Biography
Juan Enrique Segarra-Palmer emerged as a central figure in Puerto Rican pro-independence militancy and was widely described as a leader within Los Macheteros. Federal investigators and prosecutors portrayed him as part of the organization’s leadership apparatus after the 1983 Wells Fargo robbery, pursuing charges that linked political goals to an alleged criminal enterprise.
He was convicted in federal court and sentenced to decades in prison. The prosecution—and the movement response to it—became a long-running flashpoint over whether militant anti-colonial activism should be treated primarily as political conflict or as ordinary criminal conduct. Juan Enrique Segarra Palmer, Harvard-educated and from a prominent Puerto Rican family, was identified by federal prosecutors as a senior Macheteros leader and a principal organizer of the September 1983 Wells Fargo robbery, including the recruitment of Wells Fargo guard Víctor Gerena. Arrested in the August 30, 1985 sweep, he went to trial rather than accept a plea and was convicted in 1989 of conspiracy and foreign transportation of stolen money, receiving a 65-year sentence. His sentence was commuted by Clinton on August 11, 1999 and he was released on parole on October 11, 2004. Juan Segarra Palmer was a Harvard-educated Puerto Rican independentista and a leader of Los Macheteros. He was the principal driver of the September 12, 1983 Wells Fargo expropriation in West Hartford, Connecticut. He was arrested in the August 30, 1985 mass FBI raid in Puerto Rico and convicted at trial in 1989 in U.S. District Court in Hartford. He was sentenced to 65 years in federal prison. After 19 years President Clinton commuted his sentence on his last day in office, January 20, 2001; he was released on May 2, 2004 after the federal Bureau of Prisons completed his good-time calculation.
Juan Enrique Segarra-Palmer was a founder of Los Macheteros and a central defendant in the prosecution of the 1983 Wells Fargo robbery in Connecticut — the $7.2 million expropriation that funded the Puerto Rican independence underground. Arrested in the FBI's mass roundup of Macheteros on August 30, 1985, he was convicted in 1989 of seditious conspiracy and of the robbery, and sentenced to 65 years in prison, later reduced to 55 on appeal. After serving more than fourteen years, he accepted a 1999 clemency offer from President Bill Clinton — the same clemency that freed a group of imprisoned FALN and independentista activists — and was released on January 25, 2004.
Born March 6, 1950 in Santurce to a nationalist family with a long history of resistance to both Spanish and American rule, Segarra-Palmer was educated at Phillips Academy Andover and Harvard before returning to organizing work in New York neighborhoods, Boston prisons, and Puerto Rican land-reclamation campaigns. The Wells Fargo robbery was carried out on September 12, 1983 — Pedro Albizu Campos's birthday — and at trial Segarra-Palmer declared himself a prisoner of war and refused to participate in the proceedings. The September 1999 Clinton clemency treated him more strictly than the FALN prisoners released outright: deemed to have played a more serious role, he received a sentence reduction requiring roughly five more years inside. Freed in late January 2004 after nearly nineteen years, he was greeted by hundreds on his return to Puerto Rico on January 24.
