Additional documentation thanks to Freedom Archives
Oscar López Rivera is a Puerto Rican revolutionary who was a member of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), a Puerto Rican clandestine organization fighting for the independence of Puerto Rico. The FALN carried out 130 attacks in the United States between 1974 and 1983. Oscar and 14 other members of FALN were arrested between 1980-1983 and convicted of seditious conspiracy. They declared themselves prisoners of war and refused to take part in their trials maintaining that according to international law they were anticolonial combatants and could not be prosecuted by the US government. In 1999, several political and religious groups petitioned for their release. President Clinton offered him and the other FALN members clemency in 1999. López Rivera rejected the offer on the grounds that not all incarcerated FALN members received pardons. In January 2017, President Barack Obama commuted Oscar’s sentence; he was released in May 2017, having served 36 years in prison.
