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(18 May 2017) Puerto Rico nationalist Oscar Lopez Rivera received a heroes welcome at a concert in San Juan on Wednesday after being freed from house arrest following decades in custody.
The celebration at the plaza near the University of Puerto Rico drew at least 1,000 supporters by late afternoon, some embracing and wearing T-shirts reading: "Welcome to your homeland!"
Lopez, is a Puerto Rican nationalist who was a member of the ultranationalist Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), which claimed responsibility for more than 100 bombings at public and commercial buildings during the 1970's and '80's in New York, Chicago, Washington and other US cities.
The group's most notorious bombing killed four people and injured more than 60 at New York's landmark Fraunces Tavern in 1975.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Lopez said he had no regrets about his involvement with the FALN.
Asked about the possibility of violent independence for the US island territory, Rivera said that conditions on the island had changed and that, "the issue of violence is discarded completely."
Rivera was sentenced to 55 years in prison after he was convicted on one count of seditious conspiracy, and he was later convicted of conspiring to escape from prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.
He served nearly 13 years in solitary confinement, when former US President Barack Obama commuted his sentence before leaving office in January 2017.
His case transformed him into a martyr among his supporters but outraged those who lost loved ones in a string of deadly bombings.
Puerto Rico has been under US jurisdiction since 1898, and its people have been US citizens since 1917.
The island is home to numerous military veterans, though Puerto Ricans can't vote for president and their representative in Congress has no vote.
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