Who is Oscar López Rivera?

Oscar López Rivera has been imprisoned in the United States for 35 years. His crime? Fighting for independence for the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico.

Born in Puerto Rico, the son of a small farmer, López moved to Chicago when he was 14. He was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Vietnam 1966-67 as an infantryman.

Upon his return to Chicago — impacted by the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the rise of the Black struggle and his own experience in Vietnam — López joined struggles for bilingual education, against police brutality, to oppose hiring discrimination at construction and utility sites, as well as the fight to free Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irving Flores, Andrés Figueroa Cordero and Oscar Collazo, Puerto Rican political prisoners jailed in the U.S. since the 1950s. By 1979 all five had been released.

In 1980, 10 people were arrested and accused of belonging to the Armed Forces of National Liberation of Puerto Rico, which in the mid-1970s took credit for bombing businesses with investments in Puerto Rico. López, accused of being a leader of the group, was arrested the next year.

The frame-up charges included “seditious conspiracy,” defined as opposing “by force the authority” of the U.S. government as well as possession of unregistered firearms. López was not accused of involvement in a single bombing or act of violence. All the independentistas demanded to be recognized as prisoners of war and refused to participate in the court proceedings.

López was convicted and sentenced to 55 years in prison. An additional 15 years were added in 1988 after he was framed up on charges of conspiracy to escape. He was kept in solitary confinement his first 12 years in prison, but prison authorities could not break him.

“Oscar López should not be in prison,” Cancel Miranda has said. Those who have used violence to maintain Puerto Rico as a colony should be in prison, ”not those who have fought for it to be liberated.”

Write him at: Oscar Lopez Rivera, #87651-024, FCI Terre Haute, P.O. Box 33, Terre Haute, IN 47808.