Filiberto Ojeda Ríos

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Ojeda Ríos

Filiberto Ojeda Ríos (born April 26, 1933 in Naguabo , Puerto Rico , † September 23, 2005 in Hormigueros , Puerto Rico) was the leader of the militant Puerto Rican independence movement People's Army Boricua , better known as Los Macheteros . This movement fought for the independence of Puerto Rico from the United States by military and terrorist means . Ojeda Ríos was the "responsible general" of the macheteros during the 1990s on the FBI's list of most wanted persons . He was shot dead when FBI agents tried to arrest him at the age of 72.

Life

Filiberto Ojeda Ríos moved with his family to Cuba in 1961 , where he was trained as an agent by the Cuban secret service. He returned to Puerto Rico a year later, ostensibly to spy on American military facilities.

In 1967 he founded the militant independence movement Movimiento Independentista Revolucionario Armado (MIRA), which he led from then on. When the MIRA was dismantled by the police in the early 1970s, Ojeda Ríos was also arrested.

After his release, he moved to New York City and founded the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN) together with former MIRA members , which was renamed Ejército Popular Boricua (Boricua People's Army) in 1977 . The organization was mostly called Los Macheteros .

She confessed to about a hundred bombings in Puerto Rico and the United States in the decades that followed. In 1978 the macheteros shot and killed a Puerto Rican policeman, and in two fire attacks on unarmed American navies in 1979 and 1982, they shot a total of three sailors and wounded twelve others.

During the raid on the Air National Guard's Muniz base near San Juan on January 12, 1981, the macheteros destroyed eleven A7-D Corsair fighter jets. The damage amounted to $ 45 million.

On 12 September 1983 fell macheteros a money transport headquarters of Wells Fargo in West Hartford ( Connecticut ). They looted 7.2 million dollars, which at the time was the largest loot ever achieved in a robbery in the United States. Some of the booty was reportedly distributed among the poor in Puerto Rico, but the majority was used to fund further armed operations.

When the FBI arrested Ojeda in 1985, he opened fire and seriously injured one of the officers. His lawyers managed to delay the criminal case until 1989. A Puerto Rican court sentenced him to suspended sentence and wearing an electronic handcuff for what had happened when he was arrested . On September 23, 1990, he removed the handcuffs and went into hiding.

In July 1992, he was sentenced in absentia to 55 years in prison and a fine of $ 600,000 for the Wells Fargo attack.

He gave occasional interviews to Puerto Rican newspapers in the following years, preferably on Puerto Rican National Day, September 23, the anniversary of the Grito de Lares , the first Puerto Rican uprising against the Spanish in 1868. The American and Puerto Rican However, the Rican authorities failed to track him down. However, the macheteros rarely appeared.

Since about 1999 he lived with his wife Beatriz Rosado on a lonely farm in southwest Puerto Rico.

death

It was not until September 20, 2005 that the FBI tracked him down there. The agents initially only observed the house, but on September 23 they had the impression that Ojeda had noticed their presence. So they decided to access it. The first time he tried to arrest him, Ojeda Ríos fired a pistol at the FBI agents. One of them was badly wounded by a shot in the stomach. After that there were two more exchanges of fire. The operations management decided to request reinforcements and to wait. In between, Ojeda's wife surrendered and was taken into custody. Ojeda Ríos also made his mark, saying that he would surrender to the officials if they called the press (represented by the journalist Jesús Dávila) as witnesses. This request was ignored. When the FBI broke into the house after about 20 hours, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos was found dead behind the door. He had been shot through the lung and was slowly bleeding to death from it.

When the news of Ojeda Río's death spread in Puerto Rico, the FBI was accused by the Puerto Rican independence movement of deliberately bleeding the injured man to death or even planning his murder on the national holiday in order to make an example.

There were demonstrations in Puerto Rico, and Ojeda's body was laid out in the capital for a few days. The funeral procession began in the morning in San Juan , passed thousands of people lining the streets and ended hours later in his birthplace, Río Blanco , a suburb of Naguabo. Over 5000 people attended the funeral. Ojeda Ríos' funeral was attended by the highest representative of the Catholic Church in Puerto Rico, Archbishop Roberto González Nieves , ex-Governor Rafael Hernández Colón and numerous other dignitaries.

consequences

Puerto Rico's Comision de Derechos Civiles (Commission for Human Rights) made an investigation that seriously incriminated the FBI

  1. The FBI used excessive force.
  2. The FBI uses military weapons to arrest a civilian
  3. Although the FBI claims that "Mr. Ojeda Rios shot first," the first shooter was the FBI.
  4. The arrest of Mr. Ojeda Rios could have been carried out without violence.
  5. The FBI knew that Mr. Ojeda Rios had been critically wounded, but was negligent in providing medical care to him.
  6. The FBI prevented medical personnel on the premises from helping Rios.
  7. The FBI is blocking access to the site for the media and members of the Puerto Rican government in a disproportionate and unnecessary manner.
  8. The FBI has not contacted the news media and has taken steps that made it impossible for photojournalists to do their jobs.
  9. The FBI made demands on authorities of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico government that, had they been met, would have violated civil rights.
  10. The FBI is blocking access to neighboring residential areas, putting the lives and safety of the area's children, elderly and disabled people at risk.
  11. The FBI marginalized the Puerto Rican Police's assistance in the operation and treated Puerto Rican government personnel with disparaging and arrogant behavior.
  12. Despite the lack of a formal request to the highest levels of Puerto Rico Police, it seems unlikely that the Puerto Rico Police were unaware that the FBI was preparing to conduct an operation against Mr. Ojeda Rios,
  13. The FBI was not authorized to deny researchers from the Puerto Rican Instituto de Ciencias Forenses (Institute of Law, ICF) access to the crime scene. This was in violation of the laws of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico
  14. The FBI is responsible for the illegal killing of Mr. Filiberto Ojeda Rios.

additional

  • Hip-hop group Calle 13 wrote the song Querido FBI (Dear FBI) ​​to protest the circumstances of Ojeda Ríos' death.

Newspaper articles

ECOS de Espana y Latinoamérica, "El Che Guevara de Puerto Rico", December 2005

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Funeral Service for Filiberto Ojeda Ríos.Retrieved July 20, 2009.
  2. ↑ Informe Final sobre la Investigacion de los Sucesos occ = urridos en el Municipio de Hormigueros el 23 de septiembre de 2005 donde resulto el ciudadano Filiberto Ojeda Rios. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Comision de Derechos Civiles. March 31, 2011. Retrieved September 22, 2011. S121.
  3. ↑ a b Informe Final sobre la Investigacion de los Sucesos occ = urridos en el Municipio de Hormigueros el 23 de septiembre de 2005 donde resulto el ciudadano Filiberto Ojeda Rios. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Comision de Derechos Civiles. March 31, accessed September 22, 2011. Pages 136-140.
  4. ↑ Calle 13 . CMTV: El portal de la Musica. Retrieved February 13, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Ojeda Ríos, Filiberto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Puerto Rican independence fighter and terrorist
DATE OF BIRTH April 26, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Río Blanco , Naguabo, Puerto Rico
DATE OF DEATH September 23, 2005
Place of death Hormigueros , Puerto Rico