The Killing of Filiberto Ojeda Ríos

The spartan house in which Filiberto Ojeda Ríos lived for six years and in which he died did not hide the political leanings of its owner. A small banner with the red-and-green logo of the Boricua Popular Army (Los Macheteros) hung over the wooden balcony. A small Macheteros banner--generally regarded as a nod to the group's most lofty tenets of egalitarian existence--is not a notable or ominous sight in Puerto Rico. Still, the display was odd for a private man who had been incessantly searched for fifteen years after he freed himself of an electronic monitoring device and jumped bail in 1990.

His neighbors in the small hilly town of Hormigueros, eighty-five miles west of San Juan, only knew that the man who lived in that house was "Don Luis," an unassuming 70-something who enjoyed gardening. Silent and reserved, he used to wave at the neighbors from his farmhouse in the Plan Bonito (Beautiful Plan) sector whenever he saw them. No inkling of the leader who served as the emotional symbol of Puerto Rican national resistance for more than two decades, and was regarded variously as icon, legend, hero, madman or cowardly criminal once on the FBI's Most Wanted List for the infamous 1983 heist of a Wells Fargo truck in Connecticut, which netted $7.2 million for the Macheteros. Earlier this year, the reward for information leading to his arrest was increased to $1 million, even though the Macheteros have been essentially inactive for the past fifteen years.

But by midnight of September 23, Puerto Ricans just wanted to see Ojeda Ríos alive. It took twenty-four hours to finally learn, in a tense FBI press conference, that the bullet that entered his neck and exited through his back had killed him. This time he could not evade the exacting art of a sharpshooter, even wearing his faithful bulletproof vest.

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