Rosa was arrested by the FBI on the day of the attack on suspicion of conspiracy and held in federal custody for approximately eight months without formal trial; she was eventually released without conviction. She remained an outspoken independentista organizer in New York and Puerto Rico for the rest of her life, advocating for her husband's release until his sentence was commuted by President Carter in 1979.
Dávila Marichal, citing Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim, prints the surname Cortés and identifies Oscar Collazo’s wife. It reports conspiracy arrest on November 2, 1950, FBI questioning in Lower Manhattan, inability to post $50,000 bail, and actual release on December 23, 1950 because the prosecution lacked a persuasive case. This conflicts with the existing biography’s eight-month account and November 1 date; the discrepancy is preserved for reconciliation rather than treated as a separate person or silently substituted into structured custody fields.
José Manuel Dávila Marichal, Organizando la revolución: El Ejército Libertador del Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico y la insurrección nacionalista de 1950 (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid doctoral thesis, 2020), physical/printed page 521; SHA256 be07767792e7789d4683e0c5787caac280ca95b7f4c93adf2fbfbab5e7a48eb4.
