Biography
Pedro Albizu Campos was a Puerto Rican lawyer, Harvard graduate, and from 1930 until his death the president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Across three separate imprisonments he spent approximately 26 years of his life in U.S. federal custody for his unrelenting campaign for Puerto Rican independence — making him the foundational figure that the entire later cluster of Puerto Rican political prisoners (the FALN era and the Macheteros era both included) traced their lineage back to.
In 1936, after two Nationalists assassinated Insular Police Chief Francis Riggs, federal authorities indicted Albizu Campos and other party leaders for seditious conspiracy; a first trial ended in a hung jury that voted 7–5 to acquit, but a second jury convicted them. He was held at the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta from 1937, released in 1943 to medical care in New York City, and not allowed to return to Puerto Rico until 1947. (The Ponce Massacre, in which Insular Police killed 19 unarmed Nationalists and bystanders, came during a march in March 1937 while he was imprisoned.) His health collapsed during this imprisonment, a pattern that would repeat.
In October 1950, days after the Jayuya Uprising and the attempt on President Truman's life by two Nationalists at Blair House, he was arrested again. He was convicted under Puerto Rico's notorious Ley de la Mordaza (Law 53, the 'Gag Law') of inciting violent revolt and sentenced to 80 years. Held at La Princesa Prison in San Juan, he and his supporters charged that he was being subjected to radiation experiments — a claim long dismissed by U.S. authorities and later substantially corroborated by independent medical examinations of the burns and lesions on his body. Governor Luis Muñoz Marín pardoned him in 1953 in deteriorating health, but the pardon was revoked in 1954 immediately after the Capitol attack carried out by his followers.
A pardon was issued again in November 1964 as he lay dying. He died in San Juan on April 21, 1965. He remains the central political figure in the Puerto Rican independence movement.
