National Boricua
Human Rights Network

Please view the video, Dissent is Not a Crime, for more background into the case of the Political Prisoners.

Also see, Jan Susler’s article, More than 25 years: Puerto Rican Political Prisoners.

For recent articles on the Puerto Rican Political Prisoners, please click on the category “Political Prisoners” on the right side of this page.

Puerto Rican Political Prisoners:

• Carlos Alberto Torres
• Oscar López Rivera
• Avelino González Claudio

Postal mailing address:
Carlos Alberto Torres
88976-024
FCI Pekin
Federal Correctional Institution
P.O. Box 5000
Pekin, IL 61555

Carlos Alberto was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1952.  His family soon emigrated to New York and then to Chicago. As a young person conscious of his Puerto Ricanness, he was involved with other young Puerto Ricans in organizing the community to address issues including police brutality, squalid housing conditions, the educational system that ignored the needs of Puerto Rican students, and the colonial case of Puerto Rico. Their work attracted attention, and the establishment tried to stop them. He and other young Puerto Ricans, inspired by heroic guerilla movements throughout the world, decided their work for the independence of Puerto Rico could best be conducted in clandestine fashion. In 1980 he was arrested, accused of being a member of a clandestine force seeking independence for Puerto Rico, and sentenced to 78 years in prison for seditious conspiracy and related charges.

His time in prison has been most productive, generally investing in other prisoners and programs for their education and teaching adult literacy and Spanish. He participated in a national civic service organization, which raised money to help reconstruct a battered women’s shelter in the county in which the prison was located and also made financial contributions to increase AIDS awareness. At one prison, he organized the first Hispanic Appreciation Day, resulting in an unsolicited transfer to a different prison.  He has worked as a baker and as unit clerk, training and orientating the prisoner maintenance crew, doing the payroll, hiring, and job rotation.

He also invested in his own education, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin. Tapping his creative side, he learned to paint, later discovering the magic of ceramics. With an eye to the 25th anniversary of his arrest and imprisonment, he conceived a traveling exhibit of his ceramics and Oscar’s paintings and drawings, as a way to place the case of the Puerto Rican political prisoners in the public eye. With the National Boricua Human Rights Network and Comité Pro Derechos Humanos coordinating the exhibit, Not Enough Space, toured the exhibit throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, and Mexico.

Given Carlos Alberto’s spotless record in prison, one can understand the staff’s puzzlement at his placement in segregation when the September 11 attacks took place.  Prison staff likewise expressed universal impotence to remedy this wrong, given that the order came from Washington. The office of Bureau of Prison’s general counsel in Washington made it quite clear that Carlos Alberto’s segregation had nothing to do with his prison conduct and everything to do with what they called “national security” and the fact that he is convicted of seditious conspiracy. The BOP uses the same justification each time they deny him something other prisoners are entitled to, such as visits with his step-mother, former political prisoner Alejandrina Torres, and a trip to his father’s funeral.

Carlos Alberto, currently 57 years old, is not scheduled for release for another 13 years, December 5, 2024, when he will be 72 years old. Since the U.S. occupation in 1898, of the thousands of men and women who have gone to prison for the independence of Puerto Rico, he is now the longest held. And yet, 29 years of prison have not diminished his commitment to the freedom of his country, commitment he reaffirms daily, as he maintains his dignity, integrity, health, as well as his confidence in his people.

Born on January 6, 1943

Postal mailing address:
Oscar Lopez Rivera
87651-024
FCI Terre Haute
P.O. Box 33
Terre Haute, IN 47808

Oscar was born in San Sebastián, Puerto Rico in 1943.  His family moved to the U.S. when he was an adolescent. Adapting to his new home, he managed English well enough to help the Spanish speaking adults in the neighborhood make their way through the maze of public and private services.  Like many young Latino and African American men, he was drafted into the U.S. army. It was in Viet Nam that Oscar began to understand what it meant to be Puerto Rican in the United States, and the need for a people to control its own destiny. His service in Viet Nam earned him the Bronze Star.  When he returned from the war in 1967, he found that drugs, unemployment, housing, health care and education in the Puerto Rican community had reached dire levels and immediately set to work organizing to improve the quality of life for his people.  Oscar worked in the creation of both the Puerto Rican High School and the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, and participated in the development of the Committee to Free the Five Puerto Rican Nationalist Prisoners.  He was involved in the struggle for bilingual education in public schools and to force universities to actively recruit Latino students, staff and faculty.  He helped to found educational programs at the maximum security prison for men at Stateville, IL.  He worked in the community against drugs and police brutality.  He also worked on ending discrimination in public utilities like Illinois Bell, People’s Gas and Commonwealth Edison. While those in the community respected his tireless work, the establishment took action to stop him in his tracks. He and other young Puerto Ricans, inspired by heroic guerilla movements throughout the world, decided their work for the independence of Puerto Rico could best be conducted in clandestine fashion.

He was arrested in 1981, accused of being a member of a clandestine force seeking independence for Puerto Rico, and sentenced to 55 years for seditious conspiracy.  In 1988, as the result of a government-made conspiracy to escape, he was given an additional 15 years, a sentence which will begin only after he has finished serving the 55 year sentence.  His release date is 2027, when he will be 84 years old.

From 1986 to 1998, he was held in the most super maximum security prisons in the federal prison system, in conditions not unlike those at Guantanamo under which “enemy combatants,” are held, conditions which the International Red Cross, among other human rights organizations, have called tantamount to torture. Then, after seven years in the general population of a maximum security prison, he was transferred to a new, more harsh penitentiary which is the home of the federal death row. In 2008, for the first time since his arrest in 1981, he was placed in a medium security prison, albeit with the unique condition that he report every two hours to corrections staff.

In spite of 28 years of adversity in prison, Oscar has maintained his integrity—political, physical, emotional, intellectual.  Physically fit, studious, and focused, he reads voraciously, keeps up to date with current affairs, and writes.  He has also become a talented, prolific artist, whose drawings and paintings form part of an itinerant exhibit with Carlos Alberto’s ceramics, Not Enough Space. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his and Carlos Alberto’s imprisonment, the National Boricua Human Rights Network and the Comité Pro Derechos Humanos toured the exhibit throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, and Mexico.

Oscar’s daughter, Clarisa, lives in Puerto Rico with her daughter Karina.   Because of the harsh conditions, including non-contact visits, Karina was not able to touch her grandfather until she was 9 years old.  Their family visits are few and far between, because of the expense of long distance travel, and because arbitrary and punitive visiting policies serve as a disincentive.

NCI # 357422
PO Box 665
Somers, CT 06071

Friends and Family of Avelino González Claudio
Apartado Postal #22282
San Juan. P.R.00931-2282

Avelino González Claudio. . . A Tireless Fighter

In August of 1985, Avelino González Claudio was accused of participating in the planning and authorization of an operation to secure $7,117,000 from a Wells Fargo armored truck in Hartford, Connecticut on September 12, 1983, along with other Puerto Ricans and two North Americans. The operation was carried out by a clandestine organization fighting for the independence of Puerto Rico, the PRTP-Macheteros. Avelino was not arrested at the time. However, more than 20 years later, he was arrested in Manatí­, Puerto Rico, on February 7, 2008.

Avelino was born in the town of Vega Baja on October 8, 1942. As a student at the University of Puerto Rico, he became a member and then vice-president of the Pro-Independence University Federation (Federación Universitaria Pro Independencia-FUPI). In the mid-1960’s, he married and moved to New York City, earning his living on Wall Street, and working with the Puerto Rican community, joining and then leading the Vito Marcantonio Mission of the Movemiento Pro-Independencia (MPI) in New York. He and his family of four children returned to Puerto Rico, where he worked in the independence movement, including administering the political journal Pensamiento Crí­tico (Critical Thought).

When the arrests of 1985 took place, and Avelino was not arrested, he assumed the identity of José Ortega, and, while the FBI pursued him, he lived a quiet life, working as a computer teacher to support his family and contributing constructively to his nation, seeking to improve the services provided by the Department of Education.

The charges against those arrested in 1985 had various results: Carlos Ayes, Filiberto Ojeda, Juan Segarra, Norman Ramirez and Roberto Maldonado went to trial in 1989; Ivonne Meléndez Carrión also went to trial—some were acquitted, others convicted and sentenced to terms ranging from one year to 55 years; while Orlando González, Hilton Fernández Diamante, Jorge A. Farinacci, Isaac Camacho, Elí­as Castro and Angel Días Ruiz negotiated a plea agreement in 1992. They were sentenced to terms of five years in prison. Two others have never been arrested: Avelino’s brother Norberto and Victor Gerena, and are being sought by the FBI.

Avelino is currently being held in Somers, the state of Connecticut’s supermax prison, far from his family and his nation, where he is locked down 23 hours a day, with no access to family visits or phone calls, in conditions which are calculated not only to interfere with his ability to prepare a defense, but which are tantamount to torture. He is awaiting trial in federal court in Hartford.

Articles on Avelino González Claudio