Grand Jury Puerto Rican Activists and Artists

Pro-independence Puerto Ricans subpoenaed by NYC grand jury
The Associated Press
Saturday, January 12, 2008

NEW YORK: The case of three young Puerto Rican activists and artists ordered to appear before a Brooklyn federal grand jury has stirred up protests around the country and provoked outrage among supporters of the movement to grant independence to the U.S. territory.

Attorneys for two of the activists Christopher Torres and Tania Frontera said they had successfully filed motions to postpone their clients' Friday court dates. Supporters said that a third, Julio Pabon Jr., also received a postponement.

Hundreds of people demonstrated Friday in front of the Brooklyn courthouse in protest of the subpoenas. Rallies also took place Thursday in Puerto Rico and other U.S. cities.
"We don't know why this investigation is taking place," said Ana Lopez, a professor of Caribbean history at Hostos Community College in the Bronx who helped organize the rally in New York. "All we know is that its purpose is to harass and intimidate hard-working Puerto Rican people."
Federal grand jury investigations are secret by law. Officials with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Eastern District of New York said they had no comment. None of the three Puerto Ricans have been charged in any crime.

Supporters of the three speculated that the FBI had expanded a probe that began in Puerto Rico that they said was aimed at harassing the legal movement to obtain independence for the U.S. territory.

In February 2006, FBI agents searched homes and a business to thwart what the agency at the time said was a "domestic terrorist attack" planned by the violent separatist People's Boricua Army, also known as the Macheteros, or "cane cutters."

The group was responsible for bombings and attacks in the 1970s and 1980s and had claimed responsibility for a 1979 attack in which gunmen killed two U.S. sailors.

In 2005, the group's leader, Filiberto Ojeda Rios, who was wanted for the 1983 robbery of an armored truck depot in Connecticut, was killed during a shootout with FBI agents when they came to arrest him at a farmhouse on the island.

Federal investigators later said the FBI agents were justified in killing Ojeda because he opened fire first. Frontera's attorney, Martin Stolar, said it appears the "government is investigating what remains of the Macheteros" after Ojeda's death.

He said his client, a Manhattan graphic designer, has no connection to any organization. "But she's definitely been a lifelong supporter of independence," he said. Frontera was a member of a local group opposed to the military bombing of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques by the U.S. Navy during the 1990s, her supporters said. Her father is also a leading member of the Puerto Rican Independence Party. Stolar said such political activities were "very much aboveground." He questioned the federal government's probe. "We see it as a targeting of aboveground individuals and organizations and associations and conflating that with someone who is involved with the Macheteros," Stolar said.

Attorneys for Torres, a social worker and community activist, and Pabon, a Bronx filmmaker and graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, declined to comment.
Pabon's father, Julio Pabon Sr., said he was at his sports memorabilia shop in the Bronx a few days before Christmas when agents who identified themselves as members of the FBI/NYPD Joint Terrorist Task Force showed up asking for "Julio Pabon." The elder Pabon, a lifelong pro-independence activist, instinctively thought they were looking for him.
"We want the younger one," he said the agents told him, adding that they only wanted to talk to his son.

The elder Pabon was astonished, he said. "I have been an activist all my life," he said. "My son is not involved." But he said his 27-year-old son was definitely pro-independence like his parents and, while at the university, had organized a group of fellow students from Wesleyan to travel to the U.S. naval base in Groton, Connecticut, to protest the bombing of Vieques. Pabon said he and his son knew the other two who had been subpoenaed as well.

Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917 but they cannot vote for president and have no voting representation in Congress. The island was seized by the U.S. at the end of the Spanish-American War.