UNITED STATES: Groups Cry Foul on Puerto Rican Prison Terms

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 29 1996 (IPS) - A coalition of Puerto Rican politicians and activists spanning the political spectrum contends that Puerto Ricans charged with politically motivated crimes have been treated unfairly and should receive more lenience.

The coalition — which includes the three Puerto Ricans in the U.S. Congress, Democrats Jose Serrano, Nydia Velazquez and Luis Gutierrez — has asked President Bill Clinton to ease the lengthy prison sentences faced by the convicted Puerto Ricans.

Supporters of a presidential pardon include politicians of every stripe on Puerto Rico itself, from the conservative New Progressive Party (NPP), which favours statehood for the island, to the leftist Independentista movement.

Although their views on the prisoners range from seeing them as liberators to disparaging them as criminals and radicals, they all agree on one thing: the Puerto Ricans in question are political prisoners, who are serving unusually long jail sentences, and face extremely harsh conditions.

“The average sentence served by a convicted murderer in the United States is something like eight years,” says Juan Figueroa, president anK general counsel of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. “The average sentence of (the Puerto Rican political prisoners) is 65 years.”

Between 1980 and 1985, 30 Puerto Ricans were arrested and accused of conspiring to overthrow U.S. rule over Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony since 1898.

Of those, 14 were convicted of participating in the leftist Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), while 16 were seized in 1985 in connection with a 7.5-million-dollar robbery in Connecticut, blamed on the guerrilla group ‘Los Macheteros’.

Twenty of these were eventually convicted. Although none of them had any prior convictions, 12 of the convicts were sentenced to more than 50 years in prison. (Only 13 percent of all federal prisoners have sentences longer than 20 years.)

“If you compare the crimes of the Puerto Ricans with the treatment of violent felons and murderers, and compare the sentences they have gotten, the disparity is enormous,” Figueroa said.

“Some of the sentencing has been extremely high in relation to other crimes,” an aide to Representative Serrano said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

One New York-based group, ProLibertad, contends that the detainees are prisoners of war because they are fighting for the self-determination of the Caribbean island following almost a century of U.S. occupation.

“Like Washington, Jefferson and Mandela before them, the Puerto Rican political prisoners are conscientious activists for freedom and justice, not criminals,” the group appealed in a statement this year calling for the prisoners’ release.

U.S. officials do not see it that way. Puerto Rico, although officially designated “a free associated state,” is regarded as part of the United States, and Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. There are almost as many Puerto Ricans living on the U.S. mainland — some 2.7 million according to a 1993 census — as on the island itself, about 3.5 million.

Perhaps most significant, the following of the pro-independence effort has waned since the 1970s. The current governor, Pedro Rosello, is from the rightist NPP, which wants the colony to become the United States’ fifty-first state.

In such a climate, Figueroa says, “U.S. law enforcement has treated the Puerto Rican prisoners as if they were terrorists.”

Prisoners have placed in some of the worst U.S. jails, including prisons in Marion, Illinois, and Lexington, Kentucky, under conditions that Amnesty International has denounced as “deliberately and gratuitously oppressive.”

In a 1993 letter from the Marion facility, one of the prisoners, Oscar Lopez Rivera, wrote, “Today while I write this letter, I have been 36 hours without going out and tomorrow, if they do not take us out, it will have been three days without moving from this same space.”

Lopez said that he spent an average of 22 hours each day in his cell, which was only eight feet wide and nine feet long. “From an aesthetic point of view, it is as attractive as a jail for zoo animals,” he added.

Another prisoner, Alejandrina Torres, has reported being sexually assaulted in three different prisons, including a maximum- security facility in Lexington.

The placement of the Puerto Rican convicts in these prisons has been questioned even by some U.S. judges, who have noted that maximum-security facilities are used for prisoners who have histories of escape attempts or special risks, not for prisoners with unpopular political views.

Yet there is little outcry in the United States over the Puerto Ricans so far. As one Puerto Rican official in Congress told IPS, the White House has yet to give any indication of how it regards the campaign to ease the prisoners’ sentences.

So far, U.S. officials have discounted the idea even of letting the prisoners serve their terms in Puerto Rico itself, although the suspects seized in the Connecticut robbery were all arrested on the island.

However, relocation to Puerto Rican prisons may not be an improvement. One 1993 report on prisons worldwide by Human Rights Watch, which cited the Marion facility as among the nation’s worst, notes that, when it sought to investigate conditions in Puerto Rican jails, “we were refused permission to visit the prisons.” That refusal was unique in the agency’s investigation of U.S. facilities.