Biography
Puerto Rican independentista jailed on civil contempt charges for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the clandestine independence movement. His resistance was widely supported by the Puerto Rican left and human rights organizations. Documented in PFOC Breakthrough magazine.
Federico Cintrón Fiallo, a Puerto Rican independence activist and socialist from Arecibo (and brother of Macheteros commander Norberto Cintrón Fiallo), refused — with Carlos Noya — to testify before a federal grand jury in Brooklyn investigating the FALN in 1983, telling the court their refusal stemmed from "a struggle of liberation." After an August 1983 mistrial he was convicted of criminal contempt in October 1983, and on April 9, 1984 U.S. District Judge Eugene Nickerson sentenced him to two years in prison; he was imprisoned until a judge ordered his release in 1985. He is identified as a leader of the Fuerzas Armadas de Resistencia Popular (FARP) and later earned a doctorate and became a university professor.
Executive secretary of Puerto Rico's United Workers Movement (MOU) labor federation, arrested in Aug. 1975 by FBI and undercover agents on bank-robbery charges as he prepared to attend a solidarity conference in Havana; The Black Panther Vol. 14 no.6 (1975) reports his attorneys called it an attempt to cripple organized labor and the independence movement. [Source: The Black Panther (Black Panther Party newspaper), v14 no.6; digitized at marxists.org — https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/black-panther/index.htm]
