Slain P.R. Rebel Didn't Have to Die

By Juan Gonzalez

NY Daily News, October 6, 2005

A former naval intelligence officer says he knows for a fact that Puerto Rican nationalist fugitive Filiberto Ojeda Rios didn't have to die in a shootout with the FBI.

He says he knows this because he told FBI agents a year ago where they could find Ojeda - even telling them where he liked to eat.

"What they did was an injustice," the former Navy officer told me last week. "No matter what Ojeda did, he was still a human being. ... They could easily have taken him alive."

The informant, who asked not to be identified, has given his account to the Justice Department's Inspector General's Office, which opened an independent review of the shooting last week.

FBI Director Robert Mueller requested the review after top officials from the island's various political parties, including pro-commonwealth Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vilá, and several members of New York's congressional delegation publicly criticized the FBI's handling of the incident.

And yesterday the Puerto Rican commonwealth's own Department of Justice subpoenaed weapons and records of the FBI's operation.

By the time of his death, the 72-year-old Ojeda, a onetime musician turned revolutionary, had become a legendary figure on the island.

A founder of the militant pro-independence group called the Macheteros, he had been on the run since 1990 for his role in a $7 million Wells Fargo armed robbery in Hartford in 1983.

During all those years, Ojeda frequently gave interviews to Puerto Rican reporters, routinely disseminated pro-independence proclamations, and was even spotted at times at protest marches.

Despite a reward on his head that reached $1.1 million, he popped up so often in public that Puerto Ricans openly joked about the FBI's apparent inability to find him.

But on the afternoon of Sept. 23, a special team of agents dispatched from the United States surrounded Ojeda's farmhouse hideout in Hormigueros, a small town near the island's western coast.

According to the official version, Ojeda opened fire from inside when agents moved in to arrest him. One agent was wounded and Ojeda was shot beneath the clavicle in the initial shootout.

The fugitive's wife, who was with him at the time, surrendered immediately. She later claimed the agents opened fire without warning and that her husband offered to give up in the presence of well-known Puerto Rican journalist Jesus Davila, but agents refused.

Over the next 20 hours, the FBI team sealed off the area and would not allow Puerto Rican police near the scene. By the time they entered the house the next day, Ojeda had bled to death.

The long delay, officials say, was caused by waiting for bomb detection units to arrive and check for possible booby-trap.

But even those who oppose Ojeda's radical views and methods aren't buying that account.

Many are especially furious at the timing of the operation.

Sept. 23 is the anniversary of El Grito de Lares, Puerto Rico's failed 1868 independence revolt against Spanish colonialism. It is a date commemorated each year by the independence movement with a march to the town of Lares.

At the very moment federal agents were moving in on Ojeda's hideout, a taped speech of his was being played at the Lares event.

"I'm a statehooder, but I see the FBI was trying to humiliate all Puerto Ricans by going after him on El Grito de Lares," says the former naval officer who provided the agents information. "I feel I was used."

In early 2004, he claims, he and two of his friends met with FBI agents several times. They told the agents that Ojeda was living in Hormigueros, and that the fugitive often ate at El Conejo Blanco, a well-known restaurant in Hormigueros popular with independence supporters.

"All they had to do was set up surveillance at the restaurant and they could have picked him up," the informant says.

He says he also identified other spots on the island that Ojeda frequented.

"I wanted him arrested, not killed," he said.

But when the agents failed to act by early this year, he says, he broke off contact and stopped offering any more information.

"I didn't do it for the money, and never received a penny," he insists.

When I called FBI headquarters in Washington, they referred all my questions to the San Juan field office, but agents there did not return several calls for comment.

Meanwhile, press reports in San Juan claim federal officials have begun to pay out part of the $1.1 million reward for Ojeda to two informants.