Biography
Juan Antonio Corretjer, born in Ciales, was Puerto Rico's "National Poet" and a lifelong independence militant who became Secretary-General of the Nationalist Party in 1936. Convicted that year in the federal seditious-conspiracy case tied to the Riggs assassination, he was held at La Princesa for refusing to surrender the party's Book of Acts and then at the Atlanta federal penitentiary, gaining release in 1942. He was again arrested during the 1950 Nationalist revolt and, after co-founding the Liga Socialista Puertorriqueña in 1962, faced a federal conspiracy prosecution in 1969 that was dismissed in 1971. He remained a central figure of the independence movement until his death in San Juan in 1985.
