The Boricua Popular Army — universally known as Los Macheteros, the machete-wielders, after the cane-cutters of Puerto Rico's history — was founded in 1976 by Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, Juan Segarra Palmer, Orlando González Claudio and other veterans of the island's clandestine independence organizations. A musician by training who had played trumpet in Cuban orchestras, Ojeda had helped found the earlier MIRA and worked with the FALN's island wing; the Macheteros were his project of a disciplined armed organization rooted in Puerto Rico itself rather than the diaspora.
The group announced itself with attacks on police and military targets framed as reprisals for state violence against independentistas — in a decade when the Cerro Maravilla police killings of 1978 seemed to confirm everything the clandestinos said about the colonial state.