After serving more than 35 years of a controversial 70-year prison sentence he was handed for "seditious conspiracy," Puerto Rican independence leader Oscar Lopez Rivera received a presidential pardon from Barack Obama on Tuesday, January 17.

Oscar was among 64 prisoners who were granted pardons, on a day in which the President commuted the sentences of 209 individuals; 109 of whom were expected to serve life. With today's decision, Lopez-Rivera became one of 212 citizens released via pardon since 2009. While the 1,385 over-all commutations today's totals peak at, signifies the most by any U.S. President.

All in all, the 273 total of pardons and commutations brings the amount of prisoners granted some form of clemency or other to 1,597 over the course of President Obama's eight years in office.

While most who learned of their early release are non-violent drug offenders, some of those given relief were in for white collar crimes, and others were not behind bars at all, as was the case for baseball Hall of Famers Willie McCovey, 79 and the now deceased Duke Snider, who will each have a 1996 tax evasion charge removed from record.

The imprisonment of Oscar Lopez-Rivera differs drastically from the circumstance of any of the cases mentioned above. For more than three decades numerous members of Congress have called for his release, while the likes of former President Jimmy Carter, Coretta Scott King, Desmond Tutu, and other world leaders have taken up his cause, as have such celebrities and athletes as Ricky Martin, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Miguel Cotto.

Pressure has also been applied from some grassroots organizations, which have remained persistent in their fight to raise awareness of Oscar's case, despite dwindling awareness of the struggle for Puerto Rican independence among the younger generations of Puerto Ricans on the island and in the United States. Through the dissemination of literature, the collecting of signatures via petitioning, phone calls to public officials, and the use of the arts and civil actions to represent Lopez-Rivera's case before the public, thousands of backers remained hopeful that they would see the day that the 74-year-old U.S. military veteran turned community organizer can be received by his loved ones and supporters.

"While we've always felt Oscar was free, leaving him in prison was never an option," said Melissa Montero Padilla [who has been one of the most active organizers of the campaign for Lopez-Rivera's release], upon learning of the President's pardon. "With the strength of the people, everything is accomplished."

Along with his passionate sympathizers, Oscar Lopez-Rivera has also had his detractors. Despite being noted for his Bronze Star Medal awarded service during the Vietnam War, and his contributions in the areas of education, drug rehabilitation, and anti-discrimination, his affiliation with leftist movements and anti-colonial organizations marked him, along with many other young radical thinkers across America at the time, as an enemy of the state by the FBI and local law enforcement. And the severity of the charges later leveraged against Lopez-Rivera have fueled critics to look past such notable works as his creation and support of anti-poverty programs, and the building of such institutions as the Juan Antonio Corretjer Puerto Rican Cultural Center and Dr. Pedro Albizu-Camps High School, in Chicago.

In 1981, Oscar Lopez-Rivera was arrested along with Carlos Alberto Torres, Marie Haydee Beltran, Ida Luz Rodriguez, and nearly a dozen other Chicago activists, over their association with the FALN; a clandestine group documented as having claimed dozens of bombings under the cause of armed secession from the United States. Although no evidence ever linked him in connection with any specific act of violence against the state, the trial ended with his conviction for conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government from Puerto Rico by force.

As the years have passed, each of those arrested along with Lopez-Rivera has been granted release. In 1999, President Bill Clinton offered Oscar clemency in conjunction with the conditional pardoning of 13 other accused members of the FALN, but he rejected the offer because it was not extended to comrades Carlos Torres and Cordero Nananin. In the years since, Torres and Nananin have seen their release, leaving Oscar Lopez-Rivera to have become recognized by supporters as the longest serving Latin-American political prisoner in the nation's history.

His commuted sentence expires on May 17, at which point he will be released.

Source: telesurtv.net