Biography
Mexican man sentenced to 20 years for a 1972 political airline hijacking in which he took no ransom and asked only to broadcast the injustices facing minorities; The Black Panther Vol. 15 no.13 (1976) reports the Committee to Free Ricardo Chavez-Ortiz and a motion to modify his sentence and release him. [Source: The Black Panther (Black Panther Party newspaper), Vol. 15 (1976); digitized at marxists.org — https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/black-panther/index.htm]
Ricardo Chávez Ortiz was a Mexican-American who became a hero of the Chicano movement. On April 13, 1972 he boarded Frontier Airlines Flight 91 and, using an unloaded pistol, diverted it to Los Angeles — demanding not ransom but airtime on the news, where he delivered a rambling address protesting police brutality, racism and the mistreatment of Mexican-Americans. Convicted of air piracy and sentenced to life (later reduced to twenty years on appeal), he became a movement cause célèbre; The Black Panther reported in 1976 that his attorneys were filing a motion to modify the sentence and win his release.
