From: nyxfer%panix.com@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu (N.Y. Transfer)
Subject: NEWSbriefs: Puerto Rico/ATS
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Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
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Resent-From: "Rich Winkel" <MATHRICH@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 03:48:37 GMT



Via The NY Transfer News Service ~ All the News that Doesn't Fit

from ARM THE SPIRIT #12 (MARCH - MAY 1992)


                     Puerto Rican News Briefs


On March 17, 1992 in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, Luis Alfredo Col"n
Osorio, a fugitive member of Los Macheteros was recaptured.  Col"n
Osorio and Macheteros leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios were originally
arrested in 1985, along with several others, and charged in the
1983 expropriation of 7.1 million from a Wells Fargo truck.  The
two escaped FBI surveillance and went into clandestinity in
September 1990. The FBI claim that when they recaptured Col"n
Osorio, he had a pistol, a grenade and a small amount of marijuana
in his backpack. In a taped message sent to a radio station in San
Juan, Ojeda Rios, who remains free, accused the FBI of fabricating
a drug case against Col"n Osorio as part of a campaign to
discredit the armed independence movement.

In a related development, Ivonne Melendez, also a member of Los
Macheteros, was convicted of transporting money stolen in the 1983
Wells Fargo expropriation. She will be sentenced on July 1 and
faces a 15 year sentence. Of the 15 defendants in the case,
Melendez is one of the few who did not plead guilty in exchange
for a lighter sentence. "I know this trial won't be fair, that
this trial is political and not criminal," said Melendez, "but I
want to go to trial because this case is against not only me, but
the Puerto Rican people who are struggling for freedom." Most
recently, on May 13, Hilton Fernandez Diamante and Orlando
Gonzalez Claudio were each sentenced to five years in prison and
five years probation for their part in the expropriation. They
both had entered into a plea-bargain agreement with the U.S.
government

Meanwhile, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rican Senate
Judiciary Committee has been investigating a death squad comprised
of high-ranking police officials which targeted the Puerto Rican
independence movement. Calling itself the "Defenders of Democracy"
the group, among other things, bombed the offices of the Puerto
Rican Bar Association in 1980, in an attempt to deter lawyers from
representing pro-independence figures. The group also arrested
suspected nationalists with trumped-up evidence and forged
warrants. According to attorney Ignacio Rivera Cordero, a former
federal prosecutor and CIA officer who represented a key member of
the secret police group who was cooperating with the FBI, "There
are two or three independistas who simply vanished from the face
of the earth, and I'm sure this group killed them." Rivera has
also stated that "this group existed with the tacit knowledge and
approval of members of the FBI."

On March 11, a journalist who testified at the investigation,
Manuel de Dios Unanue, was executed in New York City. De Dios had
testified concerning the murder in 1978 of two young nationalists
by this death squad. According to Rivera's testimony, the two
nationalists were lured to a communication tower on the Cerro
Maravilla mountain and murdered, with the killings being covered
up by police with ties to the FBI's San Juan office. In late 1983,
under pressure from the Puerto Rican Senate, the FBI reopened the
case. Ten police officers were eventually convicted on federal
perjury charges in the Cerro Maravilla cover-up. Eight were
convicted of murder in local courts. According to reports, de Dios
had shown friends an envelope a week before his death that he said
contained documents implicating the CIA, the Puerto Rican secret
police and authorities at the highest level of the U.S. government
in a conspiracy of silence around the Cerro Maravilla case.

(Compiled from NSN Weekly Updates, La Patria Radical and the
mainstream press.)


Arm The Spirit is co-published with the U.S.-based Autonome Forum.
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