Jailed 16 years, Puerto Rico activist says she will never renounce cause Apoyo PNP a clemencia de Clinton

Información enviada a Mario Rojas, Director de Tlahui. Puerto Rico, a 23 de Agosto, 1999. Newsbriefs 8/23/99. Jailed 16 years, Puerto Rico activist says she will never renounce cause By Cindy Rodriguez, Globe Staff, 08/22/99

ANBURY, Conn. - Leaning against the cinderblock walls of her jail cell, Alejandrina Torres reaches into one of the envelopes her husband has mailed every week for the past 16 years.

Inside, she always finds a love letter - "We'll be together again one day," he reminds her - along with writings from Puerto Rican independence groups updating her on the campaign to free her.

The romantic notes and the political manifestos reflect Torres's odd mix of roles: wife, grandmother, revolutionary.

Torres, 60, is serving a 35-year sentence in a federal penitentiary here for her involvement in an underground guerrilla organization that bombed US political and military sites between 1973 and 1983 in an attempt to free Puerto Rico from US control.

After 16 years of living inside a sterile cell under the eyes of armed guards, Torres could walk out of prison soon if she accepts an offer from President Clinton.

Under mounting pressure, Clinton on Aug. 11 offered to commute the sentences of Torres and 10 others in prisons across the country. But the Puerto Rican nationalists reject the strings attached: notifying probation officers when they travel to other cities, and avoiding contact with each other.

"What they are proposing is to gag us," Torres said in an interview with the Globe. "Anything that has to do with exercising our right to self-determination would be a thing of the past. They think if we keep our mouths shut their burden of colonialization will go away."

Torres, a bright-eyed woman with deep frown lines, is a world removed from the chaotic demonstrations of the 1970s and 1980s, when she chanted "End US Imperialism! Free Puerto Rico!" and lived by Malcolm X's provocative mantra - "By any means necessary."

The FBI contends she was a member of the Armed Forces of National Liberation, known by its Spanish acronym FALN, which took responsibility for dozens of bombings, including planting pipe bombs at the New York City headquarters of several major corporations as well as the New York Public Library.

Although the 11 who have been offered clemency were not involved in attacks that resulted in injuries, prosecutors branded them as terrorists. Authorities say FALN violence was responsible for six deaths and more than 100 injuries.

Torres says she no longer believes in violence as a political tool: "There was a time when that was necessary. I guess each generation has its own method."

But the fire that has fueled her revolutionary spirit still burns. If anything, her time in prison has only hardened her views.

She said that whenever she is released, she will continue to demonstrate against the US government for oppressing her people - even if it takes another five years when she is eligible for parole.

The 14 conditions of release set by the Clinton administration include monthly meetings with probation officers, restrictions on travel, and a prohibition against associating with people who have criminal records. Because many "independentistas" have criminal records, that stipulation would essentially bar Torres from meeting or demonstrating with her compatriots.

To agree to the conditions of release, she said, would be to revoke her First Amendment right to free speech. Supporters of civil liberties agree and have taken on that fight.

In Boston and other cities with large Puerto Rican populations, a new campaign is under way: A call for the unconditional release of all 15 independentistas - the 11 offered clemency plus four others - who they call "political prisoners." Among those pressuring Clinton to free them are Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Coretta Scott King.

"They are Puerto Rican patriots," said Marcos Vilar, national coordinator of the Committee to Free Puerto Rican Prisoners-of-War and Political Prisoners. "The prisoners are to Puerto Rico what George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and all the founding fathers are to the United States." But Gene "Tito" Roman, the former director of the Massachusetts regional office of Puerto Rican Federal Affairs, says people want to remake them as heroes, but they are not.

"The romantic vision of the terrorist group FALN as patriots obscures the violence and destruction they have wrought since the 1970s," Roman said.

Poor beginnings

Torres grew up in San Lorenzo, a pueblo in rural Puerto Rico, where lush vegetation and towering palm trees sweep over the land. Her father died of stomach cancer when she was an infant, leaving her mother to support 10 children.

Her mother rolled cigars, her hands stained greenish-brown from the tobacco. When Torres was 11, the family moved to New York City's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, where her older sister, who was a young adult, helped care for the family.

In New York, Torres became convinced that Puerto Ricans would never benefit from US Commonwealth status. She said America holds on to the territory because it is a strategic military site. She said most Puerto Ricans are against becoming independent because they fear they won't survive economically without the United States.

But many Puerto Ricans living in the United States are just as poor as the ones living on the island - proof, she says, that institutional racism in America will continue to keep Puerto Ricans impoverished.

As she grew older, working as a secretary for Broadway Congregational Church, a congregation active in the civil rights movement, she got swept up in the struggle. Her future husband, the Rev. Jose Alberto Torres, marched in Selma and Montgomery, Ala., with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Later, when they moved to Chicago in the mid-1960s and married, Torres and her husband took up the cause of Puerto Ricans, saying they were voiceless. Through her advocacy work at a Chicago church, she said she learned that Latino children were humiliated by teachers in schooland their parents could not find jobs - especially if they spoke with accents.

She saw a link between their impoverished lives on the mainland and what she calls the legacy of colonialism: the brainwashing of children in Puerto Rican schools and the US control of Puerto Rican trade and economy.

In 1970, when a small group of Puerto Rican high school students fought what they called a Eurocentric curriculum, Torres and several others founded Puerto Rican High School in Chicago.

"She was always full of love and singing songs," said Marvin Garcia, who grew up in Torres's neighborhood and is now director of the school. "She always had a smile, was always full of laughter."

During the day, Torres worked as a caseworker at the Cook County Department of Public Aid, helping Cuban refugees. She counseled teens at the school after work. And during her free time, she went to every Puerto Rican independence demonstration she could. But she adamantly denies she ever helped make bombs, or conspired to blow up military sites.

She said the FBI tracked her family because her stepson, Carlos Alberto Torres, was a fugitive. Authorities, she said, found explosives in his apartment. He is now serving time in a federal prison.

"We were always under surveillance," Torres said.

As a pro-independence activist, she said she offered assistance to anyone involved in her political struggle who asked for help. She admitted helping a wanted man escape the country in the late 1970s, but never asked his name.

Prosecutors told another story during the 1983 trial of the 15 alleged Puerto Rican nationalists. They said Torres and the others possessed explosives and were plotting to bomb a US military installation near Chicago. The Puerto Rican 15, as they were called, did not contest the charges, saying they did not recognize US authority.

"In no way did I expect justice in the court of my oppressor," Torres said. The 15 hoped in vain that the trial would be played out in an international court.

During her years in prison, including the last five years at the Federal Correctional Institute in Danbury, Torres has built a life similar to the one she led outside: She teaches inmates how to read, and found work at the prison chapel. She makes 40 cents an hour putting together the church calendar, service programs, and writing the church bulletin in English and Spanish.

Her husband, who still lives in Chicago, calls weekly.

"We don't talk about the struggle. When I talk to her, I blow her kisses and tell her I love her," said Torres, who is 75. "But I continue to be an independentista. She continues to be an independentista."

Puerto Rican 15

The Puerto Rican 15 have each served 16 years of sentences that ranged from 35 to 90 years in prison - time that many, including Clinton, agree does not fit the crime.

In fact, four "independentistas" who had done worse - stormed the US House of Representatives in 1954, unfurled the Puerto Rican flag, then fired gunshots, wounding five congressmen - were pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Carter also pardoned Oscar Collazo, a Puerto Rican who was convicted in 1950 of trying to kill President Harry S. Truman.

Though she wants to see her mother free, Catalina Torres, a chiropractor in Syracuse, said that if her mother signed the agreement, it would be the same as admitting she committed a crime.

"My mother is not a criminal. What she did was not wrong," Torres said. "There is nothing wrong with fighting against colonialism."

This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 08/22/99. (c) Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.

Apoyo PNP a clemencia de Clinton
Lunes, 23 de agosto de 1999
Por Femmy Irizarry

San Juan (EFE) - El comisionado residente en Washington, Carlos Romero Barceló, dio a conocer hoy una resolución de apoyo aprobada por el Directorio del Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP) a la oferta de clemencia condicionada presentada por el presidente Bill Clinton a favor de 11 de los 15 presos políticos boricuas confinados en cárceles estadounidenses.

Elizam Escobar, Carmen Valentín, Alejandrina Torres, Ricardo Jiménez, Adolfo Matos, Edwin Cortés, Alicia Rodríguez, Alberto Rodríguez, Ida Luz Rodríguez, Luis Rosa, Dylcia Pagán.

Romero Barcelo argumentó que el documento que fue aprobado por el ex gobernador Luis A. Ferré y establece que no se pueden perder de perspectiva los delitos cometidos por estos 15 puertorriqueños, como tampoco se puede pretender ocultar los "actos violentos, sangrientos y criminales" y las organizaciones terroristas a las que admiten pertenecer, que cometieron estos delitos entre 1974 y el 1988. El Comisionado hizo mención de Ferré porque el ex gobernador y presidente fundador del PNP se ha pronunciado partidario de la excarcelación sin condiciones de los 15 presos políticos.

La resolución del PNP, que fue aprobada el pasado 18 de agosto, presenta los delitos graves cometidos por los presos políticos, entre ellos, conspiración para derrocar por el fuerza al gobierno de EEUU y posesión ilegal de armas de fuego. Además informa de los más de 100 atentados que se adjudicaron.

Al momento de presentar las actividades delictivas de los presos políticos, la Resolución guarda un parecido con un informe presentado por la Oficina Federal de Investigación (FBI) el viernes pasado.

El Informe del FBI cataloga de terroristas a los integrantes de las dos organizaciones políticas que operan en el clandestinaje en favor de la independencia para Puerto Rico, las Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN) y el Ejército Popular Boricua (EPB), conocido por Los Macheteros.

Como reacción a ese Informe, el coordinador del Comité Pro Derechos Humanos en Puerto Rico, Luis Nieves Falcón, condenó el mismo porque "lo que busca es crear una situación que no permita que el presidente Bill Clinton reconsidere el indulto".

Sin embargo, para Romero Barceló el informe que divulgó el FBI es oportuno.

"El que el FBI haya esperado a que el Presidente presentara su oferta de clemencia, para divulgar ese informe, me suena mucho más razonable que presentarlo antes de la decisión", sostuvo.

Romero Barceló, aunque aceptó que a ninguno de los presos puertorriqueños se le acusó por asesinato, aclaró que no es hasta el 1990, que el Gobierno Federal incluye que bajo un acto terrorista se puede incluir un asesinato.

Respecto al término de "presos políticos", el Comisionado reiteró que los puertorriqueños en cárceles de EEUU no pueden recibir esa calificación, porque están presos por la comisión de un delito criminal.

Aclaró, que el término que utiliza Amnistía Internacional para referirse a los que luchan por un ideal sin violencia, son presos de conciencia, pero que esta terminología tampoco aplica a los puertorriqueños.

"Estas personas fueron encontradas culpables por haber conspirado para construir bombas y elaborar otros objetos explosivos, y por haber decidido bombardear lugares públicos llenos de gente inocente e indefensa", concluyó.

From: ALM alm1998@aol.com
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