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Ida Luz Rodríguez

Ida Luz Rodríguez is one of the 11 Puerto Rican former political prisoners granted clemency by President Clinton in September 1999. She immediately returned to Puerto Rico, where she was met with a huge welcome celebration. For updates on this clemency, see www.prisonactivist.org/quesalgan

The description below is adapted from Can't Jail the Spirit (March 1998).

Ida Luz ("Lucy") Rodríguez was born in Las Marias, Puerto Rico on July 7, 1950. When she was barely two years old, her family moved to Chicago. She studied at Northeastern Illinois University, majoring in Psychology and Sociology. Damian, her son, attended the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School and lives near his grandparents in Chicago.

She was recognized for her outstanding work at the Rafael Cancel Miranda Puerto Rican High School, today known as the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School, and the Committee to Free the Five Puerto Rican Nationalists. In 1976, along with her compañero Oscar López-Rivera, she went underground and was captured along with other comrades, on April 4, 1980. She received an 80-year sentence for seditious conspiracy and other charges, after already serving an 8-year state sentence. While incarcerated at the federal women's prison in Dublin, California, Lucy participated in the production of a video which tells the story of part of her life and the lives of her compañeras in struggle. She has contributed articles to Libertad, and her life story has been published in Puerto Rican Women:A History of Oppression and Resistance. Another book which devotes a chapter to her story is John Langston Gwaltney's The Dissenters: Voices from Contemporary America.

Throughout her capture, trial and incarceration, she has maintained her position as an anti-colonial prisoner of war (POW) resisting the illegal U.S. occupation of her homeland. She has a son, Damien, in Chicago, where her family remains active in the independence movement.



This page is maintained by the Prison Activist Resource Center. Updated 26 September 1999.