Andrés Figueroa Cordero
Biography
Andrés Figueroa Cordero was one of the four Puerto Rican Nationalists who attacked the U.S. House of Representatives on March 1, 1954. Sentenced to a long federal prison term, he served 23 years before President Carter commuted his sentence on October 6, 1977 on humanitarian grounds — Figueroa Cordero was dying of cancer. He returned to Puerto Rico and died on March 7, 1979.
On March 1, 1954, four members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party — Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andrés Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores Rodríguez — entered the U.S. Capitol, took seats in the visitors' gallery overlooking the House chamber, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, and opened fire on the Representatives below. Thirty rounds were fired in roughly thirty seconds; five Representatives were wounded but all survived. The attack was timed to draw international attention to the Inter-American Conference of the Organization of American States then opening in Caracas, and to challenge the U.S. claim that Puerto Rico had become a self-governing 'commonwealth.' All four were arrested at the scene, tried in federal court in Washington, D.C. and again in New York for related conspiracy charges, and sentenced to consecutive terms amounting effectively to life in federal prison. President Jimmy Carter commuted Andrés Figueroa Cordero's sentence in October 1977 (he was terminally ill with cancer and died in 1979); Carter commuted the remaining three sentences on September 6, 1979. They returned to Puerto Rico to a crowd estimated at 5,000 at San Juan International Airport.
Puerto Rican nationalist imprisoned for the 1954 armed protest inside the U.S. House of Representatives; he served 23 years before release in 1977 due to cancer and died in 1979. The Black Panther Vol. 19 no.3 (1979) obituary; protesters demanded release of the remaining imprisoned nationalists. [Source: The Black Panther (Black Panther Party newspaper), v19 no.3; digitized at marxists.org — https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/black-panther/index.htm]
