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Vol. 77/No. 18      May 13, 2013

 
Fight to free Oscar López from
US prison ‘is fight for all of us’
 
BY CANDACE WAGNER
AND MARTÍN KOPPEL  
NEW YORK — “Fighting for the freedom of Oscar means fighting for the freedom of all of us,” Luis Nieves Falcón told an April 19 meeting here at the El Maestro Cultural and Educational Center in the Bronx, to celebrate the publication of Between Torture and Resistance by Oscar López Rivera. A Puerto Rican independence fighter, López has been in prison in the United States since 1981 on trumped-up charges of “seditious conspiracy.”

Nieves Falcón is editor of the book, which was released in English by PM Press in March. The book includes López’s statement during his trial, excerpts from letters and a forward by retired South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It is being used to further the campaign to free Lopez.

The son of a small farmer, López grew up in the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico. When he was 14 his family joined his father in Chicago. Nieves Falcón said López’s experiences as a draftee in Vietnam “radicalized him.”

Upon returning to Chicago, López was active in struggles for bilingual education and promotion of Puerto Rican culture, housing and against police brutality. He helped organize the Committee to Free the Five Puerto Rican Nationalists, who were jailed in 1954 for carrying out an armed pro-independence demonstration in Congress.

Nieves Falcón described the conditions López has faced in prison, including 12 years of solitary confinement, sleep and sensory deprivation, limited visits, inadequate medical care and frequent strip searches.

“The goal is to isolate the prisoner so no solidarity develops,” López writes in the book in one letter about solitary. “They want to make us as mute as the walls and steel bars.”

“What has allowed Oscar to resist so many years?” Nieves Falcón asked. “Number one, his conviction that he is fighting for a just cause; number two, the example of other women and men who have suffered the same thing for the independence of Puerto Rico; and three, the support for his fight to be released, which is especially strong in Puerto Rico.”

Nieves Falcón also spoke at meetings in Chicago and Philadelphia.

Write to Oscar López at: 87651-024, FCI Terre Haute, PO Box 33, Terre Haute, IN 47808.

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Who are the Cuban Five?
 
 
 
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