Biography
Yvonne Meléndez Carrión was a Puerto Rican independence activist arrested on August 30, 1985 in the mass FBI raids in Puerto Rico that targeted Los Macheteros (the Ejército Popular Boricua) in connection with the 1983 $7.2 million Wells Fargo expropriation in West Hartford, Connecticut. Held in extended pre-trial preventive detention without bail and prosecuted in Hartford federal court, the defendants asserted that U.S. courts lacked jurisdiction over Puerto Rican patriots. A mother, student, and school aide, she was among the women held in preventive detention and gave interviews describing the case as colonial political repression.
