Not just a ‘terrorist’
P.R.herolikefamedfreedomfighters
It’s been a long time since I last attended the Puerto Rican Day Parade, but I intend to be there Sunday on Fifth Ave., marching at the front of the parade with Oscar Lopez Rivera, the 74-year-old former FALN leader who some condemn as a terrorist yet others praise as a patriot for Puerto Rico’s independence.
Hundreds of other Puerto Ricans will march as well to send a clear message to the city’s corporate, media and political elite — Puerto Ricans don’t need your approval to choose their heroes.
The attacks on the parade’s board of directors the past few weeks for daring to honor Lopez Rivera are unprecedented in the modern history of New York City ethnic parades.
That’s why I am also making a personal donation of $1,000 to the parade’s student scholarship fund.
“We have been calling for Oscar’s release for the past three years, with Puerto Ricans of all political views supporting it, and no one paid much attention,” Ululy Martinez, vice chair of the parade board, told me.
But this year, when the board unanimously decided to name Lopez Rivera as a “hero of the nation,” major corporate sponsors and Hispanic police organizations pulled out. So did bigname officials like Gov. Cuomo, Police Commissioner James O’Neill and Sen. Chuck Schumer.
The boycott campaign was quietly organized by a rightwing conservative group in Washington, the Media Research Center, that receives major funding from donors close to both President Trump and to Breitbart News.
Lopez Rivera, as everyone knows by now, served 35 years in a federal prison until he was freed recently when President Barack Obama commuted his sentence. During the 1970s and 1980s, he was a leader of the pro-independence FALN (Armed Forces of National Liberation). Its members set more than 100 bombs, the most deadly of which was the Fraunces Tavern attack that killed four people.
He was never charged, however, with setting those bombs, but convicted instead of seditious conspiracy.
Still, terrorism directed at innocent people can never be justified, and Lopez Rivera spent nearly half his life in prison as a result.
The FALN, in fact, was one of a string of Puerto Rican groups during the 20th century that waged an armed campaign to end U.S. colonial control of Puerto Rico. They included the Nationalist Party, the Armed Liberation Commandos (CAL), the Armed Revolutionary Independence Movement (MIRA), and the Macheteros.
All patterned themselves on the IRA’s armed campaign against British rule in Ireland, or Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress’ war against white rule in South Africa, or Menachem Begin and the Irgun’s guerrilla campaign against British rule in Palestine.
All were both terrorists and freedom fighters at the same time. Even those who condemned their methods could admire their goals.
Mandela, of course, received a ticker-tape parade down Broadway in 1990.
Begin became the first Israeli prime minister to attend New York’s Salute to Israel Parade in 1978, with barely a mention in the city’s press that he commanded the Irgun when it bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1947, killing more than 90 people.
As for the IRA, in 1983 New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade named as its grand marshal longtime IRA leader Michael Flannery. Some politicians like Sen. Daniel Moynihan chose to boycott, but Mayor Ed Koch and Gov. Mario Cuomo participated, anyway.
So here we are in 2017, with Puerto Rico’s economy near collapse, and a control board imposed by Congress now ruling the island’s affairs in classic colonial style.
Some powerful people in this country seem bent on bullying Puerto Rican leaders in New York into submission. Into choosing only those heroes they approve.
Well, it’s not going to happen. Not while this old-timer and other Boricuas proud of their heritage can still walk.