Topics discussed:

• Recent examples of resistance
• The Puerto Rican Diaspora
• The Prison Experience in the US
• Community Organizing in Puerto Rico
• The Struggle to Audit the Colonial Debt
• Decolonizing Puerto Rico

Born in 1943 in San Sebastián, Puerto Rico, Oscar López Rivera emigrated to Chicago with his family at the age of 14. Growing up in Humboldt Park, he soon learned that “being Puerto Rican would determine where I went to school, what church I was allowed to attend,” and a host of other injustices. An intelligent student, Oscar grew up as a mischievous, fun-loving young man who loved dancing and music; he was also a hard working young man who aspired to own his own business. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1965, like tens of thousands of young Latinos, African- Americans and other minorities, obeyed under the threat of imprisonment for draft dodging.

Returning to his family and community after his tour in Vietnam, for which he was awarded a Bronze Star, he was profoundly impacted by how he saw the Vietnamese treated, and the similarities with the treatment of minorities in the U.S. He determined to change these conditions, and along with other young Puerto Ricans, organized and fought for improvements in housing, healthcare, education and different needs. Convinced of the need to change the unequal relationship between the conditions of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico to the U.S. government, he became a leader in the struggle to free the Five Puerto Rican Nationalists, who were serving lengthy terms for their pro-independence efforts.

His strong belief that Puerto Rico should be free from U.S. colonial control led him to clandestinity. He was arrested in 1981, and convicted of seditious conspiracy and related charges, along with ten others who were arrested the previous year. Sentenced to 55 years in prison, he became the longest held Puerto Rican political prisoner in the history of Puerto Rico’s struggle for independence, regarded as the “Nelson Mandela of the Americas.” In 2017, as the result of a broad human rights campaign, and after he served almost 36 years in prison, President Obama commuted his sentence, only days before leaving office. The Puerto Rican people and their allies celebrated the May 17, 2017, end of his sentence.

Since then, he has continued to energetically advocate an end to U.S. colonialism, and has resumed his role as an organizer, working to establish a holistic community center in Río Piedras, from which he will train organizers as well as deepening his relationship to the municipalities of Loiza and Comerio, working on educational and community-based projects.

The tour will highlight the US and Puerto Rico campaign for an independent audit of Puerto Rico’s $74 billion debt.