Metro

Officials shame NYC by backing terrorist in parade

The 57th Puerto Rican Day Parade, which takes place today along Fifth Avenue, promises to be a joyous celebration highlighting the many positive contributions Puerto Rico has had on our city’s social and cultural fabric.

It is surprising, then, that parade organizers and their allies have chosen to embrace the cause of Oscar López Rivera, the imprisoned and unrepentant terrorist leader of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, or the FALN, a group that wrought destruction upon our city.

FALN was comprised of a small group of dedicated terrorists who waged a a violent campaign for Puerto Rican independence.

The independence movement has always been something of an outlier for most Puerto Ricans. In a November 2012 plebiscite, for instance, 61 percent of those voting favored statehood.

It is understandable, then, that most of the larger Puerto Rican population blanched in horror as the FALN earned a reputation as the most violent terrorist group in US history, responsible for 114 separate bombings from 1974 through 1983.

Leader of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Oscar López Rivera.AP

That deadly legacy didn’t dissuade City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito from breathlessly speaking out in López Rivera’s behalf, yet again, at a parade press conference Thursday, in which she vowed to somehow use her office to help free him.

“This is a historic moment because we are seeing convergence and a momentum on the campaign for Oscar that really gives me a lot of hope and inspiration,” she said.

The FALN is not a mere abstraction for city residents, as the group took credit for the infamous Jan. 24, 1975 bombing of historic Fraunces Tavern in the Financial District, a crime that killed four innocents and wounded more than 50 others.

Nearly eight years later, on New Year’s Eve 1982, the FALN placed five dynamite-laden bombs in Brooklyn and Manhattan, four of which exploded with devastating force.

Two of the bombs badly maimed three dedicated NYPD cops — the very law-enforcement officials Mark-Viverito presumably wants to help keep her, her constituents and other city residents safe from harm.

City council speaker Melissa Mark-ViveritoRobert Miller

One of those FALN blasts erupted shortly before 10 p.m., at the rear entrance of One Police Plaza, when Officer Rocco Pascarella, 33, encountered a bomb planted inside a Kentucky Fried Chicken box that cost him a leg just below the knee.

Two NYPD Bomb Squad detectives, Richard Pastorella, 42, and Anthony Senft, 36, were badly maimed by a separate FALN bomb that blew up a short time later nearby.

López Rivera, an FALN founder, was arrested in Chicago in May 1981 and after being convicted of seditious conspiracy and weapons possession, he was sentenced to 55 years in prison.

In August 1999, President Clinton offered a controversial clemency deal to 12 FALN members.

López Rivera was alone in rejecting the unsolicited chance to go free, rebuffing a proviso that he renounce violence.

He displayed the same obstinacy at a parole hearing more than a decade later, insisting that he didn’t want to go free because a FALN co-leader, Carlos Torres, had not been offered clemency, too. (Torres was paroled in July 2010.)

Mark-Viverito and National Puerto Rican Day organizers have now opted to adopt López as a cause celebre deserving our sympathies all the while innocently misstating — or perhaps willfully ignoring — the historical record.

WireImage

Joe Connor, whose dad, Frank Connor, was among those killed in the Fraunces Tavern bombing, is incredulous that López Rivera has emerged as a darling of the starry-eyed left that prefers to see him as someone who was persecuted for his unpopular politics, rather than his murderous misdeeds.

“The reason he’s been put on this pedestal is that people don’t know the truth,” Connor insists.

“People have come up with this narrative that he’s a Puerto Rican patriot and a choir boy. They’ve made it sound like he’s a political prisoner, when he’s been involved in all these bombings.

“I think if people knew he was a convicted terrorist, turned down clemency and tried to escape from prison twice in violent ways, they might have another opinion.

And yet, parade organizers persist in lauding López Rivera for “his exemplary conduct in prison for more than 20 years,” conveniently obscuring how he was twice implicated in violent prison-escape bids.

López Rivera has now served 33 years of a combined 70-year term, but Connor says he witnessed López Rivera’s lack of contrition firsthand not long ago.

In 2011, Connor and several other FALN bombing victim family members traveled to a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., to confront López Rivera at a parole hearing, hoping to find a reason to open their hearts up to him.

“But he lied. He talked in circles. He obfuscated. It was pathetic,” Connor recalled. “He said, ‘Yes, they found weapons and bomb-making materials in my house, but I don’t know how they got there.’”

National Puerto Rican Day Parade organizers warmly refer to López Rivera in avuncular terms, referring to him as Oscar while insisting that he warrants freedom on humanitarian grounds.

Connor, however, has another take on the man inextricably tied to his dad’s murder. “He certainly doesn’t deserve it. We gave him every chance to come clean and he has refused to do so.”

Post reporter Philip Messing witnessed the second of the two FALN bombs that detonated at Police Headquarters on Dec. 31, 1982 and the bloody aftermath.