Vol. 73/No. 41      October 26, 2009

Carlos Alberto Torres with granddaughter Noemi Alexandra. He is one of longest-held political prisoners in world.

Torres was interviewed May 26 via a videoconference hearing by U.S. Parole Commission examiner Larry Glenn. Following the hearing, Glenn recommended that Torres be paroled on April 3, 2010.

However, in June prison authorities in Pekin, Illinois, where Torres is being held, reinstated charges of possessing knives against Torres and his cellmates. The knives were allegedly found in January, hidden in the light fixture of the cell shared by 10 prisoners.

On July 28 the full parole board said they would postpone their final decision for at least 90 days pending resolution of the charges.

Two days later prison officials found Torres and his cellmates guilty, even though another prisoner gave sworn testimony that the knives were his and that neither Torres nor the other cellmates knew about them. Torres received a sentence of 60 days’ loss of telephone use, visits, and commissary privileges, and lost 41 days of good time credits.

The actions are “a transparent attempt to derail his release after 29 years in prison,” Torres’s lawyer Jan Susler wrote in a letter to his supporters, “and to isolate and further punish him.” If the parole commission does not approve Torres’s release, he will not be granted another hearing for 15 years.

Torres was arrested in April 1980 along with 10 other supporters of Puerto Rico’s independence. The U.S. government accused them of being “terrorists” and members of the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) of Puerto Rico. They were also accused of “seditious conspiracy” and armed robbery among other charges.

López Rivera was arrested in May 1981 and found guilty of similar charges in a separate trial in July that year.

Puerto Rico has been a U.S. colony since 1898, when U.S. troops wrested control of the island from Spain. Residents of Puerto Rico are subject to U.S. laws, courts, and military service. They are U.S. citizens, but have no vote in presidential elections. The representative from Puerto Rico in the U.S. Congress has no voting rights.

In 1999 then-president William Clinton offered to pardon or commute the sentences of 16 Puerto Rican political prisoners. Two of them—Antonio Camacho Negrón and Oscar López—refused because they did not want to accept onerous conditions on their freedom. Two others had already been released and did not respond. Torres was never offered a pardon.

“I spoke with Carlos Alberto on Saturday [October 3] the day after the phone restrictions were lifted,” Alejandro Molina, co-coordinator of the National Boricua Human Rights Network, told the Militant. “Two or three of his cellmates had the weapons charge reversed on appeal and he is hopeful in this case.”

“We think this is a delaying tactic that could disrupt the parole process,” Molina said. “Carlos Alberto has had a stellar record of conduct in prison” until this accusation.

Over the last decade “almost every church denomination in Puerto Rico, representatives of the main political parties there, and dozens of other organizations and prominent individuals around the world have called for the release of Torres and the other political prisoners,” Molina added.

In a letter in 2007, Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu from South Africa noted the similarity between the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela during the apartheid regime and that of the Puerto Rican independentistas.

Letters protesting the weapons charge against Torres can be sent to: Warden, FCI Pekin, P.O. Box 7000, Pekin, IL 61555 and Harley G. Lappin, Director, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 320 First St., NW, Washington, D.C. 20534.

Letters to the two political prisoners can be sent to:

Carlos Alberto Torres, #88976-024, FCI Pekin, P.O. Box 5000, Pekin, IL 61555 and Oscar López Rivera, #87651-024, FCI Terre Haute, P.O. Box 33, Terre Haute, IN 47808.
 
 
Related articles:
Reduced sentence for Cuban 5 defendant Antonio Guerrero
New York picket demands: Free the Cuban 5!
Free Carlos Alberto Torres now!  
 
 
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