Biography
Dylcia Pagán was a New York-born television producer (NBC, Channel 13) and journalist who had worked on Puerto Rican community programming before being identified as a FALN member and captured in the wake of the April 1980 Evanston arrests. Convicted of seditious conspiracy and weapons offenses, she was sentenced to 63 years, while her young son Guillermo (born underground) was raised by family. Her sentence was commuted by Clinton in August 1999 and she settled in Puerto Rico, where she has worked as a poet, writer, and activist. Dylcia Pagán was a Puerto Rican independence activist whose public work included civil-rights–era organizing and later media advocacy focused on Puerto Rican political and cultural representation. Over time, her activism became closely identified with a more militant strand of the independence movement.
In 1980, she was arrested in Evanston in a case involving members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN). She was convicted of seditious conspiracy and related federal offenses and received a lengthy federal sentence; the convictions in this group of cases were not for carrying out specific bombings that caused deaths or injuries. Pagán was released on September 10, 1999, after President Bill Clinton granted conditional clemency, and she later returned to Puerto Rico. Dylcia Pagán was one of 11 FALN members arrested on April 4, 1980 in Evanston, Illinois. She was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 55 years in federal prison. She served 19 years before being released by President Clintons clemency on September 10, 1999. She was separated from her son for the duration of her imprisonment, and the family-separation aspect of the FALN cases became one of the central organizing themes of the international campaign for clemency.
