Oscar López Rivera

Oscar López Rivera (born January 6, 1943) is a Puerto Rican activist and militant who was a member and suspected leader of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN), a clandestine paramilitary organization devoted to Puerto Rican independence that carried out more than 130 bomb attacks in the United States between 1974 and 1983.

López Rivera was tried by the United States government for seditious conspiracy, use of force to commit robbery, interstate transportation of firearms, and conspiracy to transport explosives with intent to destroy government property.

López Rivera declared himself a prisoner of war and refused to take part in most of his trial.

He maintained that according to international law he was an anticolonial combatant and could not be prosecuted by the United States government.

Oscar López Rivera was born in San Sebastián, Puerto Rico, on January 6, 1943.

His family moved to Chicago when he was nine years old.

At the age of 14, he followed them to Chicago.

At age 18 he was drafted into the army and served in the Vietnam War, where he earned a Bronze Star Medal.

When he returned to Illinois in 1967, he became a community activist, advocating for housing for the Puerto Rican community, bilingual education and Latino recruitment in the university system.

In the late 1970s he began to advocate for Puerto Rican independence.

López Rivera was one of the founders of La Escuelita Puertorriqueña, 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.

López Rivera joined the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN), an organization which in the 1970s fought to make Puerto Rico an independent country.

The FALN was involved in more than 100 bombings in New York, Chicago and other cities, including the 1975 bombing at Fraunces Tavern in Manhattan that killed four people.

López Rivera was never conclusively linked to the bombings.

López Rivera was first linked to the FALN in 1976.

That year, a burglar was arrested in Chicago attempting to peddle stolen explosives.

The burglar led the Chicago police to an apartment, nearly devoid of furniture, but in which there were boxes containing explosives and bomb-making paraphernalia, weapons, clothing, wigs, and photographs of Chicago buildings, maps of the city, and several FALN documents, including a manual for guerrilla warfare detailing deceptive practices and rules of clandestine living titled Posición Política.

This bomb factory was linked to the owner of the apartment, Carlos Torres, López Rivera, and their respective wives, Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres and Ida Luz Rodríguez.

All four became fugitives after this discovery.

The four were also linked to the National Commission on Hispanic Affairs (NCHA) of the Protestant Episcopal Church, a charitable organization based in New York City that was meant to fund projects to assist Hispanic communities throughout the United States.

Beltran was subsequently convicted of the 1977 bombing of the Mobil Oil building, that resulted in one death.

The FALN was one of the targets of the first terrorism task force in the United States; the US Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), established in April 1980, had as one of its goals to pursue threats from the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN).

On April 4, 1980, 11 FALN members, including Rodríguez and Beltrán Torres, were arrested trying to rob an armored truck in Evanston, Illinois.

López Rivera was tried in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in 1980–81.

The charges included armed robbery and for being a recruiter and bomb-making trainer in the FALN.

No one was injured in any of the bombings in which López Rivera was accused of being involved.

On August 11, 1981, López Rivera was convicted and sentenced to 55 years in federal prison.

López Rivera was apprehended one year later on May 29, 1981 when, according to police, he ran a stop sign in Glenview, a Chicago suburb and provided a false Oregon driver's license.

At the time of their arrest, López Rivera and the others declared themselves combatants in an anti-colonial war against the United States to gain Puerto Rico's independence from the U.S., and claimed prisoner of war status.

They stated that U.S. courts did not have jurisdiction to treat 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 did not recognize their request.

In August 1981, Alfredo Méndez, one of those arrested in Evanston who had become an informant, testified that López Rivera taught him how to make bomb detonation devices and gun silencers.

He also testified that the first bombing in which Méndez was to have taken part planned to target the hotel that housed the offices for the Democratic Party.

On February 26, 1988, he was sentenced to an additional 15 years in prison for conspiring to escape from the Leavenworth prison.

López Rivera was not directly linked to any specific bombings.

Many considered him to be the world's longest-held political prisoner, with a number of political and religious groups calling for his release.

U.S. President Bill Clinton offered him and 13 other convicted FALN members conditional clemency in 1999; López Rivera rejected the offer on the grounds that not all incarcerated FALN members received pardons.

In January 2017, President Barack Obama commuted López Rivera's sentence; he was released in May 2017, having served 36 years in prison, longer than any other member of the FALN.