TERRORIST PAINTS TOWN BLOOD RED
Viv parades around with López Rivera
A defiant City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito paraded convicted terror conspirator Oscar López Rivera around town like a conquering hero ahead of Sunday’s controversial march.
Brushing off Mayor de Blasio and other leaders who say López Rivera should not be honored at the Puerto Rican Day Parade, Mark-Viverito joined the former FALN militant as he was feted at an official parade reception Friday night at the New York Hilton in Midtown.
On Saturday, the Puerto Ricanborn Democratic speaker accompanied him to a fund-raiser for the powerful Service Employees International Union 1199 in Midtown. After she gave a defensive threeminute introduction, López Rivera delivered a 20-minute speech.
“She said she is being heavily criticized because she is standing behind him,” said union member Jose Maldonado.
“She was proud of her associa- tion with Oscar,” said Nelson Denis, who also attended the health-workers-union soiree.
López Rivera slammed “corporate America” for perpetuating the US commonwealth’s fiscal crisis and later signed copies of his 2013 book, “Between Torture and Resistance,” attendees said.
“He said that Puerto Rico is at a historical point; its future is being determined right now, unfortunately, by a group that does not have the best interests of Puerto Rico at heart,” Denis said.
The island will hold a nonbinding referendum on its political status Sunday, giving voters a choice between statehood, independence or status quo.
López Rivera served 35 years in prison for conspiracy to over- throw the US government as a leader of the FALN, a Puerto Rican nationalist group. The group was behind the fatal 1975 bombing of Fraunces Tavern in the Financial District.
When President Barack Obama commuted his sentence in January, parade organizers planned to name López Rivera as the festival’s National Freedom Hero.
Dozens of public officials, including Gov. Cuomo and Police Commissioner James O’Neill, and corporate sponsors pulled out of the event in response. Half of the 50 floats were out.
Even de Blasio, who plans to attend the march, said on Monday that he privately asked organizers to rescind the award.
López Rivera said he would de- cline the title. The move incensed Mark-Viverito, who said last week that her hero would still be honored. She did not explain how.
The two leaders plan to walk the 35-block route Sunday with two youth dance troupes and several hundred others in the first quadrant of the march, sources said.
Even without the kudos, López Rivera’s inclusion has split New York’s Puerto Rican community.
Retiree Hilda Melendez, 66, said López Rivera’s participation made her uneasy.
“It’s very disturbing,” she said, while attending the pre-parade 116th Street Festival on Saturday. “I’m glad he’s not going to be honored, but it’s very sad people aren’t marching because of him, and there will be fewer floats.”
“I believe in freedom. He was pardoned, he served his time, but people here have the right to feel upset,” said paralegal Tanisha Pilar Dejesus, 36. “The community is divided.”
THE heinous FALN bomb attack on Fraunces Tavern on Jan. 24, 1975, first brought terror home to modern-day New York City. Let’s not forget this on Sunday, June 11, when remorse-free FALN mastermind Oscar López Rivera — turned loose by former President Barack Obama after serving half of his 70-year prison sentence — marches in the Puerto Rican Day Parade at the charmed invitation of City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.
There’s good reason why Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello told The Post that the invitation to López Rivera was “beyond comprehension.”
Most of us New Yorkers in 1975 naively believed random slaughter in service of political lunacy was a distant problem that didn’t concern us. Palestinian zealots murdered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics and hijacked airliners all over the Middle East and Europe. Kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst and her SLA cohorts shot up a bank in San Francisco — but le- thal terrorism just couldn’t happen in New York.
Some amateurish, smallscale terrorist efforts prior to 1975 fortunately killed no one. Other plots were foiled before they could happen. The FALN atrocities shook us out of our complacency — for a time.
A decade of middleclass flight left the city mainly to a handful of the very rich and legions of the very poor. In between were mostly young, ambitious, artsy-minded types for whom crumbling streets and ruined neighborhoods made a romantic backdrop for adventure. Times Square squalor was merely colorful. But nobody counted on senseless atrocities perpetrated by agents of foreign powers.
The NYPD and FBI found numerous, poorly made unexploded bombs around town prior to the Fraunces Tavern bombing. But the lunchtime attack, which killed four people and injured 50 more, was clearly the work of trained professionals. The FALN wanted Puerto Rican independence — a cause embraced by no one in New York or in Pu- erto Rico. In a 1967 referendum, 60.4 percent of island residents voted for continued commonwealth status; 39 percent for statehood; and a scant 0.6 percent for independence. But FALN made no pretense of being a grass-roots movement; it was a Marxist neo-insurgency aligned with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who sought to dislodge legitimate governments in South and Central America and the Caribbean. FALN’s dream for Puerto Rican “independence” was a replica of Communist Cuba.
An FALN member told The Associated Press that historic landmark Fraunces Tavern restaurant had been chosen as the target to kill “reactionary corporate executives” who lunched there. A written message warned New York, “You have unleashed a storm from which you comfortable Yankis [sic] cannot escape.” (Although López Rivera didn’t light the fuse himself, he was super-high-up in the organization and has not renounced terrorism since the attack.)
The FALN struck again in April, planting bombs at four Manhattan locations that killed no one. A bomb at La Guardia Airport in December killed 11; Croatian separatists were suspected but the case was never solved. There were further non-lethal but destructive bombings by FALN in 1982 and 1983. After those, the threat seemed to recede. New Yorkers were more vexed by fleeing business, skyrocketing crime, the burning Bronx and the AIDS explosion than by terrorism fears — until the Feb. 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Things seem different since 9/11, of course. Today we don’t recoil from the sight of cops and soldiers toting machine guns at landmarks like Grand Central Terminal. We “say something if we see something.” Yet, even now, we might not have learned our lesson.
Not militants, but voters — many of whom lived through the hell of 9/11 — elected Mark-Viverito to office. Her council colleagues elevated her to the speaker role despite her public embrace of the nihilist Occupy Wall Street movement and her snubbing of the Pledge of Allegiance. They held their noses over her deifying of López Rivera because, one council member told The Post, they feared objecting would “make her mad” and lose her support for projects in their districts. Profiles in courage, 2017-style. Terrorism has many roots and causes, but it thrives in part because the world’s Mark-Viveritos enable it — and the rest of us let those of her kind get away with it.