For the past two years, Oscar Lopez Rivera has been a free man, and a busy one at that. After spending nearly 36 years in federal prison, 12 of which he did in solitary confinement, one wouldn’t be mad at Oscar if he decided to spend what was left of his golden years on the beaches of Vieques. Since his sentence was commuted by President Obama, the small and soft-spoken man hasn’t shied away from the public eye. In 2017, he was the honoree of the Puerto Rican Day parade in New York, that is, before he stepped aside to avoid unnecessary controversy after corporate sponsors threatened to pull out in protest.
Oscar was convicted of “seditious activity” in 1981 and sentenced to 55 years in prison for his involvement with Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN). During the 70’s and 80s, this Puerto Rican revolutionary organization carried out a number of bombings and robberies. The first bombing targeted businesses in Manhattan in commemoration of the 1950 Jayuya Uprising and demanded the freedom of Puerto Rican and political prisoners. To this day Oscar states that he had no involvement in the bombing nor was he ever tied to a specific bombing.
I spoke with Oscar at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, CA. Just one of his many stops on his speaking tour across the Northwest. I wanted us to meet at a dark, windowless Revolutionary Irish bar just up the corner, but it wasn’t open yet. We settled for a windowless dark room in the back of the cultural center instead. I had seen him the day before at SF State where he spoke to a large group of students about the U.S. colonial legacy in Puerto Rico. He wore a red guayabera then. He wore a white one when I spoke with him.
“You know before, I never wore them before,” he said, referring to the traditional summer shirt worn symbolically by Latin American leaders and Chicano Studies professors around the world. “But I receive them as gifts now.”
In some ways, the guayabera is fitting for this stage in Oscar’s life. He is a sort of de facto Puerto Rican ambassador. He has met with former heads of Latin American states, such as Rafael Correa of Ecuador and Evo Morales of Bolivia, who he spoke highly of. “I admire the hell out of Evo. The first time I heard Evo, they had this thing about drugs, you know big thing about drugs. So he walks into the place and it’s real loud. And I’m listening to this on the radio, I’m in prison, and he says—La Coca no es Cocaina—but real loud, with a lot of power. And I said this guy is really up to something.” Oscar was referring to the time Evo spoke on decriminalizing the traditional practice of chewing coca leaves at the U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna.
In 2018, Bolívia hosted the Foro de São Paulo, a forum bringing together leftist parties and social movements from across all of Latin America. Oscar was invited to speak on a panel, but was detained for 18 hours in transit through Panama. According to Oscar, he was interrogated by a young Panamanian who claimed that they didn’t allow people with criminal records into the country. “Usually, I listen to them and I let them know where I’m coming from. I asked him—you said this has been going on for how long? Well listen, this is the fourth time that I enter Panama. Three times before, never, never was I stopped.” I imagined him being as calm and as firm then as he was explaining it to me. “Something that probably you are not aware of, probably in the last 8 or 9 or 10 months the United States government has decided to start messing with me and you’re doing the dirty work for them. But in 1989—I told him—the United States government came into Panama, killed over 5,000 Panamanians, the debris is still all over Panama. Don’t you think you should be more concerned with that, being a Panamanian, than being concerned with a Puerto Rican?” I can’t imagine the history lesson sat well with the young Panamanian officer, but this interaction gives you an idea of the kind of person Oscar Lopez is.
Oscar is too well aware of the contradictions arising in particular moments in history. Just a few days ago the pardon of sleazeball ex-governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich caused a stir. The right wing twittersphere was tweeting out that we shouldn’t be suprised by the pardon, comparing it to the commuting of Oscar by Obama. “I often use the example of the John Gotti case. Here is a man admitting he killed 19 people and he was let go because he became a rat. So a rat is compensated and it doesn’t matter how many people he killed.” Oscar looked at me with a slight grin on his face. The man he’s referring to is Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, who was living under witness protection in Arizona before he was indicted and found guilty for trafficking ecstasy. “The Bull” was released early in 2017 after serving 17 years of his 20 year sentence.
“Some of these people see us as something that we are not, because of the labels. We cannot defend ourselves because we don’t have the wherewithal, but they’re not gonna defend us in the first place,” he said of Blogajevich, who attempted to sell Obama’s senate seats to the highest bidder. “It is a question of power, who the person is, the relationship that has been created and probably the ex-governor will go from Democrat to Republican.”
I felt like I could talk with Oscar for hours, partly because of his focus on the little details most of us overlook. Another reason is just how generous he is with his time, especially with young people. Last July, he participated in the mobilizations that brought down Ricky Rosselló, another disgraced former governor of Puerto Rico. “I was there, almost from the very beginning,” he said as he leaned over and grabbed his coffee to warm his hands. “For me, being there was mandatory. When I’m there, a lot of young people come to me and one of the things they say is: ‘We are following your example, you opened our eyes, or you opened doors, or you opened space.’ It’s meaningful, it’s very meaningful.”
When the text messages of Rosello and his cronies leaked to the public, Puerto Ricans came out in mass to protest for 15 days straight. Musical artists like Bad Bunny, Residente, and Ricky Martin participated. More importantly, young Puerto Rican women came out to fight back against the misogyny represented by the Rosello government. This may be the next generation of those willing to fight for decolonization. “Under their belt they have already a victory,” he said. “Once a person is fortunate enough to win a victory, they will give continuity to it. It’s a sense of empowerment. They feel the power now they know they can do it. So, I’m hoping they can give continuity to what happened, in a different form because it’s not the same issue.”
Surely the Puerto Rican context has changed since the days Oscar was involved, but could all of these different groups with different interests, some pro-independence, other pro-statehood, come together to create a better Puerto Rico? Oscar said that there are pro-statehood opportunists who fled the party of Rosello to join new parties like the Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana.
“If the United States had wanted to make Puerto Rico a state they would have done it already, like they did with Hawaii and Alaska. The main reason they have not been able to do so is because that independence movement that all of us support is there. The other thing is that there are not enough Americans there.” If you’re confused by this remark, Oscar means white Anglo Americans, not Puerto Ricans who are also American citizens.
Still, he is impressed with the creativity and persistence of young people, some of which are joining the Independence Party and running for assembly and as mayoral candidates. As far as those young people across the country who have decided to run for office inspired by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Oscar holds some reservation. “If they’re gonna run for office, make sure that they have an agenda and they’re gonna represent the interests of our people.” If this new generation, elected or not, are willing to continue this long struggle, there is much to learn from Oscar.
Take for example the years that Oscar spent in prison. The experiences in prison could have broken anyone else, yet he was able to transcend the most soul-crushing moments. Oscar says he owes this to his time in Vietnam where he experienced similar dehumanizing moments. As he described being woken up every half an hour during the 68 days he spent in the hole, I couldn’t help but think of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation technique.”
Yet, there were times during our conversation that I found myself laughing at the dark moments. Oscar recalls befriending a prisoner who was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood who was going to teach him to paint, that is until Oscar went into the hole. The prison guards claimed to have found a knife and prison wine, all of which he says was fabricated against him. After completing his 68 days, he asked the brotherhood prisoner if the offer still stood. Oscar bought his painting supplies and within a month received his materials. That same night the prisoner was transferred to a different unit.
“Guys who would come pass my cell and say: ‘hey Oscar that’s some ugly shit you are doing.’ It took me four months, and in the fourth month I’m doing some sunflowers. It started lookin’ like sunflowers, so the same guy who was criticizing me comes and he says, ‘You know that looks good,’ and he walks away. Fifty minutes later he comes back—‘Hey Oscar can you do some sunflowers for my mother?’” Oscar fell in love with painting. The painting took him outside of the four walls that imprisoned him. Later on, he had access to more resources that would allow him to develop as a painter and he is now quite the accomplished artist.
It is worth noting that Oscar’s imprisonment also coincides with the rise of the prison industrial complex. “When I arrived in Leavenworth, this is 1981, there were 25,000 prisoners in the federal prison system. The day that I walked out as a free man, there were a little over a quarter of a million … So, you can imagine how big of a change it was.” This is just federal prison, which doesn’t include state prisons, local jails, juvenile centers and immigrant detention centers.
“When I arrived in Leavenworth, they had factories and some of the guys who worked there were making $400, $500 dollars a month, money that they were sending to the outside world, to help their kids, help their family. When I left Terre Haute, a guy probably would make like $50 a month, $60 a month. Probably the highest would be about 110 dollars a month,” he said. Most of these prison names that Oscar rattles off, I had to look up after the fact. In Leavenworth, in the state of Kansas, he did time with Leonard Peltier, another political prisoner of the American Indian Movement. It also happens to be the place where the Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon spent the last fews years of his life before he died in 1922.
Oscar reminds all of us not to forget political prisoners, but especially young activists. He mentioned his disappointment at the fact that some #BlackLivesMatter activists he had spoken to had not yet connected with Black political prisoners. It is a challenge to keep the collective memory alive of people who have been behind bars for decades. Hell, it is a challenge to know how to respond in real time to whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange who are facing prison and extradition.
“What happens with the case of Assange and Manning is that they did something to a corporation and although a lot of people think it’s a government or a public structure, it is not.” For Oscar, what Assange did was open people’s eyes and allowed them to begin questioning their government.
“With Manning, they didn’t like the fact that Obama commuted the sentence. This is like get-back to them.” I wondered if he feared this same kind of “get-back” from the new administration, that this new-found freedom would be short lived. “Oh no no, one of the things for me, it will never end. So, I’m not worried. It does not bother me one bit,” he says to me as he takes a sip of his black coffee.