On March 1, 1954, four Nationalists — Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores — unfurled the Puerto Rican flag from the visitors' gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives, shouted "¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!", and fired pistols into the chamber, wounding five congressmen. Lebrón, who fired at the ceiling, declared "I did not come to kill anyone, I came to die for Puerto Rico." All four were sentenced to terms amounting to life — the women's leader receiving 50 years.
They served a quarter century as the hemisphere's most famous political prisoners, refusing to request clemency. In 1979, after an international campaign joined by Castro's Cuba and human-rights bodies, President Carter commuted the sentences of the three survivors and Collazo (Figueroa Cordero, dying of cancer, had been freed in 1977). Their return to San Juan drew crowds of thousands.