# Talk:Yuri Kochiyama

The problem quote: "Kochiyama was an advocate for political prisoners, including imprisoned members of the civil rights movement, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and others, helping to found the National Committee to Defend Political Prisoners (NCDPP) in the early 1970s."
Specifically, I don't know that anyone in the Puerto Rican independence movement who Yuri Kochiyama (is mentioned as) corresponding with counts as a political prisoner.
The wikipedia page for "Political prisoner" has this to say: "There is no internationally recognized legal definition of the concept, although numerous similar definitions have been proposed by various organizations and scholars, and there is a general consensus among scholars that "individuals have been sanctioned by legal systems and imprisoned by political regimes not for their violation of codified laws but for their thoughts and ideas that have fundamentally challenged existing power relations". The status of a political prisoner is generally awarded to individuals based on the declarations of non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International, on a case-by-case basis."
The only imprisoned Puerto Rican independence movement person mentioned down the article is Lolita Hebron.
So I ask you, in what sense was Lolita Hebron a political prisoner? She fired her gun at a bunch of congress people at the Capitol as part of an armed attack that wounded five congressional representatives. Were there some other Puerto Rican independence people that were imprisoned that the opener refers to? Benevolent Prawn (talk) 04:23, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

Sure, so the article references Lebron, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores, all of whom were imprisoned for the same armed action in 1954. Lebron is referred to as a "political prisoner" in Fujino's scholarly biography of Kochiyama, Heartbeat of a Struggle ("...famed Puerto Rican independence leader and political prisoner Lolita Lebron...", Fujino 2005, p. 224).
Given that the primary definition on the Wiki page for political prisoner is "someone imprisoned for their political activity", and that the group undertook the attack on behalf of the Puerto Rican independence movement (Lebron shouted "Viva Puerto Rico Libre" during the shooting and "proclaimed upon arrest 'I came to die for Puerto Rico!'"), I think that the group fits at least one basic definition of the term. I have adjusted the section about Lebron and her allies to make their motivations more clear.
If there are specific definitions of "political prisoner" that you feel Lebron does not meet, and you have sources that explain them, perhaps these definitions could be added in an explanatory footnote.
Alternatively, perhaps the phrase "alleged" political prisoners could be used in the lead? Spookyaki (talk) 11:17, 15 January 2025 (UTC)