FBI murders Puerto Rican independence figure

Aged 72, Ojeda Rios was the leader of the Boricua Popular Army, also known as the Macheteros, a group that advocated independence for Puerto Rico. He was wanted on charges that he had participated in the planning of a 1983 Wells Fargo armored car robbery in Hartford, Connecticut, in which $7.1 million was taken. A fugitive for 15 years since fleeing house arrest in 1990, he was sentenced in absentia to 55 years in jail.

Ojeda Rios was alone with his wife in their home in the rural southwestern Puerto Rican municipality of Hormigueros, near the city of Mayagüez, when scores of FBI agents stormed his property, unleashing a rain of bullets. According to reports, at least 100 armed agents were involved, backed by helicopters and a squad of military sharpshooters brought to the island from Virginia.

The nationalist leader was struck by a single bullet from a sharpshooter’s high-powered rifle. While he suffered no wound to any vital organ, he was left to bleed to death on the floor of his home as FBI agents refused to allow Puerto Rican authorities and emergency medical teams anywhere near the house, maintaining a militarized perimeter for 24 hours.

Later, an FBI spokesman claimed that the agents who had surrounded the house and shot Ojeda Rios feared that the house could be wired with explosives and were waiting for reinforcements to fly in from the US.

Testimony from his wife and a neighbor, as well as the results of an autopsy, exposed as lies the FBI’s version of events. US authorities had claimed that federal agents had come to arrest Ojeda Rios, opening fire only after he had fired on them.

In a press conference Monday, however, the nationalist leader’s wife, Elma Beatriz Rosado Barbosa, testified, “On Friday, September 23, in the afternoon hours, our house was surrounded. Armed men penetrated our property and took our house by assault, hitting it in a brutal and terrible manner, firing with heavy weapons against the front wall of our residence.”

Hector Reyes, whose house is approximately 300 feet from that of Ojeda Rios, confirmed this account, saying that the US assault team began firing on the house as soon as the helicopters arrived on the scene. “The first shots were very powerful, not from a little revolver like they say he had,” said Reyes.

The killing sparked spontaneous demonstrations throughout the island and statements of condemnation by leaders of virtually every political tendency, from pro-independence to the supporters of the island’s status as a US “commonwealth” and those advocating US statehood.

Even the territory’s Governor Anibal Acevedo Vila, whose Popular Democratic Party supports the island’s current colonial status, found himself compelled to declare his “deep indignation” and demand an explanation from the FBI for the killing of Ojeda. “As governor, I make an energetic demand to the federal authorities to end the silence that they have maintained in relation to these events,” he said.

Neither the governor nor the Puerto Rican police and local prosecutors were given any advance notice that the FBI was about to mount a military operation on the island. They first learned of the siege from news reports and received no official report from the FBI until nearly a full day later. An FBI spokesman claimed that the silence owed to the fact that the operation was “developing” and the agency feared endangering its agents.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/puer-s27.shtml