From: Marpessa Kupendua
Subject: !*USA: Torture of Puerto Rican POW
Article: 27588
From the United Church of Christ
Stop the torture of Oscar L pez Rivera
Oscar L pez Rivera is known to his friends, family, and community as a highly principled, caring man with a deep love for people and a strong commitment to justice. For the past eleven of his sixteen years in prison, he has been held in solitary confinement in an effort to break his spirit. Because he has remained strong, the prison system has treated him with ever-increasing severity. As people of faith, we must demand his release from such brutal conditions!
Oscar was brought from Puerto Rico to the U.S. at young age by his father. He learned to survive and helped his younger relatives adjust to their new and harsh environment of Chicago. After he was sent to Viet Nam and returned with a Bronze Star, he helped his mother buy a house and open a family restaurant. His love of people and ability to relate to them led him to become a community organizer whose successful efforts resulted in bilingual education, jobs, and better housing.
The liberation wars waged abroad and the Black and anti-war movements in the U.S. during this period helped him to see the connection between these local issues faced by Puerto Ricans in the US and the colonial plight of their homeland.
Why is he in prison?
Arrested in 1981, Oscar is serving a 70-year prison sentence. He is one of 15 Puerto Rican women and men imprisoned across the US who responded in those turbulent years to the violence of colonialism by joining an armed movement for Puerto Rican independence. Most of them were convicted of seditious conspiracy; none of them was charged with nor convicted of murder or any act of bloodshed. Yet they are serving extremely long prison sentences, averaging over 65 years far longer than people convicted of heinous crimes. In light of the disproportionate length of these sentences, religious and humanitarian leaders from Puerto Rico, the US, and throughout the world, including Coretta Scott King, Desmond Tutu, Rigoberta Mench , and the Catholic bishops of Puerto Rico, have joined in the call to President Clinton to release them from prison.
At one time or another during their lengthy imprisonment, most of them have been subjected to brutal psychological or physical abuse, including assault, multiple strip- searches, body-cavity searches, and extended periods of isolation and sensory deprivation. But because government authorities perceive Oscar to be a leader, they have singled him out for the harshest, most continuous attack. They hope to break the other political prisoners, as well as the Puerto Rican independence movement as a whole.
What has the government done to him?
Oscar has spent the last eleven years in complete isolation, locked in a bathroom-sized cell some 22 hours daily; permitted visits only through glass and over a monitored telephone, such that he has never embraced his 6 year old granddaughter. Amnesty International, the National Interreligious Task Force on Criminal Justice, and a host of religious and human rights organizations have denounced these conditions as torture. Oscar has also been framed with false disciplinary charges and subjected to sting operations which used desperate prisoners as informants and provocateurs. When the new Administrative Maximum Unit [ADX] at Florence, Colorado was opened, he was among the very first prisoners sent there.
His good conduct and consistent compliance with prison rules are simply ignored. In 1996, having successfully completed the program at Florence, officials there recommended his transfer and that of 13 others to lower security prisons. Everyone but Oscar received such placement. Oscar was instead returned to the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, where he had served more time before placement at ADX than any of the others a punitive and transparently politically discriminatory move. Once back at Marion, and again, in spite of his good conduct, he has been moved to a more restrictive unit where he is entombed in a closed-front cell.
Pray for Oscar. Write, phone and fax Janet Reno and ask her to transfer Oscar out of Marion and send him to U.S.P. Lewisburg. Sample letter is below
.Honorable Janet Reno
Attorney General of the United States
Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Room 4400
Washington, D.C. 20530-0001
(202) 514-2000 phone
(202) 514-4371 fax
Then, urge President Clinton at the White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500, to grant amnesty to Puerto Rican prisoners of conscience.
Dear Ms. Reno:
It has recently come to my attention that Oscar L pez Rivera, #87651-024, a Puerto Rican political prisoner at the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, has spent the past eleven years in solitary confinement. I further understand that his return to Marion a year ago took place despite his successful completion of the program at the Administrative Maximum prison in Florence, Colorado, and despite the official recommendation that he be sent to the general population of a lower security prison. I understand that in August, without any reason, Mr. L pez was transferred to an even more restrictive unit in Marion, in which the cells are equipped with solid doors which further increase his level of isolation.
As a person of faith, I cannot understand how this level of harassment and human rights violation can be justified. Please effect the immediate transfer of Mr. L pez to the general population of USP Lewisburg, the prison he requested.
Thank you.