Biography
Ángel Rodríguez Cristóbal was a farmer, Puerto Rican independence and socialist activist who served as a leader of the civil-disobedience campaign against the U.S. Navy's use of the island of Vieques as a bombing range. Arrested on May 19, 1979 along with some twenty others for occupying the Navy's restricted zone in Vieques, he was convicted of trespassing, sentenced to six months in federal prison, and transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida. On November 11, 1979 he was found dead in his cell. Prison authorities called it a suicide by hanging, but his body bore a deep wound above the left eyebrow and other injuries, and his family, the independence movement, and much of Puerto Rico believed he had been beaten to death. His death made him a martyr of the Vieques and Puerto Rican independence struggles and set off protests across the island.
