Vol. 80/No. 37      October 3, 2016

 

Support grows for Oct. 9 event to free Oscar López

 
NEW YORK — Supporters of Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar López Rivera, jailed in the United States for more than 35 years, are stepping up their activities to win his freedom. Transportation is being organized from a dozen cities to attend an Oct. 9 “Freedom Convocation and Cultural Celebration” in Washington, D.C., to demand his release.

López was born in Puerto Rico and moved to Chicago as a teenager. Upon his return after being drafted into the U.S. Army and serving a stint in Vietnam, he joined protests against police brutality and racist discrimination in hiring and for bilingual education. He called for independence for Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony since 1898, and was a founder in the early ’70s of the Committee to Free the Five Puerto Rican Nationalists, political prisoners in the U.S. at the time.

López was arrested in 1981 and accused of being a leader of the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), a group that had taken credit for bombings of U.S. businesses with ties to Puerto Rico. Having no evidence of his participation in any acts of violence, U.S. prosecutors charged him with seditious conspiracy “to oppose by force the authority” of the U.S. government.

A Free Oscar López contingent got a good response at the Puerto Rican Day Parade in Newark, New Jersey, Sept. 18, passing out hundreds of paper fans encouraging people to get on the buses to D.C. and collecting signatures on petitions calling for his freedom.

Rafael Cancel Miranda, one of the five nationalists whose freedom López fought for in the 1970s, is speaking in New York at several programs Sept. 23-24 to promote participation in the Washington event.

“A few weeks ago some people were saying that we don’t have enough time to get people to D.C.,” Ponce Laspina, a spokesperson for the New York Coordinator to Free Oscar López, told the Militant Sept. 20. “Now my phone doesn’t stop ringing with people calling to get on a bus.”

Laspina is also organizing a bike ride for Oscar López in the Bronx on Sept. 24. The ride will make 14 stops, distributing flyers on López, passing out T-shirts calling for his freedom, and encouraging people to go to Washington for Oct. 9.

The next day 35 Women for Oscar is inviting participation in a march from Harlem to the Bronx.  
 
 
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