What justifies Oscar López Rivera’s 33 years in prison?
Few know this, but one of the oldest political prisoners in the world is not in China, Russia, Syria, Iran, Venezuela or Cuba but in a prison in Indiana, here in the United States, an injustice that President Obama can begin to right by freeing him without excuses and without wasting time.
His name is Oscar López Rivera, a 71-year-old Puerto Rican who on May 29 marked 33 years in U.S. federal prisons, 12 of them in solitary confinement.
What terrible crime could that man have committed to deserve a 70-year sentence from a U.S. court, or the judge’s comment that he was sorry he couldn’t sentence him to death?
What hideous crime is he guilty of that he provoked such outburst from the judge and drew a sentence of such severity?
The fact is that López Rivera, who ironically served in Vietnam, is guilty of the only unforgivable crime for a colonial power: he fought for the independence of his homeland.
He was not accused of any other crime, or of harming any person, only of “seditious conspiracy,” the same shapeless and gelatinous charge foisted on Mandela, which means that what López Rivera believes and hopes for his island goes totally contrary to what the United States has imposed for 116 years.
To understand the mettle of this man, who misses the sea every day, to understand how is it possible that in 1999 he rejected the clemency offered by President Clinton, through which he would have been released in 2009, because it would have meant leaving his two comrades behind, it is useful to hear his own words. These are excerpts from a letter he wrote last year:
“Upon reaching my 70th birthday, I celebrate and thank life for everything it has given me and everything it has taught me. […] I celebrate it and thank it for giving me the opportunity to serve the most just and noblest cause I know — the struggle for the independence and sovereignty of my homeland and for a better and fairer world.
“I celebrate it and thank it for allowing me to serve that cause with great love and compassion for more than four decades. I celebrate it and thank it for allowing me to survive for more than three decades in the gulags without deviating me from the path I chose and with my spirit and will even stronger than before I was imprisoned.”
One might wonder what justifies the fact that López Rivera spent half his life behind bars, while others like Luis Posada Carriles, a terrorist who was convicted in two countries, strolls arrogantly down the streets of Miami.
Washington’s hypocrisy becomes clear when someone with López Rivera’s moral integrity spends 33 years in prison while Posada Carriles, identified by U.S. intelligence as the intellectual author of the bombing of a Cubana airliner in 1976 that killed 73 persons, and the bombing of hotels in Cuba that resulted in the death of Italian tourist Fabio di Celmo, lives peacefully in Florida.
“The Italian was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I sleep like a baby,” Posada Carriles told The New York Times in 1998, way beyond remorse and fear of justice.
If anyone with that moral turpitude is going around, enjoying Miami’s sunshine, nothing justifies keeping López Rivera in the darkness of prison, away from the warmth of his island, his people, his family and his life. Nothing.
Puerto Ricans of all ideologies, world leaders that include five Nobel laureates, and the organizers of the annual Puerto Rican Parade, to be held Sunday (June 8) down New York City’s Fifth Avenue, have asked President Obama to grant clemency to López Rivera, so that finally this solid man who every day misses the sea can embrace his grand-daughter, whom he knows only from her visits to the prison.
Readers may join this urgent plea by accessing: http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/free-oscar-lopez-rivera and signing the petition.
